[Lifestyle] ‘Labour doesn’t seem to understand how it’s happening’: meet the new Black Tories

[Angel of Death]

The Conservatives are keen to boast about the diversity of their top team – but the party has never been seen as a natural home for Black voters. Can a small group of Black Tories change that?

istory is unlikely to be kind to Kwasi Kwarteng’s 38-day tenure as Britain’s first Black chancellor. Almost overnight, his disastrous mini-budget tanked the economy, crashed the pound and sent interest rates soaring. Three weeks later, he was gone. But there is no denying the symbolic power of the brief moment last autumn when there were no white men occupying any of the four great offices of state. Kwarteng, who was born in east London to Ghanaian parents was the fourth consecutive person of colour to hold the post of chancellor. James Cleverly, whose mother hails from Sierra Leone, became the country’s first Black foreign secretary. Suella Braverman, the daughter of a Kenyan of Christian Goan origin and a Mauritian of Indian origin, was the third home secretary of colour in a row, while Kemi Badenoch, who was born in south-west London to Nigerian parents, became trade secretary. Perhaps most notable of all was that this new era of diversity at the top of government had been delivered not by Labour, the party traditionally seen as the natural home for minority voters, but by the Conservatives. In the wake of the fallout from his mini-budget, Kwarteng derided the opposition’s record on diversity. “If you look at the last 10 years, the Conservative party is much more ethnically diverse than the Labour party, and they lecture us on diversity. They lecture us on gender diversity when they’ve never had a female leader; we’ve had three female prime ministers,” he told the Mail on Sunday. “So, on gender, on race, on all of these things they think they own, they are failing and are backward, and the Conservative party is much more progressive.” We have to demonstrate that the Conservative party really is a broad church. You don’t have to agree with everything a prominent Black Tory says to find a home here Now, a formidable cabal of Conservative change-makers are working behind the scenes to ensure that Kwarteng will not be the last Black Conservative to clutch that iconic red box. Enter the 2022 Group, with its mission to transform the party in the eyes of Black voters. The name is a conscious echo of the powerful 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs who have the ability to determine a leader’s fate, and co-founder Samuel Kasumu, a quietly spoken but shrewd political operator who once worked as race adviser to Boris Johnson, hopes this project will be as influential and enduring. “Are we going to have future prime ministers come through this group? Are we going to be able to make sure that the Conservatives become a party of choice for British African and Caribbeans through this group? I think the answer is yes,” he says. I first meet Kasumu 11 days before Kwarteng is sacked, at the launch of the 2022 Group. It is perhaps the liveliest corner of an otherwise bleak Tory conference. Economic turmoil, infighting and dire polling mean there is little to laugh about. But in this bland function room at Birmingham’s Hyatt Regency hotel, the exuberance is contagious, and even hotel staff pile on to the dancefloor as a DJ wraps up to Montell Jordan’s hip-hop classic This Is How We Do It. “Though there are difficult times ahead, this group was set up with the future in mind, so we have a lot to be optimistic about,” says Kasumu, 35.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/07/new-black-tories-labour-doesnt-seem-to-understand-how-its-happening