Raab: I’ll tell the working class I’m on their side
Former grammar student believes he can come from behind to beat his public school opponents
DOMINIC RAAB believes that Boris Johnson can be beaten in the race for Downing Street because voters will turn their backs on the “privileged elite” vying for power. As a grammar school boy and the son of a refugee, the former Brexit secretary remains convinced he can overhaul the “easily caricatured” frontrunner once his “mettle” is tested in public debates.
Mr Raab, who currently lies fourth in the contest to succeed Theresa May, will use tomorrow’s first TV hustings event – which will not include Mr Johnson – to hammer home the message that voters want someone who is “really on our side”.
He polled just 27 votes in Thursday’s first ballot of Tory MPS but insists the competition has “not even started yet” and that he can make it to the final two candidates who will go head to head for the votes of party members.
He began his leadership bid by launching a “clean campaign” pledge with Matt Hancock, promising not to make personal attacks on other candidates – but he cannot resist a dig at Mr Johnson’s background as he tries to make the argument that he is the “change” candidate.
While Mr Johnson and Rory Stewart both went to Eton and Jeremy Hunt went to Charterhouse, Mr Raab, 45, was educated at Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, a selective state school in Amersham, Bucks, having lost his father at the age of 12.
“There is a case for a generational change of leadership with energy and vigour,” he says. “When you campaign in marginal seats, who can reach out and unite the working-class vote and the middle-class vote? Are we going to be in a better position to do that with a candidate who isn’t so easily caricatured as being from the privileged elite, with the son of a refugee, a grammar school boy who is offering tax cuts to most of those people on £15,000 as opposed to people on £50,000 and above?
“What is the impact of that in a tight marginal race? It’s about energy and youth and having a vision, but it’s also about the practical electoral reality of who is going to be better placed to win in seats where Conservatives will ask: are they really on our side?”
His reference to tax cuts is a preview of one likely line of attack on Mr Johnson, who has pledged to raise the 40 per cent tax threshold from £50,000 to £80,000 because middleclass strivers have been sucked into the higher rate band. Mr Raab wants to cut the basic rate from 20 per cent to 15 per cent over five years to help those on the lowest salaries.
Mr Johnson will be the only one of the six remaining candidates not to take part in Sunday’s Channel 4 hustings, having decided instead to save himself for a Tuesday night debate on the BBC, when there will be fewer candidates left.
Mr Raab says the TV debates will be “crucial”, particularly “for the favourite or front-runner. Can they push on?” He is desperately hoping Mr Johnson cannot. “I’ll let Boris speak for Boris,” Mr Raab told The Daily Telegraph. “But everyone is going to have to demonstrate that they have not just the vision but the nerve and mettle to deal with the EU and with a minority government. If you’re not up
‘Are we going to be in a better position to win with a candidate who isn’t so easily caricatured as from the elite?’
for the TV debates and the test that provides, people will argue it’s a barometer for what would happen if you get the job. If you can’t take the heat of the TV studios, what chance of taking the heat of the negotiating chamber in Brussels?”
Unlike Mr Johnson, Mr Raab needs the exposure of the TV debates to increase his public profile. Broadcasters still struggle to pronounce his name correctly (it rhymes with Saab, though, disappointingly, he says he has never owned or driven one) and as he boarded a ferry to the Isle of Wight yesterday to address the local Conservative Association, few passengers reacted to his presence.
Of all the candidates vying to occupy the second slot in the final two after Mr Johnson effectively booked his own place on Thursday, Mr Raab has perhaps the hardest job.
While Mr Hunt, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid and Mr Stewart are all fighting for the votes of moderate or Remainbacking MPS, Mr Raab has positioned himself as the Brexiteer ultra, making it less obvious to see where he can pick up votes once the 20 MPS who voted for Eurosceptics Andrea Leadsom and Esther Mcvey (both eliminated on Thursday) have been fought over.
But a poll this week for the Conservative Home website, asking members who should be the next PM, has Mr Johnson on 54 per cent, with Mr Raab a distant third on eight per cent, half what he was on a month ago. “These snapshots will change when candidates are seen in much more detail,” Mr Raab insists. “This campaign has not even started yet.”
Mr Raab, who has two young sons with his Brazilian wife Erika, has more motivation than most to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of Downing Street, or “straighten out” the Labour leader, as he puts it. His father Peter, who was Jewish, emigrated to Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1938 at the age of six to escape the Nazis, and would have been “horrified”, were he still alive, that “the country which gave him tolerance and opportunity” could be led by a man who is a “stain” on Britain “with the succour he’s given to anti-semitism”.
He is confident that if he can stay in the race beyond Tuesday’s second round of voting, he can make inroads with his policies on cutting taxes for the low paid, helping social tenants onto the housing ladder by allowing them to buy a stake in housing association homes, boosting apprenticeships and scrapping stamp duty on homes under £500,000.
However, it is his promise to get Britain out of the EU by Oct 31 that will be tested to destruction over the coming days.
He says he is the candidate Brussels “fears the most” because in his short spell as Brexit secretary before resigning over Mrs May’s plans: “They said I pressed them harder than anyone else had done and said to them things no one else had dared. That’s the job.”