When I meet Chris Grayling in his departmental office, I do a double take. The Justice Secretary is not wearing a suit or even his Lord Chancellor’s robes but a pair of pale chinos and a pink Ralph Lauren button-down shirt. Noticing my surprise, Grayling reveals that this is his definition of ‘smart casual’: he’s off to a Tory away day straight after the interview.
Grayling is 6ft 5 and his height makes his mood pretty obvious. Straight after the last election, his shoulders were hunched and his head was down. As he now admits, ‘I didn’t want us to go into coalition.’ Compounding his misery, he had missed out on a cabinet post despite having been shadow home secretary. But Grayling is now in cabinet and standing tall. He beams as he shows me the view from his room, which sweeps round from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall.
When Grayling replaced Ken Clarke as Justice Secretary, it signalled a hardening of the Tory position on a host of issues, most notably the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights.
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