Boris Johnson’s racism reviewer whose mind is already made up

She’s moved from far left to a Conservative No 10, writes Sean O'Grady. But if there’s one thing Munira Mirza has been consistent on, it’s her views on multicultural Britain

Meeting Boris in 2008 was the move that really changed her life, and she’s been in or around his orbit ever since (PA)

The ideal person to lead the government’s hastily arranged commission on racial inequalities, apparently, is Munira Mirza, head of the Downing Street policy unit.

She is from Oldham, the daughter of immigrants who arrived from Pakistan, her dad a factory worker, her mum what the Americans call a home-maker. She is well educated, well mannered and well connected. She is 42, a little younger than her close colleague Dominic Cummings, and also independent minded and not actually a member of the Conservative Party.

In fact she was “one of the left”, as she often coyly puts it, a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which is to say a Trotskyist. Like Claire Fox, Frank Furedi and others of that diaspora, she’s found libertarianism an equally bracing creed. A little known fact about Mirza – running government policy, remember – is that she is open to legalising drugs because “clearly something is not working”: “People take drugs recreationally and they enjoy it and they’re not going to stop, so something’s got to give,” she said in a 2018 interview.

Her communism lasted until about her mid-twenties. Since then she has been reluctant to categorise herself in a facile left-right way, though she’s definitely liberal or libertarian, not least because she found the intellectual intolerance of the left so irksome. Even now she says the need for more “political diversity” is more pressing than the traditional categories of ethnicity or class.

So why, then, has her appointment been greeted with, in the words of one headline, “dismay”?

Why, apart from some partisanship, does Diane Abbott, Britain’s first black female MP, say that the commission’s report will be dead on arrival? Why are there YouTube videos with titles such as “Hiring Munira Mirza is like having Richard Dawkins do Easter Mass”?

OK, a lot of this is knee-jerk leftie stuff, and it is fair to say that “commission” is a misleading title for an almost entirely internal governmental exercise, albeit with some independent membership promised.

However, the deeper reason for the disquiet, to put it mildly, is that Mirza has been swimming in these multicultural waters for some time, and, the evidence suggests, has long since made her mind up about racism in Britain. The results of her probe into the evidence are pretty much pre-ordained. For example, here are Mirza’s own words, in that interview in 2018, on the racial disparities audit ordered by Theresa May, the last such wide-ranging official exercise: “It perpetuated what I thought was a very negative, inaccurate picture of British society.

“It reinforces this idea that ethnic minorities are being systematically oppressed, that there’s a sort of institutional problem, when in fact what we’ve seen in the last 20 years is a liberalisation, an opening up for many people.

“My worry has always been when if you’re telling that negative story, it skews policy, it means people make bad policy decisions because they think they’re trying to correct something that’s actually working quite well, but it also reinforces for a lot of younger people this idea that they can’t succeed, and that I think can have quite a material impact and that means that they’re not motivated to go out, apply for university, be ambitious, seek good jobs. They’ll think that they’ve always got a kind of white racist decision maker who’s holding them back.”

Mirza acknowledges racism exists and she supports a multicultural society, for obvious reasons, but believes “multiculturalism” “racialises” social problems that are largely explicable in other ways. Thus, for example, she sees the issue of black people being disproportionately being stopped by the police as a function of their larger presence in public in areas of higher crime. Their higher sentences may be down to their distrust of white solicitors’ advice to them to plead guilty to an offence (one of the faults she finds with David Lammy’s report on Bame people and the criminal justice system).

To Mirza, what she has called “the race relations industry” has tended to exaggerate tensions and downplay the good news stories of, say, some ethnic groups doing well in higher education, in contrast to white working class boys. Critics would argue that she misuses the statistics, doesn’t take account of “intersectionality” (for example, properly accounting for gender) and falls for the “model minority” stereotype. It’s certainly the case that her published work arguably doesn’t feature the most advanced statistical treatments of the available figures that is warranted.

At any rate, despite her equable demeanour “IRL”, there is no totem of the left-liberal view she hasn’t assaulted with intent to harm over many years, especially online. She has had a long-held, uncompromising and consistent outlook. To take just a few examples...

Diversity: “The principle of equality is being replaced by the principle of diversity ...The most pernicious effect of this new racial thinking is how it fosters tribalism between ethnic and religious groups” (2006).

Diversity training: “One way you don’t improve is introduce diversity training to the workplace. It stops people thinking for themselves” (2018).

Hate crime laws: “These laws criminalise people’s thoughts” (2004).

White privilege: “Far too simplistic” (2018).

The Danish newspaper cartoons of the prophet Mohammed: “The Muslim Council of Britain has announced it is pleased that the British newspapers have not shown the pictures. But the point about free speech is that it allows citizens to think and feel whatever they wish. Muslims are not banned from practising their religion, but nor should they be shielded from criticism by others, however hurtful they might feel it is” (2006).

