Next Prime Minister

[ursus arctos]

Ah, just seen that Ray did this already.

Still one of her best in recent times. Very much in her wheelhouse and she's hit it for six.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Marina Hyde says in her column this morning "I don’t want to come over all Mystic Meg, but I am seeing a nightmarish news story in Dominic Raab’s future that will curtail any bid in fairly short order." which may just be speculation but did vaguely remind me of talk of a skeleton in his closet.

That's interesting. I'll ask my son if he's heard anything. He's pretty good when it comes to the political rumour mill.

Maybe it's something to do with this:

On 30 January 2011, The Mail on Sunday published an article alleging that Raab, in his previous role as Chief of Staff to David Davis in 2007, had paid a female employee £20,000 in an out-of-court settlement as part of a confidentiality agreement to drop a claim of workplace bullying. Raab responded by stating: "This is a smear and any insinuation that I have behaved improperly is false and malicious". He subsequently sued the newspaper for libel. The Mail on Sunday's publisher Associated Newspapers' attempt to stop the action was denied by the High Court in December 2011. During these proceedings, it was disclosed that the employee had taken a claim against Raab to an employment tribunal, where it was settled with a compromise agreement which included monetary compensation and a confidentiality clause for both parties. The newspaper issued an apology on 18 March 2012, stating: "We accept that our allegations were unfounded and we apologise to Mr Raab for the damage, embarrassment and offence caused". It also paid compensation according to Raab as part of an out-of-court settlement.

Which might be connected to:

In late October 2017, a dossier listing allegations of a mainly sexual nature against several dozen Conservative MPs made internally by party researchers was circulated at Westminster and amongst journalists. Raab wrote on his website at the beginning of November that his entry made a false accusation of an "Injunction for inappropriate behaviour with a woman". He commented: "I have never been served with any injunction for anything. Nor have I ever sought one". It was "false and malicious" to make "any insinuation that I have engaged in anything resembling sexual harassment, sexually abusive behaviour or lewd remarks". He believed the dossier itself was a "form of harassment and intimidation". Raab said he was taking legal advice.

Incidentally, this might surprise a few people:

Raab worked at Linklaters in London, completing "his mandatory two-year training contract at the firm and then left shortly after qualifying as a solicitor in 2000." While at Linklaters he worked on project finance, international litigation and competition law. This included time on secondments at Liberty (the human rights NGO) and in Brussels advising on EU and WTO law. He spent the summer of 1998 at Birzeit University near Ramallah where he worked for one of the principal Palestinian negotiators of the Oslo peace accords, assessing World Bank projects on the West Bank.

In 2000, Raab joined the Foreign Office, covering a range of briefs including leading a team at the British Embassy in The Hague, dedicated to bringing war criminals to justice.

He's lives down the road from you in Thames Ditton, apparently.

[Ray de Galles]

I know, he's my MP. I've been present when two of my children have been presented with awards by him and struggled to keep my mouth shut.

[ursus arctos]

I spent a reasonable amount of time at Links on a deal from hell at about that time. Running across Raab would have made it even worse.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Raab's the well-schooled and connected but clearly thick as shit one who didn't realise Britain imported things through Dover, isn't he?

[Diable Rouge]

Graham Brady is throwing his hat in the ring.

[Duncan Gardner]

Mister Brady, pompous bag of wind and quite possibly shady

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Someone clearly murdered the real dominic raab and took over his life sometime around 2000. There's no way the current incarnation of Raab can spell Tripos, never mind win a university wide award for international law, based on it.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

That Marina Hyde piece is indeed a thing of wonder. Her at her cathartic best. Also, Owen Jones' piece in the Guardian today summing up May's appalling record in office is a superb piece of righteous anger.

[Ginger Yellow]

In one of my incredibly rare moments of fairness to her, unlike a couple of her recent predecessors, I've never got the impression that she saw the job of Prime Minister as a mere stop on the career path to the more important work of making lots of money from directorships and speaking engagements.

No, it was very much a means to the end of fucking over anyone she viewed as foreign.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I would expect Theresa to be able to command quite the fee from conference speeches to, er, conference organisers, on how to try and avoid making yourself looking like a complete fucking amateur on one of the biggest stages in the country.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

No, it was very much a means to the end of fucking over anyone she viewed as foreign.

