Good morning. I promise this newsletter contains no explanations of how clever it was of Boris Johnson to say he was going to move to Cincinatti in a rocket, or whatever.
In 2001, 91% of Conservative MPs were male, and every single one of them was white. As of last night, when Liz Truss confirmed the appointments of Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor, Suella Braverman as home secretary and James Cleverly as foreign secretary, none of the four most senior jobs in the British government are held by a white man.
It’s pretty funny that in the most diverse cabinet ever, there’s still room for Jacob Rees-Mogg. Even so, this is a remarkable change – and one that sounds an alarm for the Labour party, which has never been led by a woman, and never had a person of colour in any of the four great offices of state.
Tomorrow, Liz Truss will set out her package of help on energy bills, and we’ll cover it in detail in First Edition. But for today’s newsletter, with director of the British Future thinktank Sunder Katwala, we’re taking a step back to examine a radical transformation in the upper echelons of British politics. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Russia | The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has called for a demilitarised zone around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Guterres was echoing a new International Atomic Energy Agency report which urged interim measures to prevent a nuclear disaster.
UK news | The mother of Olivia Pratt-Korbel has spoken publicly for the first time since her daughter’s murder, saying that those responsible for her death “need to own up”. A 34-year-old man, who was arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder, remains in custody.
Media | The BBC’s chairman has rejected claims by the former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis that a former Downing Street director of communications is acting as an agent of the Conservative party inside the corporation. Richard Sharp told MPs that Maitlis was “completely wrong”.
Scotland | Nicola Sturgeon has announced a rent freeze for public and private properties and a ban on winter evictions in a package of measures “deliberately focused” on the cost of living crisis.
Literature | Alan Garner has become the oldest author to be shortlisted for the Booker prize. Garner, 87, is the only British writer on this year’s list alongside Percival Everett, Elizabeth Strout, NoViolet Bulawayo, Claire Keegan, and Shehan Karunatilaka.
In depth: Is it tokenism or progress?
When the record number of Labour women elected in 1997 were photographed (above) with the new prime minister, and saddled with the excruciating moniker “Blair’s Babes”, it would have been easy to dismiss Margaret Thatcher as an aberration: she appointed just one woman to the cabinet in her entire premiership, and seven years later, the Tories were even more hopeless at representing Britain’s ethnic diversity than Labour. Progressive politicians were confident – maybe even relaxed – that their opponents would remain painfully unrepresentative as Labour took strides towards showing voters a picture of modern Britain.
That appears a serious miscalculation now, when the Daily Mail can badge its front page with the line “FEMALE PMS … IT’S TORIES 3 LABOUR 0” and the Daily Express runs a headline quite reasonably describing the cabinet as the “most diverse … and right-wing” ever.
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The Conservatives’ success
The process of change in the Conservative party began under David Cameron, whose success in diversifying the party’s Westminster representation was in its classically Tory starting point: “Everything was done within a meritocratic frame,” said Katwala, whose thinktank is focused on issues of race and identity. “It wasn’t about quotas.”
Instead of forcing the selection of women and candidates of colour, the party ensured their presence on a “priority” list from which local associations were invited to choose, Katwala explained. “When Nadhim Zahawi got selected in Stratford-on-Avon in 2010, he told people that he came without a word of English, that this is the best country in the world – of course they chose him. He tells them a story about Britain that they like.” In 2015, the process was accelerated by prioritising candidates such as Rishi Sunak for safe seats. Kwarteng, Braverman and Cleverly were all elected across those two cycles.
Crucially, the strategy Cameron pioneered allowed the maintenance of a Conservative view of the best approach to diversity – not an imposed solution, but a view that the cream will rise to the top if only it is allowed to.
Critics would also argue that it is a strategy which is better at finding conventional cabinet picks than fundamentally changing the party, or better representing ethnic minority groups and women in the country. In this July piece, Kenan Malik noted that the Conservatives have “turned the normal diversity pyramid on its head”: one in five cabinet ministers were from minority backgrounds in Boris Johnson’s last cabinet before his resignation, against about one in 15 of MPs as a whole, and one in 33 party members.
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Labour’s problem
The Labour party has the opposite problem. While its membership is similarly overwhelmingly white, it won the support of 64% of minority voters in 2019, according to Ipsos Mori, against 20% for the Conservatives, and lost to the Tories by much smaller margins among women than men. Half of its MPs are women, against a quarter of Tories, and 20% are from minority backgrounds. But, as Katwala notes: “It hasn’t been able to build on that with representation at the top.”
Katwala points to some really interesting research by More in Common which suggests that the problem may not be exactly about party decision-makers’ stated views – but in the views they attribute to the voters. More in Common found that 95% of a segment of the population it calls “progressive activists” said they would be fine with an ethnic minority prime minister – but that 44% of them doubted that the average voter would feel the same. And yet 81% of those same voters said they would have no such problem, actually.
