NEW Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab – who has replaced David Davis following his dramatic resignation last night – became the MP for Esher and Walton in Surrey in 2010.
Relatively unknown to the public, the 44-year-old was made a junior minister in 2015 under David Cameron, before returning to the backbenches when Theresa May took charge in the aftermath of the EU referendum.
Mrs May brought him back into Government last year, where he served as minister of state for courts and justice before being made housing minister in January.
He last hit the headlines just a few months later when his diary secretary was caught in an undercover sting selling sex on a website for “sugar daddies”.
The 20-year-old aide told an undercover reporter she knew Mr Raab’s “every move”, raising fears she had left herself open to blackmail.
She also claimed her boss had the same Pret a Manger lunch every day without fail – a chicken Caesar and bacon baguette, superfruit pot and the vitamin volcano smoothie – dubbing it the “Dom Raab Special”. Mr Raab later insisted this wasn’t true.
But the ardent Brexiteer is no stranger to controversy.
In a 2011 article for the website Politics Homes, he argued men were being flagrantly discriminated against, insisting: “Feminists are now amongst the most obnoxious bigots.”
The comment earned him a fierce rebuke from then Home Secretary Theresa May. She told the Commons: "We should be trying to get away from gender warfare and the politics of difference – but I might suggest to him labelling feminists as obnoxious bigots is not the way forward to do that."
In 2012, Mr Raab joined other Tory rising stars in putting his name to a manifesto called Britannia Unchained, which raised eyebrows by branding the British "among the worst idlers in the world", insisting they “prefer a lie-in to hard work”.
And he provoked outcry again last year when he argued the “typical user of a food bank is not someone that's languishing in poverty, it's someone who has a cash flow problem episodically".
Previously David Davis’s chief of staff before being elected to parliament, Mr Raab’s background as a high-flying lawyer will come in useful for his new role.
The father-of-two joined the Foreign Office in 2000, leading the British Embassy team at The Hague dedicated to bringing war criminals to justice.
He later advised on the European Union when he returned to London, as well as the Arab-Israeli Conflict and Gibraltar.
A black belt in karate, Downing Street said his latest promotion showed the “high regard” in which he is held by Mrs May.
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