Dominic Raab, British Foreign Secretary / Daniel Leal-Olivas / AFP

Dominic Raab, as head of the Foreign Office, made his first visit to Canada. Then he went to the US and then to Mexico. He is implementing a cunning plan of Brexit supporters. True, former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers speaks of this plan with undisguised skepticism.

"A newcomer"

Raab has made no secret of his dream of one day becoming Britain's prime minister. But his career has at times been disappointingly slow. Perhaps because he should not have clashed with the country's home secretary, Theresa May? But who knew she would end up in the prime minister's chair...

One such clash occurred in 2014 in the Raab constituency in Surrey.

A visitor from Nepal was the culprit of a traffic accident. He was convicted of manslaughter and they tried to deport him from the country, but they couldn’t. The lawyer argued about the Nepalese’s right to family life according to EU laws. The judge listened and left him in the country. The nuance was that the Nepalese had no children or wife.

Raab wrote a bill to prevent judges from blocking deportations by citing pan-European laws. May, who headed the Home Office, began to threaten fines from Brussels. Unexpectedly, Raab was supported by about a hundred Conservatives. May and Prime Minister David Cameron had to sweat a lot to ensure that Raab's initiative did not gain the necessary number of votes.

There is a contradiction in this story. Raab himself is an “outsider”. His father came to Britain at the age of six from the Czech Republic, not knowing a word of English. It was 1938, the family was fleeing Hitler, and for good reason – their relatives who remained in Eastern Europe did not survive the Holocaust.

“I like that we [the UK] are a melting pot, I’m just worried about the consequences,” Raab defended himself in an interview with the Surrey Live website three years ago. He worries about the impact of migration on unemployment, wages, health care, and school capacity. Faith in the migration system will not be restored until migrants get off the state’s back and become self-sufficient, and the state takes control of migration and restricts the movement of criminals, Raab insisted. He concluded: “We can’t do any of those three things while we’re in the EU.”

His father was sent to an English school, learned the language, became a manager at Marks & Spencer, where he met his future wife - she went in to buy some clothes. On February 25, 1974, their son was born. Sadly, when Raab was 12, his father died of cancer. His last wish was for his son to go to Dr Challoner's Grammar School, one of the best public schools in the UK. Raab managed to get through a crowd of applicants.

The year his father died, Raab took up karate. He now has a black belt and third dan, and regularly trains in boxing. Cartoonists love to play on this, depicting him literally fighting his way into 10 Downing Street.

How Jamie Oliver Almost Let Raab Down...

Raab studied law first at Oxford and then at Cambridge. He enjoyed partying, but proudly reported that he led a quiet life at university. He had no interest in politics, ran a local karate club, travelled to box for the university and, although he loved to party, was not a member of the Bullingdon Club. The club was notorious for its drinking and rowdy behaviour, and many famous politicians including David Cameron and Boris Johnson have come from it.

As a student, Raab spent six months on a kibbutz in Israel. Then, in 1998, several months at Palestine's Birzeit University, following the philosopher John Stuart Mill's adage that he who understands only one side of a problem really knows almost nothing. He assessed World Bank projects in the West Bank for the Palestinians.

Russophile, but insulted Putin

Politics / International Affairs

Then there was work as an international lawyer at Linklaters in London and a move to the Foreign Office in 2000. A couple of years later, he met a student from Brazil at a party. Erica came to London to study English and eventually married Raab and became a British citizen.

She has a truly Brazilian trait – being late for everything, Raab joked about his wife, recalling how patiently he waited for her to arrive for dates. But Erica is less patient. His proposal almost fell through – at Christmas 2004, Raab asked Erica to marry him, but before that he spent ages preparing Jamie Oliver carpaccio for her. “I’ve never waited so long for raw meat,” Erica recalled in The Times. Raab, like his two sons, speaks Portuguese fluently – his father-in-law and mother-in-law never mastered English.

