Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Dominic Raab’s brazen Brexit pitch

Credit: Getty

Dominic Raab’s launch was just downstairs from the event that Matt Hancock held, and rather more serious, too. He was able to underline his parliamentary support, filling the front row of his audience with MPs who cheered loudly at appropriate moments. He was introduced by Maria Miller, who joked that she hoped to persuade him to become a feminist and claimed that both had come from relatively humble backgrounds. Raab’s campaign team had clearly decided that it was best to be brazen about something that is considered by some as a weakness.

The candidate’s pitch was as someone who is sufficiently brazen to achieve the kind of Brexit he and the Conservative party want, and then make Britain fairer for ordinary people. He pointed to complaints from Michel Barnier and Guy Verhofstadt that he ‘pushed them too hard’ and had ‘told them things no one else had dared to’.

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