Human rights are the talk of the town, says Roger Smith
Human rights are likely to dominate the early days of the Conservative government. Among the more significant junior appointments made by the prime minister after the election was that of Dominic Raab as Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Ministry of Justice. Raab has been one of the most formidable enemies of the Human Rights Act. He deploys the intellectual skills demonstrated by a legal career at Linklater’s and then the Foreign Office with the pugnaciousness to be expected from a karate expert. He is (in my view) profoundly wrong but extremely clever—and very engaging. I saw a lot of him at one time and always liked him.
Raab can be portrayed as, and sometimes is, a wild right-winger. In furtherance of this image, he has railed, for example, against the “raw deal” that men receive from laws against sex discrimination. Yet, on human rights, his position is rather more complicated than the simple negativism of, say, Theresa May. Raab cut his political teeth working for maverick David Davis and ran his successful by-election