...And how Raab let Boris Johnson down

In 2003, Raab was sent to The Hague with a team that prosecuted war criminals including Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Liberian President Charles Taylor (the latter was accused of starting the civil war).

Then came his next connection to the world of politics: Raab did a favor for Tony Blair. They wanted to call him to give evidence at the Milosevic trial, Raab persuaded the court to reject this demand. In the end, Blair did not go anywhere.

In 2006, Raab began to storm the political Olympus. He became chief of staff to David Davis, then the shadow home secretary. Davis is a special forces reservist. He singled out Raab from other candidates because of his black belt. “It’s evidence not only of his physical fitness but also of his discipline, of the ability to go out and train and run in the rain day after day with no immediate reward,” Davis explained to The Times. And in The Sunday Times: “Dominic is very loyal, very tough and very clear-headed. He’s not intimidated. I would go to war for him if I had to.”

When Davis ceased to be shadow home secretary, Raab became chief of staff to Dominic Grieve, then shadow justice secretary, and in 2010 he himself was elected as an MP for a Surrey constituency.

Soon he tried to remove his email address from everywhere. Voters were supposed to contact him only in person, by phone or by sending a paper letter. Raab did not want to see his email not only on the parliamentary website, but also on independent resources. For example, he threatened the management of one of the sites to sic the UK Information Commissioner on him if his address did not disappear from the list under the heading "contact your MP". There was a stir. Raab had to justify himself - they say that MPs receive a huge number of letters, including lobbyist mailings. Just sorting through the mail takes an unreasonable amount of time.

His harsh statements have often put him at odds with May. For example, he argued with her and other politicians over the 2010 Gender Equality Act, calling feminists disgusting bigots. The act combined various UK laws in force at the time with EU standards. Raab complained on the BBC that although the UK has “some of the toughest anti-discrimination laws in the world”, society is often “blind to blatant discrimination against men”. Male bankers have often been blamed for the 2008 crisis, with Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman saying that if Lehman had been run by women, the crisis would not have happened. At the same time, any remark about a woman (for example, attacking a judge’s assistant on Sky Sports) immediately causes a stir and repression, Raab complained.

Is it normal to eat the same thing for years?

Raab does not understand women and is very difficult to work with: he behaves as if he is already the Prime Minister. This is what his former secretary publicly complained to the press in April 2018. She claimed to know about her boss’s every move. Can we trust her words? She was fired because she posted her profile on a dating site where many women charge money for dates, and she was lucky to stumble upon an undercover journalist from The Daily Mirror! He pretended to be a businessman and paid her 750 pounds for a meeting. In response to careful questioning, she willingly began to tell details of her boss’s life. However, the most interesting thing in her revelations was that every morning Raab eats the same thing: a sandwich, a Caesar salad, fruit and the same cocktail, ordering all this from the Pret a Manger chain.
Raab, by the way, said that this is not true. And is it really that unusual for a person to eat the same thing at work? It turns out that surveys have already been conducted in the UK. In 2017, New Covent Garden Soup, based on data from 2,000 workers, found that every sixth person has eaten the same lunch every day for at least two years. 77% of workers have not changed their menu for nine months. Four years earlier, Whole Foods Market conducted a similar survey. It was found that a third of Britons eat the same lunch every day, and half have done so for six years. There are some advantages to this, the journalists decided. If you have the same thing on the table every day, you start to eat less. In addition, you know exactly how much you spend on lunches per month or year.

In 2015, Raab became the parliamentary under-secretary of state for human rights, but he did not serve long in the role. In 2016, Cameron was replaced by May. Raab really wanted to join her cabinet as a minister, but instead he lost his job at the Ministry of Justice. Although May supposedly owed him. Raab teamed up with Boris Johnson, campaigning for Brexit, and then thwarted his plans to lead the party by withdrawing his support at the last minute, the BBC reported. As a result, Johnson did not put forward his candidacy, and May became the leader of the country.

