Dominic Raab and his life in the fast lane of Brexit Britain

It’s only a year since he resigned from his Cabinet post as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union because of the contents of the Brexit deal that he himself was responsible for. So goes life in the fast lane of Brexit Britain. Down is up, up is down and everywhere there are masturbation references.

Raab has had an unfortunate relationship with good grace for some time. He has made any number of offensive comments on live television captured for posterity. His assertion that food bank users have a “cash flow problem” gives you a clear sense of his depth and perspective on the realities of life.

It seems truly remarkable that he occupies one of the great offices of state in the United Kingdom. But he does. And this is where we have collectively got to.

The reason that I mention it is that Raab was quoted on the BBC yesterday morning offering this considered treatise on the standard and quality of public debate and life: “no-one gives a toss about the social media cut and thrust”.

What is it about senior Tories and masturbation, I hear you ask? After the Prime Minister’s interest in Jeremy Corbyn’s “onanism” that this column rehearsed last week, we have the less-cultured language of the street deployed by Raab this week. Onanists or tossers, it still amounts to the same thing and Tory Ministers are obsessed with it.

It would be easy to dismiss him as a slightly thick buffoon of the Mark Francois variety. But this he clearly is not.

Dominic Raab

He is a graduate of both Oxford and Cambridge universities. His legal career was impressive for its breadth of work including on human rights in Brussels and on trade law. He worked for a PLO negotiator in Ramallah. He is the son of a Czech immigrant who died when Raab was far too young. He has impeccable life experiences to draw upon.

His life story is impressive not privileged, although he has enjoyed the best of opportunity. He should be a great public servant of substance and note.

Why then does he behave so badly?

His casual dismissal of the social media “cut and thrust” did not refer to anonymous abuse on Twitter – though that issue is really serious and should not be waved aside in the way the Prime Minister waved aside the commitment of resources to historic child abuse investigations.

Remember that? “Spaffed up against the wall”. Masturbation and its product once again.

What Raab was referring to was the decision of the Central Office of the Conservative Party to rebrand its Twitter feed as “Fact Check UK” during the televised leadership debate on ITV on Tuesday night. This led Twitter itself to accuse the governing party of the United Kingdom of “misleading the public”.

The view of Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs? No-one “gives a toss” evidently.

This and the related blizzard of questionable references that seems to dominate the thinking of our most senior Cabinet ministers I wouldn’t go so far as to describe as a strategy. But it does rather give an insight into the culture, behaviour, conduct and reflexes of the people who are leading the polls and seeking to form the next government All of this profanity, deception and debasement is part of a pattern that flows from the content of the characters of the people leading the United Kingdom and the United States. We have become a dystopian reality and the disease is infectious.

Raab should, on paper, be one of our better public servants – his conduct is consistently the polar opposite. Why? Well because that is what it takes to get on in the Conservative Party and in the UK Government these days. The “leaders’” debate itself plumbed new depths for quality. It was the equivalent of having Ebbsfleet play Albion Rovers in the Champions League final. The public support for “both” alternatives for prime minister is probably as low as it has ever been.

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In Scotland their parties barely garner the support of one-third of the electorate combined in the latest opinion poll. Which makes it all the more farcical that this debased ritual is given such prominence on our public service broadcasts and across the media.

In normal times we should be more collectively incensed by the sheer undemocratic unfairness of alternatives opposed by two-thirds of the Scottish electorate getting portrayed on the national news as being the only options for debate. That is truly risible. The saving grace, however, is the fact that the more exposure the pairing get, the worse their ratings plummet.

Despite his high office, Raab is just another bit player in the jerking-obsessed culture of right-wing extremism in British politics. The problem for the SNP is that the standards of their opponents is so low that their performance risks being dragged down with it as if Liverpool had to play Ebbsfleet every Saturday.

This risk must be avoided at all costs. Standards, ambition and self-discipline must be kept to the highest possible level. We are in for a whirlwind ride in the weeks and months ahead. It is mission critical that a lot of eyes stay focused on the prize.

Creative use of posters was not funny after all

HAVING lampooned the Tories for their dishonest and misleading behaviour, I feel I must come clean with a confession.

In the 1992 election I was privileged to cut my teeth as the election agent and campaign organiser for the SNP in my home constituency of Motherwell South. Our candidate was the brilliant Kay Ullrich, who signed up Nicola Sturgeon for the party and went on to lose a bruising Monklands by-election two years later by the narrowest of margins in a hitherto safe Labour stronghold.

Kay Ullrich

In the previous election, the SNP had gathered barely over 15% of the vote. These were completely different days from today.

But spirits in the SNP were high. By-election victories and a strong campaigning style made us believe. The Sun had come out for independence and a poll that year put support for independence at more than 50%. It was a rogue but it was exciting.

We had collective candidate-itis and thought all things were possible. Ravenscraig was teetering and we felt the area would surely shift from loyalty to a party that had done so little. It eventually would, but not until a long time later.

My counter party as agent was the brilliant Labour fixer Frank Roy, who became a linchpin of many successful Labour campaigns and MP for the area. I liked Frank and was delighted to work with him many years later on the European referendum Remain campaign. I am certain I irked him more than once in those days, not least when I got newspaper-style posters put up round the area under the misleading title “Motherwell and Wishaw News”. The “headline” read, “SNP SET TO WIN IN MOTHERWELL SOUTH”.

Frank Roy

It was a giggle and felt great. Frank was annoyed. In the end we got just over 20% and lost by 14,013 votes. I had a laugh; Frank had the last one.

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