Sunak is Britain’s first Asian prime minister, but this diversity success was no accident

London: Two images captured inside No. 10 this Diwali told a story Britons have never heard before.

In one, new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stands, hands together in prayer, a garland of orange and white roses hanging around his neck on top of his polished suit, white shirt and tie.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has hosted a reception to celebrate Diwali in No. 10 Downing Street.Credit: Simon Walker / No. 10 Downing Street

Diyas flicker in the background and those surrounding him are also in prayer – two are Sikh men wearing turbans.

In the second photograph, both of which were released by 10 Downing Street, the group watches Sunak light an oil lamp for Diwali.

Labour MP Diane Abbott, who in 1987 was the first black woman to enter the House of Commons, said the scenes at Downing Street were ones that she never thought she’d live to see.

“I did feel pride,” Abbott said in an interview with the Herald and The Age.

Incoming Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is greeted by colleagues at Conservative Party headquarters.Credit: Getty

“Someone of South Asian origin as prime minister lighting Diwali candles – it’s a real sign of progress.

“There must be so many little South Asian boys watching the television and having their horizons expanded.”

The unceasing political turmoil triggered by the 2016 Brexit referendum has sparked enormous churn in the British government.

But one of the unforeseen consequences has been, for the first time in Britain’s history, the rapid promotion of ministers from non-Anglo backgrounds into the four Great Offices of State.

Labour MP Diane Abbott, who in 1967 was the first black woman to enter the House of Commons.Credit: AP

First, it was Sajid Javid as home secretary in 2018; then Sunak into treasury in 2020; followed this year by James Cleverly into the foreign office, Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor of the exchequer in the Liz Truss government, and finally Sunak into the prime ministership this week.

But none of this was inevitable.

Former Conservative MP Andrew MacKay was responsible for candidate selection as the party’s deputy chairman between 2003 and 2005. He played a key role in modernising the Conservative Party, prioritising women and candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds.

This was followed by former prime minister David Cameron’s A-List – a process to make the Tory ranks look more representative of society as a whole and to bring in star performers from outside the traditional party machine.

It was this scheme that enabled him to accurately predict in 2012 that the Conservatives would be the first to field a prime minister of Indian origin.

The prediction also became a reality thanks to Sunak’s qualifications, which were obvious to party operatives who met him when he was looking to enter politics. MacKay was struck by his “intelligence, charm and attention to detail”.

“He was clearly a superstar and a natural PM,” he said.

But Sunak’s first attempt to stand for office was stymied by Oliver Dowden, who beat him for preselection for a seat in Hertfordshire.

Dowden was this week reinstated to cabinet by Sunak and was one of the heavyweights driving the Team Rishi leadership campaign.

When former leader William Hague announced he was retiring from his Yorkshire seat of Richmond, one of the safest Tory seats in northern England, Sunak was earmarked as his successor.

Delivering his maiden speech with perfect comic timing, Sunak recounted being introduced to a Yorkshire farmer as “the new William Hague”, to which the reply was: “Ah yes, Haguey, good bloke; like him, bit pale though, this one’s got a better tan.”

But foisting the “tanned Hague” onto northern, wealthy farmers was no given.

“It’s a huge area of prosperous farmers who had hardly ever seen a coloured face before,” MacKay recalled.

Hague had to use his 25 years of political capital to coax the local association into endorsing the lad from Southampton.

“The association always decides the candidate; they’re never told but they can be handled – subtly,” MacKay said.

“They often want your advice and are grateful for it and I would often steer them in the direction. We made a huge effort to get Rishi in.”

MacKay said Sunak becoming prime minister vindicated their relentless patronage of the candidate who might otherwise have struggled to get his foot on the political ladder.

Sunak is one of the 6.9 per cent of the British population who ticked “Britain Indian” in the 2011 census.

He describes himself as “thoroughly British” with Indian religious and cultural heritage, and has never cast himself as a diversity candidate.

But he speaks consistently about being a practising Hindu and of the Britishness in the “great tolerance” shown to his migrant parents and grandparents. Both his grandfathers emigrated to Britain via East Africa from Punjab in pre-partition India and what is now Pakistan.

He told India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi this week that he was a “visual representation” of the historic links between India and the UK.