"Raab-turnip"

Raab focused on parliamentary work and joined the Brexit committee. He worked hard to get a ministerial seat, writing loyal articles for May in newspapers and praising her on TV, Business Insider noted. In June 2017, he became deputy minister of justice, then deputy minister for housing at the Department of Regions and Local Government. In July 2018, his efforts finally paid off. Raab’s old mentor, Davis, who served as May’s minister for Brexit, resigned: he could not stand May’s ideas about life after Brexit. Raab was called in to replace him. But just five months later, in November, he too resigned along with several other ministers. It was an act of protest against May’s plan for a soft exit from the EU.

The Telegraph's EU sources claim that Raab was not as detail-oriented or as tough a negotiator as he likes to portray himself to voters. His time as a minister in Brussels allegedly earned him the nickname Turnip.

Raab, however, has never hidden his dislike of the EU. In 2011, for example, he wrote an article for The Telegraph entitled “What happens if we reject the EU? Nothing.” It came out on the eve of Parliament’s decision to grant prisoners the vote. Criminals had benefited disproportionately from the EU’s fight for human rights, he fumed.

The vote for those sentenced to less than four years is the latest in a long list. Prisoners have ingeniously won a host of new rights, from fertility treatment while in prison to the right to keep twigs in their cells – supposedly to wave them in pagan rituals. “State legal aid for prisoners has risen from £1m in 2002 to £19m in 2008,” Raab wrote. “Rather than encouraging this, taxpayers’ money should be spent on prison reform, particularly drug rehabilitation and education.”

But the main conclusion came at the end of the article. “The debate goes to the heart of our democracy: who writes the law of the land?” Raab asked. Is it Brussels or the country’s own authorities? He blamed Strasbourg’s usurpation of the legislative function and urged people not to pay attention to attempts to interfere with British foundations: “There is no chance of Britain being fined, let alone kicked out of the Council of Europe.”

Why Raab Needs America

On July 24 this year, Raab became Johnson’s Foreign Secretary. A couple of weeks ago, he travelled to Bangkok to meet 20 counterparts from the Asia-Pacific region. They discussed international trade and strengthening diplomatic ties. And on August 6, he visited Canada, meeting Foreign Secretary Chrystia Freeland (who was the Financial Times’s Russia bureau chief in the 1990s). Raab said he was pursuing a political goal with the trip: “I want to strengthen the alliance to uphold the international rule of law and address issues that threaten our security, whether that’s Iran’s defiance, Russia’s destabilising actions in Europe, the threat of terrorism or climate change.”

But he made no secret that this was a secondary task, while the main task was trade. “I am determined to improve economic relations with non-European partners,” Raab said at a press conference before the trip. “Working with them now will ensure a smooth transition of our trading relations after Brexit, moving quickly to large-scale trade deals that stimulate business, lower prices for consumers and meet our high standards.”

Following him, Britain’s International Trade Secretary Elizabeth Truss is heading to North America – with the same goal. Brexit leaders want to boost trade with non-EU countries. As Raab said when he was campaigning to leave the EU: “Britain must be the master of its own destiny.”

And he recently explained on BBC Radio 4: “The chances of us coming back to the table and getting a good deal [with the EU] will be greater after we leave [without a deal], if that’s what it comes down to. Because we’ll be an independent country and less dependent on the EU’s demands than we are now.” However, he insisted that the government would still like to get a deal with the EU before leaving the union.

The EU is the UK's largest trading partner. According to the UK Office for National Statistics, UK exports to the EU were worth £288.9 billion, while imports from the EU were worth £353 billion. EU exports to Canada, Mexico and the US (including Puerto Rico) were worth £130.5 billion, while imports were worth £82.7 billion.

Britain is running out of time to reshape trade relations – Brexit is due to take place on October 31 (unless it is delayed again). Summers, commenting on Raab’s visit, said on the BBC: “Britain has no leverage [in negotiations], Britain is desperate <...> it needs to agree very quickly.”

Boris Johnson gathers Brexit supporters into government