Three years ago, in the hope-filled summer of 2019, Ali Milani was causing upset in Boris Johnson ’s Parliamentary seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
Caught up in the David and Goliath moment, thousands of young people were turning up to Milani’s rallies and going door-to-door canvassing to help unseat the Prime Minister.
Milani was everything the local MP Boris was not. Local, for one thing, and raised on a nearby council estate by a single mother.
“I want to hold Boris to account on behalf of the country,” he told me.
On December 12, Milani came closer than any candidate has come to defeating a sitting Prime Minister in more than 100 years. Boris Johnson was worried enough to be panic-canvassing on election night. The Far Right were bothered enough to be sending Milani death threats.
In the end, the 25-year-old contender was 7,000 votes short – a pattern repeated with far greater deficits all over the country. Milani won 18,000 votes, to Johnson’s 25,000.
“It was a romantic story,” he admits now. “The country needed to know an Uxbridge immigrant son of a single mother from a working-class background could beat an Oxbridge Etonian born to rule.
“People needed to know that’s a possibility within our democracy.”
Three years on, our lives are so different, it’s hard to think back to that moment. Milani lost his beloved father Hassan to Covid in Iran during the first wave.
When we speak this time, it’s over Zoom because he is recovering from the virus, and still testing positive.
In the parallel universe where Milani won, what does he think would be different?
“If Boris hadn’t been there, coronavirus would have been handled better,” he says. “Any Tory leader would have handled the pandemic better.
“At least there wouldn’t have been scandal after scandal. How many people died because they couldn’t get their act together?
“It’s a great tragedy. He was the worst guy at the worst time. We really needed a serious person. Boris is a brilliant campaigner, but he’s quite incompetent as someone to govern.” After losing the election, Milani went to the States to work on Bernie Sanders’ campaign, but he is now back home in Uxbridge, and setting his sights on Boris once more.
“I would like to contribute to public life,” he says. “I would love to stand again. Will they have me, is more the question. I hope so.”
Whether Johnson will still be PM or even still the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip is another question.
“I think Boris expects to carry on and run, but they may replace him,” he says. “If anything, that makes him more dangerous. He is desperate to throw meat to his base.”
Next week, Milani launches a book about his candidacy, The Unlikely Candidate – What Losing An Election Taught Me About How To Change Politics.
It talks about his mum’s struggles to put food on the table, and how his Iranian father was never permitted a visa to come to the UK, while Milani, in turn, could not visit Iran.
As he says, in another parallel universe, where the Tories were in power when he came to the UK with his mother and sister, “I would probably be in Rwanda.”
It was his father who persuaded him to write the book when they met in Istanbul just before Hassan would become an early victim of Covid.
Hassan wanted his son to tell people what he had learned by failing, and the hope he found during his campaign.
“On election night my shoulders felt so heavy,” Milani says. “It was hard telling people to hope. But the amazing energy generated helped me get over the pain of the defeat.”
If Johnson’s majority looked shaky in 2019, it’s rickety now. Recent polling suggests the Prime Minister’s 15% majority is ripe for overturning.
Constituency changes will add a more Labour-friendly Northolt and the new Elizabeth line connection is likely to lure young commuters.
There are a host of tricky local issues for an Austerity Prime Minister – the swimming pool and library among them. And some of his constituents still remember his contempt for them as “picaninnies” and “letterboxes”.
“In 2019 we needed the hopeful story of beating Boris,” Milani says. “But it turns out that in 2022 we actually need that hope even more.”
There is a telling detail in his book. His dad, Hassan, who saw the Shah exiled from Iran, used to tease his son by saying “My generation went out and overthrew a king, what are you going to do?”
A challenge the son has taken literally. “Maybe the parallel universe will come true if the polls are right,” Milani says. “Maybe it’s time for hope again.”
He smiles. “If Boris is still there, at least we can run under the slogan ‘I told you so.’”
