For her first government, Liz Truss has appointed supporters of the ultra-liberal wing of the Conservative Party to key positions, Brexiteers on whom she must be able to count. Exit too close to his predecessor, Boris Johnson. In the most important portfolios, four are from the minorities and have made the course of the big universities like the majority of the leaders of the conservative party.
A financier from Ghana
In finance, Kwasi Kwarteng succeeds Rishi Sunak. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer, 47, was born in the United Kingdom to parents who had emigrated from Ghana (a former British colony) in the 1960s. the royal family and the aristocracy of the whole world, where paraded David Cameron and Boris Johnson before him, then Cambridge. He is also a Harvard graduate. A flawless run for this “Black Boris” (“Black Boris”), as a British newspaper dubbed him.
The Home Office is headed by Suella Braverman, a 53-year-old former attorney general, who was born in the UK to Indian parents who emigrated from Kenya and Mauritius. When she was elected as an MP in 2015, she took an oath on the Dhammapada, one of the best-known Buddhist texts. She succeeds Priti Patel, also born to Indian parents from Gujarat, who emigrated to Uganda. A Cambridge graduate, Suella Braverman also obtained a master’s degree in European and French law from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Inside, she will have to put an end to migrant crossings in the Channel, a file that London shares with Paris and which poisons the relationship between the two countries.
A businessman born in Iraq
James Cleverly, Foreign Secretary (a post previously held by Liz Truss), was born to a Sierra Leonean midwife and a British father. Unlike his peers and although he held several important positions within the Conservative Party, he did not follow the classic university course of prestigious universities, but that of the army.
Finally, Nadhim Zahawi, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is the only one of the four to be born outside the United Kingdom. He was born in 1967 into an Iraqi Kurdish family in Baghdad. He came to Britain aged 9. A successful businessman, in 2000 he founded the leading polling institute YouGov. Minister without portfolio, he will be responsible for putting oil in the wheels so that the government runs smoothly.
Already in the previous government, the BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), according to the term used in the United Kingdom, represented nearly 18% of Boris Johnson’s first cabinet, according to the NGO DiversityUK, more than the representation of these among the British population (14%).
David Cameron promoted diversity
Diversity has also reached the British Parliament where, since the last legislative elections in 2019, one in ten MPs has an immigrant background. In a little over thirty years, Parliament has grown from one deputy of foreign origin in 1987 to 65 non-white deputies today.
Among the Tories, it was former Prime Minister David Cameron who, in the early 2000s, introduced lists of priority candidates for the legislative elections, in order to promote diversity, also in terms of gender equality. In twenty years, the Tories have gone from zero to twenty deputies from minorities.