See I don't know about that. I don't know if she has a sufficiently coherent concept of other people to have an animus towards foreigners. and there's fairly strong grounds to believe that she would be equally happy to see large numbers of white english people go hungry. I think that it's considerably more likely that she wanted to look tough and capable, and twigged pretty early on that the best way to do that in the tory party is just be consistently unpleasant to foreigners. You don't ever have to actually do anything, and the hostile environment is something that the Home Office seemed to want to do anyway. Just think back to when she was emerging as the one to take over from cameron. she had never said anything about anything much, and all people knew about her was that she was continuously unpleasant to foreigners in a way that made it seem perfectly normal, without ever managing to reduce migration at all. And this made her the steady, safe pair of hands to get brexit across the line.

She's an awful hollow weak bedraggled human, and the consistently unpleasant attitude to non-nationals seems to me to have been primarily a conscious effort not to look hollow, weak and bedraggled. It turns out that she's completely and utterly useless.

[Snake Plissken]

She couldn't deliver a letter and talks with all the warmth of an Antarctic blizzard. And that is before we get to the bit where she clearly hates people.

[Lang Spoon]

I think she really does hate foreigners. She's a nativist and a racist according to former civil servants.

[Nefertiti2]

You just have to look at what she did to students where she lied about data repeatedly to deport the students who universities and industry wanted to stay.

[ChrisJ]

I think she really does hate foreigners. She's a nativist and a racist according to every policy for which she's had responsibility.

Soz, fixed your typo.

[Duncan Gardner]

Ah the far off days when young Terri and her bezzie at Oxford Uni (Benazir Bhutto) ran Mott the Hoople's fan club. Roll away that Stone, Dudes!

[Eggchaser]

Raab worked at Linklaters in London, completing "his mandatory two-year training contract at the firm and then left shortly after qualifying as a solicitor in 2000." While at Linklaters he worked on project finance, international litigation and competition law. This included time on secondments at Liberty (the human rights NGO) and in Brussels advising on EU and WTO law. He spent the summer of 1998 at Birzeit University near Ramallah where he worked for one of the principal Palestiniannegotiators of the Oslo peace accords, assessing World Bank projects on the West Bank.

This means absolutely nothing.

Trainees at massive law firms, especially "magic circle" ones like Linklaters, are little more than photocopying and coffee monkeys, albeit ones often paid more than I earn as a qualified solicitor with over a decade of actual client facing experience behind me. My father used to deal with Slaughter and May as part of his job and he said the average meeting would consist of him a partner who did the talking, a junior partner or senior solicitor who took notes, sometimes a further solicitor scrabbling through documents and files for the Grand Poobah, plus a trainee or two doing shit work. He also said he always told them he didn't want to see anyone's time on the bill except the partner's.

As a contrast, I was appearing in Court on my own (on behalf of a client, smart arses) on the second day of my training contract and handling my own caseload (under heavy supervision).

Raab worked on those subjects because when you do your training contract you do seats in different practice areas as mandated by the Law Society.

Two of my wife's cousins trained with similar firms and secondments and a foreign stint are just par for the course.

"Leaving shortly after qualifying" means his two year fixed term contract ended and they didn't take him on as a newly qualified solicitor as he didn't make the grade.

Fair play to anyone who gets a job with a firm like Linklaters, whether by sheer hard work or by who they know, but let's not pretend Raab was doing anything of any great merit

[Snake Plissken]

Not the biggest fan of Owen Jones but his Guardian article and this bit on Sky is spot on.

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1131964775381053440

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Is Trump still coming? Is a seething and bitter May still going to be given one last platform to salt the earth for her successor?

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

I think she really does hate foreigners. She's a nativist and a racist according to former civil servants.

This is true. I met her once at Abu Dhabi airport - she wouldn't look me in the eye. Shifty angular cunt.

[ursus arctos]

Is Trump still coming? Is a seething and bitter May still going to be given one last platform to salt the earth for her successor?

He most certainly is, and is bringing all four of his kids to the state dinner with Brenda

[Nefertiti2]

There's a family meal deal?

[Snake Plissken]

I bet she's left express instructions to hide the good cutlery.

[San Bernardhinault]

It's kind of nice that he gets to have dinner with a massively hated lame duck PM who's being defenestrated by her own party. It somehow makes his visit even less consequential.