Dominic Raab's Pret Special
3 min read
He doesn't have the same lunch every day. Really.
The most important thing about Dominic Raab’s order from Pret is that it is not the same every day. We know this because the former deputy prime minister gave interviews about it. “Look, I have something different every day,” Raab told the BBC.
So, the suggestion by his diary secretary that he always has a Chicken Caesar and Bacon Baguette along with a Super Fruit Pot and a Vitamin Volcano Smoothie – an order she claimed was known as the “Dom Raab Special” – has been rejected by the man himself. More than that, he denies sending staff out to pick his lunch up for him. There is no Dom Raab Special, and he buys his own lunch. I hope that’s clear.
Although… “The reality is,” Raab went on, in this unusually food-focused inquisition, “I do love a good Chicken Caesar Baguette from Pret. And the reality is, sometimes you’ve just got your head down going through all the paperwork, and the team will often say, ‘Can we get you a sandwich?’”
So, Raab does have a favourite Pret order. And his staff quite often bought it for him. Neither of these things is exceptional. Busy people who know what sandwich they like do end up asking people to pick it up.
The question isn’t so much “Why did Raab have a regular Pret order?” as “Why do we know what Raab’s regular Pret order was?”
The immediate answer to that was in 2018, when his diary secretary was caught in a Daily Mirror sting after advertising her availability on a “sugar daddy” website. As she discussed whatever one discusses in such meetings, she dropped in gossip about her boss, the-then housing minister.
And here we got to the real answer: Raab wasn’t popular with his staff. And people who don’t like their bosses moan about them, often to strangers. Raab’s aide said he was “difficult” and “dismissive of women”. He denied this, but they weren’t the first complaints about life working for Raab to reach the press, and they wouldn’t be the last.
Pret still sell the Dom Raab Special (although for some reason they don’t call it that). The baguette side of things is a solid safety order: a stodgy and unmemorable mix of chicken and mayonnaise, perfect fuel for an afternoon of yelling. The Vitamin Volcano, a shade somewhere between red and purple, on the other hand, is a shock to any system used to lunching in Parliament. Combined with the fruit pot, it delivers more vitamins than have ever been seen in the Terrace café.
Raab is famously driven, a man who trained at karate-kicking so hard that he no longer has any cartilage in his knees. He took that attitude to work, pushing himself to fill gaps in his knowledge – famously he only learned about the significance of the English Channel to trade after becoming Brexit Secretary – and pushing staff to, well, despair.
For instance, one of the ways we know he orders other things for lunch is that there are no tomatoes in the Dom Raab Special, and in 2022 The Sun reported he’d thrown tomatoes from his Pret lunch while shouting at officials. That was disputed, but it was more evidence of staff venting their unhappiness.
In 2023, Rishi Sunak ordered an investigation into allegations Raab had bullied staff. It found no evidence of food-chucking but used the words “intimidating” and “abrasive” quite a lot. Raab resigned. The lesson is clear: if your lunch order makes it into the papers, it’s time to think about how you treat your staff.