Watching the “extraordinary” and “significant moment” on the other side of the world was Senator Mehreen Faruqi, who moved to Sydney from Pakistan in the 1990s.

“Less than one hundred years [ago], like me, his ancestors were colonised and were subjects of the British Empire, so it is absolutely incredible to see this turn of events,” she said.

Faruqi’s book Too Migrant, Too Muslim, Too Loud documents the racism she has experienced in Australia and particularly since entering politics, including when she sought preselection from Greens party members.

She says it’s the legacy of the White Australia policy, lack of maturity and “wilful denial” in discussing racism that is holding Australia back from normalising diversity and reaching the nirvana of when a person’s background exits the discussion and a politician is judged purely on their policies and performance – as was arguably the case with former British prime minister Liz Truss.

“Australia has a lot of catching up to do,” she said, in an interview by phone.

Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi.Credit: Olive + Maeve

“The Australia that I see in my workplace is so radically different to the Australia that I live in, the streets that I walk. But if you want to talk about racism in this country and the reality of it for the people who face it, you’re often gaslighted and told to go back to where you came from.”

“Racism is inherent in this country, and it basically stems from the dispossession and the way that the country was violently colonised.”

But Diane Abbott says it’s partly because of the empire that Britain’s multiculturalism is reflected in the topmost levels of power, not seen in comparable countries, including former imperialists.

“It’s not happening in Australia, it’s not happening in France and it’s not happening in Germany,” she said.

“There’s something about British society which is a little bit more open. It may be because of the experience of empire, not to say that the experience of empire wasn’t a wholly negative thing for the countries that Britain colonised, but somehow there was just that much more interaction.”

”And what happens as a consequence of empire, post-war you have South Asians, Africans, Caribbean people coming to this country in very great numbers and we ourselves have fought for equality, have fought for recognition,” she said.

But she said her party needed to do some soul-searching and ask itself why it is the Tories who have now given the UK its first Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, as well as three female prime ministers and now its first prime minister of colour. (Had Disraeli been a practising Jew, he would have been barred from office when first elected in 1837. It wasn’t until 1858 that a person of Jewish faith, Lionel de Rothschild, was able to take his seat in parliament. By that time, Disraeli was chancellor of the Exchequer.)

“It’s something the Labour Party needs to reflect on, the fact that the Tories had all these firsts when it comes to representation, because there was a point when we had more minority MPs and we have very many women MPs,” she said.

In the UK, Labour has never had a female leader, and it will have to win the next election in two years’ time before it can boast of having had a black cabinet minister in one of the Great Offices of State.

“The British public expects to see diversity and the Labour Party needs to live up to that,” Abbott warned.

In Australia, it’s the reverse. Labor has equal women MPs in caucus due to its quota policy, and, while it does not have diversity targets, the last election preselected its most diverse set of candidates in history.

By contrast, the Coalition is far behind in gender representation, which dropped to 1993 levels at the last election.

Faruqi said that if the Australian parliament were truly representative, there would be more than 50 MPs from non-European or Anglo backgrounds.

“That’s an unthinkable proposition at the moment,” she said.

MacKay offers several lessons from the Tories’ success, and the first is that diversity must never be about filling quotas.

“You have to really work hard, they have to be as good or better than their non-white or male equivalents.

“We didn’t want any tokenism; you can’t just fill the number and say, ‘Oh we don’t have enough black people, let’s find some.’”

He said Sunak’s example was a case in point. Immediately after winning preselection, Sunak threw himself into his local constituency, getting up before dawn to speak to farmers as they milked their cows and attended auction marts.

“Rishi couldn’t have done it without William, just as Hague couldn’t have done without Rishi being Rishi,” he said.

And he said the second lesson was that progress builds its own momentum, justifying the need for aggressive action to break down the initial barriers.

“Once you roll the pitch, people become more open-minded; it’s not as difficult as you might think,” he said.

When Sunak told the Conservative leadership hustings in Exeter about his Hindu faith, returning to his temple in Southampton, and described it as an important part of his life and how he and his wife raise their daughters, the audience burst into applause.

It was a demonstration of just how far the Tory Party as a whole had come since 2001 when Cameron entered Parliament and had not a single black or Asian colleague in the party room.

Faruqi can only watch with envy.

“I dream of it happening in Australia in my lifetime but I’m not convinced that it is going to happen in my lifetime,” she said.

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