48 Britain The EconomistJune 27th 2020
D
uring a recentBlack Lives Matter protest in Hyde Park, one
of the organisers, Imarn Ayton, led the crowd in chanting “Mu-
nira Mirza must go”. “She does not believe in what we believe in,”
proclaimed Ms Ayton. “New narrative today!” As director of Num-
ber 10’s in-house think-tank, the Policy Unit, the unbeliever in
question has hitherto been an obscure figure in Boris Johnson’s
high command, albeit an important one. She has been content to
let Dominic Cummings soak up the media’s attention while build-
ing up the most impressive Conservative policy team since Marga-
ret Thatcher’s day. But Boris Johnson’s decision to give her the job
of establishing a new government commission on racial inequal-
ities immediately transformed her into a lightning rod.
Ms Mirza is an unlikely Tory. Her parents—a factory worker and
a part-time Urdu teacher—migrated from Pakistan to Oldham, a
northern working-class town. She went to an overwhelmingly
Asian comprehensive school and was the only pupil from her
sixth-form college to go to Oxford University, where she got a first
in English. She joined the Revolutionary Communist Party (rcp), a
Trotskyite groupuscule that regarded the Communist Party of
Great Britain as a bunch of sell-outs. She spent her spare time read-
ing not just Lenin and Trotsky but also Antonio Gramsci, who be-
lieved that revolutionaries need to take over “the culture” as well
as the formal institutions of power. She moved to Kent University
to study sociology with Frank Furedi, leading light of the rcp, and
wrote for the party’s in-house journal, Living Marxism.
And yet today Ms Mirza is so close to Boris Johnson that he says
she is one of the five women he most admires, along with Boudicca
and his grandmother. She spent eight years working as his deputy
mayor for culture when he was mayor of London, and defended
him vigorously when he likened women wearing burqas to “bank
robbers” and “letter boxes”, her ethnicity giving him useful cover.
Mr Johnson likes to refer to her as his “nonsense detector”.
Ms Mirza’s rightward journey began after the rcpunderwent an
institutional and ideological meltdown in 2000 when Living Marx-
ism was bankrupted in a libel trial. She was not the only party
member to loosen her ideological moorings: Claire Fox estab-
lished the Institute of Ideas and eventually became an mepfor the
Brexit Party, while Ms Mirza became chief fundraiser for a newcentre-right think-tank, Policy Exchange (px).
Ms Mirza says that the question of intellectual freedom was at
the heart of her conversion to the right: “I realised very quickly that
the main thing that the left was not in favour of was free speech—
that there was an intolerance about different ideas and opinions.”
Equally important is the idea that individuals are masters of their
own fate. The left is increasingly preoccupied by the idea that peo-
ple’s identity is fixed by the groups into which they are born, a no-
tion which Ms Mirza’s trajectory challenges. But though her politi-
cal journey is a long one, she has not left all of her past behind. The
rcpand Mr Johnson’s Conservative Party have more in common
than might at first appear.
Ms Mirza’s arrival at pxcoincided with two changes in the Con-
servative Party that turned her into a hot property. The first was the
party’s growing interest in “the culture”. In the 1990s, the party was
dominated by efficiency experts who wanted to apply cost-benefit
analysis to everything and traditionalists who shared Sir John Ma-
jor’s enthusiasm for “old maids cycling to Holy Communion
through the morning mist”. pxdecided that Conservatives needed
to embrace Britain’s more diverse culture (one of the px’s founders,
Nick Boles, is gay) while pushing back against the left-wing idea
that all minorities are victims. The second was the party’s growing
appetite for revolution: the belief that the only way to protect the
ancien régimefrom internal collapse is to purify it, often by bor-
rowing the tools of revolutionaries. Michael Gove, one of px’s other
founders, liked to display posters of Lenin and Malcolm xon his
office wall and to praise Mao Zedong’s Long March. He also acted as
a long-term patron of Dominic Cummings, a man who can’t see an
institution without giving it a good kicking.
The party’s cultural agenda and revolutionary turn are linked.
Today’s radical Tories believe that the left’s grip on what Gramsci
called the “instruments of cultural reproduction” is so tight that
conservative values can be promoted only by revolutionary
means. What’s the point of reforming the civil service if civil ser-
vants have no national pride? Or in reorganising education if pro-
fessors and teachers tell pupils that they are victims of structural
oppression? You need to apply electric-shock treatment to the pre-
vailing mindset. Hence Mr Cummings’ war on “the blob”, formerly
known as the establishment—the people at the centre of the coun-
try’s political and intellectual life who these days share a liberal in-
ternationalist world view. And hence the Brexiteers’ demand for a
radical rupture from the European Union.
Ms Mirza is in the vanguard of this revolution. She rejects be-
liefs widely accepted in “the blob”. Her first publication for px,
“Culture Vultures”, argued that cultural institutions are short-
changing working-class pupils by emphasising “relevance” rather
than high culture. Her second, “Living Apart Together”, argued that
multiculturalism fostered Islamist extremism by encouraging
Muslims to see themselves as a separate group, and she rejects the
idea that British society is structurally racist.
Ms Mirza brings a sharp and well-informed voice to an impor-
tant area. But she also has a dangerous appetite for iconoclasm and
polarising rhetoric, and her passionate individualism offers few
policy solutions to the problems of racism and limited opportuni-
ties available to black people.
Britain’s debate about race is calmer than America’s. Politicians
as different as Theresa May, a former prime minister, and David
Lammy, an eloquent black Labour mp, agree on important points.
Ms Mirza needs to temper her combative instincts with pragma-
tism, or risk turning it into another front in the culture war. 7Bagehot Revolutionary conservative
Munira Mirza is unlikely to calm the tension around Black Lives Matter