Dominic Raab

Dominic Raab
Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom From:25 October 2022 – present
Prime Minister	Rishi Sunak
Predecessor	Thérèse Coffey
Successor	Incumbent (no successor)
Former  Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom From:15 September 2021 – 6 September 2022
Prime Minister	Boris Johnson
Predecessor	Nick Clegg (office vacant for 6 years)
Successor	Incumbent (no successor)
Former Foreign Secretary of United Kingdom From: 24 July 2019 - 15 December 2021
Predecessor	Jeremy Hunt
Successor	Liz Truss
Information
Party	Conservative
Religion	Church of England

Dominic Rennie Raab (b. 1974) is a British Member of Parliament. He currently serves as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, all three of which he has held since October 2022, having previously held these offices between 2021 and September 2022. He has also served as the Brexit Secretary, First Secretary of State and Foreign Secretary. He is a member of the Conservatives, and has represented the constituency of Walton-on-Thames since 8 May 2010.

Early life

Dominic Reenie Raab was born on 25 February 1974 in Buckinghamshire, England. His father, Peter Raab, a food manager for Marks & Spencer, was a Czechoslovakian-Jewish immigrant who fled to Britain in 1938 to avoid Nazi persecution. His mother, Jean Rennie, was a clothes buyer for M&S of partial Scottish, Cornish and, to a lesser extent, German ancestry.

Dominic Raab studied Law at Lady Margaret Hall, one of the constituent colleges of Oxford University. He studied for a MA degree at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Career

1990s and 2000s

Dominic Raab, as stated on his website, spent Summer 1998 at at Birzeit University near Ramallah, where he worked for one of the chief Palestinian negotiators of the Oslo peace accords, assessing World Bank projects on the West Bank.

Dominic Raab began his political career in 2006. His first role in the Conservative Party was working as an aide to UK MP David Davis as well as later to Dominic Grieve.

2010s

In 2010, Raab was elected with 59% of the vote to the House of Commons to represent Esher and Walton, a parliamentary constituency in south east England, as part of the general election that year which resulted in a coalition government between the David Cameron's Conservative Party and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats.

Raab was re-elected on 7 May 2015 with 63% of the constituency vote, over 50 points ahead of his nearest rival Francis Eldergill of Labour, who recieved 12.7% of the vote.

In 2017, Dominic Raab was re-elected by a reduced margin from 2015 with 58.6% of the vote.

At the September 2018 Conservative Party conference, Dominic Raab used the story of his father's escape from Nazism in Europe to call out the deep-rooted antisemitism of the left-wing Labour Party.

After Theresa May announced her resignation as Conservative Party leader and UK Prime Minister on 24 June 2019, Raab announced on the 25 May that he was joining the race to succeed May. Raab failed to obtain the minimum of 33 votes in the second round of the party leadership contest. After elimination, he supported eventual winner Boris Johnson.

Dominic Raab became Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom on 24 July 2019.

Despite the nationwide landslide for Boris Johnson's Conservative Party in 2019, Dominic Raab again saw his share of the vote in Walton and Esher reduced. He won the seat by 49.4% of the overall vote, just over 4 points behind his nearest rival, Monica Harding of the Liberal Democrats.

2020s

During the early months of the Chinese Communist Party pandemic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson tested positive for COVID-19. The government confirmed that Raab would deputise for Johnson if the PM became incapacitated from the virus. Raab was asked to deputise on 6 April 2020 after Johnson went to intensive care.

In June 2020, Dominic Raab criticized the far-left, homophobic, black supremacist terrorist organisation Black Lives Matter. He described the gesture of taking the knee as one of "subjugation" and said that takes the knee only two people; Queen Elizabeth II and "the Mrs when I asked her to marry me".

Following the heavily disputed election of Joe Biden as President of the United States in November 2020, considered by many to be fraudulent, Raab claimed that Biden would have "no greater ally" than the UK, despite Biden's known anti-British sentiment. He congratulated Biden and his vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris on their alleged victory, acknowledging that President Trump "fought hard".

Dominic Raab stated in July 2021 that the introduction of vaccine passports, widely considered to be an infringement of civil liberties, was "just coaxing and cajoling" to increase uptake of experimental injections by younger people.

Views and policies

Abortion and right to life

Dominic Raab, who rejected Labour's call to include abortion in a "British Bill of Rights", has largely abstained from parliamentary votes on abortion. Raab voted with the pro-life base in 2016 when voting against sex-selective abortion and again in 2019 when voting on the introduction of abortion to Northern Ireland, although on other occasions he has voted against the anti-abortion lobby.

Personal life

Dominic Raab is married to Erika Rey, a Brazilian marketing executive, with whom he lives in Surrey and has two children.