While Boris Johnson remains in intensive care with coronavirus, the Foreign Secretary and First Secretary of State, Dominic Raab, will be taking on prime ministerial duties as de facto second in government.
Until Boris Johnson is recovered, Raab will be responsible for making decisions on the UK’s current lockdown condition and leading the country through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But who is Dominic Raab, and what is his political background?
He is a former lawyer who studied law at Oxford University and then switched to Cambridge for his masters. As a lawyer, he worked in the commercial sector and the Foreign Office before entering politics in 2006 working as an aide to Conservative MP David Davis and then Dominic Grieve.
He was first elected to Parliament as an MP in 2010 for the Esher and Walton constituency in Surrey. He then entered government in 2015 as a junior justice minister before becoming a leading figure in the Vote Leave campaign ahead of the EU referendum. However, he was removed from government by Theresa May when she took over as prime minister.
Following the 2017 general election, he returned to the House of Commons back benches as Mrs May brought him back to the Ministry of Justice. He then went on to serve as housing minister before becoming Mrs May’s second Brexit secretary in July 2018.
After Mrs May resigned, Raab put himself forward as a potential successor but was eliminated after the second round of voting. He then went on to support Boris Johnson’s candidacy and was later rewarded for this and named Foreign Secretary and First Secretary of State under Johnson’s leadership.
He is not without controversy, and has found himself in hot water for numerous reasons. For instance, in 2011 in an article for the PoliticsHome website he claimed that; “Feminists are now among the most obnoxious bigots”
Another instance includes his appearance on a BBC show in 2017 where Raab described typical food bank users as;
“Not someone languishing in poverty, it’s someone who has a cash flow problem.”
By Tara Pilkington