“Progressives are too pessimistic about this, and these are the kind of people who sit in selection meetings,” Katwala said. “They’re imputing prejudice on to the electorate that doesn’t appear to be founded. There’s perhaps a level of distance that makes them fear the country hasn’t changed.”
This is why even though there are so many more minority MPs in Labour, they almost all represent majority-minority seats – “and that makes it harder for them to have people who might be the next party leader, if voters see someone like David Lammy or Sadiq Khan as a bit ‘too metropolitan’”.
It’s obviously a good thing if majority-minority seats are reflected by their MP. But there’s a question about why that should be almost the only place Labour has MPs of colour – and however complicatedly coded that word “metropolitan” might be, it’s hard to argue that Labour’s prospects of diversity at the top wouldn’t be better served by a more diverse range of seats at the bottom.
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Does a more diverse cabinet change politics?
The most powerful argument against celebrating the composition of Liz Truss’s cabinet is that diversity has to have an impact on policy to be meaningful. In this piece by the Guardian’s community affairs correspondent Aina J Khan, Labour councillor and anti-racism campaigner Shaista Aziz points out that Braverman supported Priti Patel’s Rwanda deportation policy and Sajid Javid’s decision to revoke the citizenship of Shamima Begum.
“It’s not enough to be a Black or ethnic minority politician in this country or a cabinet member. That’s not what representation is about. That’s actually tokenism,” Aziz said. “I do not believe that these three appointments are going to change anything for the vast majority of people of colour in this country.”
Similarly, in July Nesrine Malik wrote that diversity in the UK had become defined as “a means of celebrating the increased number of non-white faces in unfamiliar places as long as they leave those places unchanged”.
But she also noted that treating diverse voters as “one lumpen voting bloc for the left … betrays a patronising, one-dimensional view of these communities”. And Katwala said: “In fact, the Tory minority vote in parliament is not typically ‘anti-woke’ at all. Cleverly and Kwarteng are the opposite of culture warriors.” (You can’t say the same of Braverman; if this newsletter had come out of the Home Office, she would have immediately scrapped it.)
Katwala drew a clear distinction between the impact of growing numbers of women in parliament and of minority MPs. “Among women, there is some gender solidarity about changing the culture in Westminster,” he said. “It’s much spikier among minority groups – Tories think Labour take them for granted, Labour think the Tories are taking them for a ride.”
Central to both parties in translating parliamentary progress to better representation, he said, was “recognising that minority voters are not all the same. And, actually, that is part of the long story of integration in this country.”
What else we’ve been reading
Sport
Tennis | Nick Kyrgios lost a men’s quarter-final thriller 7-5, 4-6, 7-5, 6-7 (4), 6-4 to the Russian Karen Khachanov at the US Open. Another Wimbledon finalist this year, Ons Jabeur, beat Ajla Tomljanović 6-4, 7-6 (4) to reach the women’s semi-final.
Football | On the first Champion’s League matchday of the season, Celtic lost 3-0 to Real Madrid, Manchester City beat Sevilla 4-0, and Chelsea slipped to a 1-0 defeat to Dinamo Zagreb.
Football | Sarina Wiegman’s England side concluded their World Cup qualifying campaign top of Group D with 10 wins in 10 games, having scored 80 goals and conceded none, after a 10-0 demolition of Luxembourg.
The front pages
“Into the storm: Truss vows to solve cost of living crisis” – the Guardian’s splash headline this morning. “We can ride out the storm” – both the Times and the Metro say that while the Daily Mail has the same but with “Together” tacked on the front, and “can” underlined (same words in the Daily Express, no underline – it adds enthusiastically that “freezing energy bills at £2,500 will definitely help!”). And this is starting to look embarrassing for all concerned, because the Telegraph also says “Together we can ride out the storm”. Thank goodness then for the Mirror, which has “A new prime minister … now fix the Britain you lot broke”. “Truss era begins with tax warning” says the i, while the Financial Times’ splash headline is “Truss assumes office with vow to steer Britain out of energy storm”. The Sun shows Truss meeting the sovereign with “Hello Liz” in a shared speech balloon. “Frail Queen greets PM” is the strapline.
Today in Focus
The human cost of Pakistan’s devastating floods
More than 1,200 people have died in the floods in Pakistan. The disaster has left around a third of the country under water.
Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Haarlem, near Amsterdam, will become the first city in the world to ban meat adverts in public spaces, after it was found that meat accounts for almost 60% of all greenhouse gas emissions from food production. It’s a bold move as the Netherlands is the EU’s biggest meat exporter but, in the eyes of local government, it is necessary if they are to achieve the EU’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050. The advertising ban will also include holiday flights, fossil fuels and cars that run on fossil fuels.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