The Macpherson report: “We have now reached the point where all differences in public service outcomes by race are assumed somehow to be the result of ‘institutional racism’. The Macpherson report of 1999 into the police laid the ground for this new orthodoxy, positing that racism exists all around us in the ‘system’ and that it is perpetuated ‘unwittingly’ by people working within it” (2017).

The Windrush scandal: “Their experiences were deeply distressing ... But was this really about race? Stories exist of foreign-born white people experiencing similar levels of Kafka-esque misery” (2018).

Muslim people: “Muslim consciousness is dominated by a ‘culture of victimhood’, which has bred feelings of resentment and defensiveness ... Stop treating Muslims as a vulnerable group. The exaggeration of Islamophobia does not make Muslims feel protected but instead reinforces feelings if victimisation and alienation” (2007).

And on the now-topical issue of the British empire: “Numerous critics have pointed out that history lessons, for instance, are taught in a one-sided, moralist way, focusing attention on the racism and violence of the empire, and the oppression of ethnic groups and women, but with little sense of the positive contributions of the industrial revolution, the emergence of parliamentary democracy, the literary and cultural heritage of the language” (2007).

In 2004 she wrote a report for the Institute of Ideas recommending a review of the general statutory duty on race in the 2000 Race Relations Amendment Act, and to delete the specific duty to promote good relations, review exceptions made “for Sikhs and Jews”; and “encourage local authorities to dismantle programmes that foster division, particularly in policing and education”. So we know where she’s coming from.

She has written prolifically and to explore her output on her blog allinbritain.org, on Spiked and in The Spectator is to come away dazed at the relentless, merciless monotony of her militant liberalism on the subject of race. To her, the issue of racism in Britain is exaggerated and exacerbated by well-meaning efforts on the left and the centre to defuse it. The well-known racial disparities can be largely explained away by other socioeconomic factors. To a fair degree she has already written the conclusions to her commission’s report, which, so far as can be judged (there are no published terms of reference), will be presented to the minister for equalities, Kemi Badenoch, and Johnson himself.

Basically, in the Mirza world there isn’t much of a problem. What people of colour perceive as racism isn’t (probably) really racism but the product of other complex socioeconomic factors. They misunderstand, because of the relentless propaganda about institutional racism, that the opportunities are there to be taken. A harsh judgement on her would be that she is Boris’s gaslighter-in-chief. She doesn’t quite say, “Look at me, I’m a working class girl from Oldham and I did OK,” but it seems to be a message.

It’s true, mind. She may be helping run the country and write the Tory manifesto, but she was hardly born to it. The youngest of four, Mirza went to a local comprehensive, and after university (English at Mansfield College, Oxford, and a postgrad course in sociology and later a PhD at Kent taught by ex-RCP man Furedi) she floated around the arts world before joining the Tory-leaning “Cameroon” think tank Policy Exchange. This was a trendy subset of the Notting Hill set, overseen by Nick Boles and Michael Gove. That might have been that, sort of, but, at the age of 30, she was despatched to help Johnson when he became mayor of London in 2008. Why? A news report at the time suggested that David Cameron was concerned that the Tories, then in opposition nationally, would be damaged by Johnson’s excesses: “A troupe of minders has been drafted in to guide the new mayor in his first 100 days,” with Mirza recruited in an “attempt to neutralise any accusations that Johnson is racist, especially as he seeks to slash grants to ethnic groups”. That turned out well, then.

Mirza became deputy mayor for culture and education and set about scrapping some of Ken Livingstone’s pet projects such as the Rise Festival. Her views and Johnson’s were not so far apart, and she has defended him when needed, once commenting that “the press should be able to ridicule Islam”. You can imagine him agreeing with her “universalist” approach, of acculturating ethnic groups and hoping racism will wither away if everyone stops banging on about it. They appear, with Cummings and Gove, to share a taste for upending the establishment. Mirza once contributed to the Radio 4 Great Lives programme about her hero, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, a restless and controversial thinker in her day.

Meeting Boris was the move that really changed her life, and she’s been in or around his orbit ever since. She said this of him in 2014: “I do love working for Boris because he never stops, he’s always fizzing with good ideas.”

Not a Tory traditionalist as such, she is more of an iconoclast, though not in a contemporary Bristolian sense. She married a noted libertarian, Dougie Smith, in his youth part of the sometimes unruly Federation of Conservative Students, and later a speechwriter for Cameron. Smith recently joined her working for Cummings in No 10. They have a child of about five, something she says is a particular delight for her mother (her father had already died).

Smith attracted some publicity a few years ago for his company Fever Parties, which apparently organised “five star orgies” for what Alan Partridge would have called “sex people”. It is tempting to wonder who, among the Tory hierarchy of today, including himself, might have joined in the fun. Or maybe there was restraint. In Smith’s case it would have been like owning a sweet shop but not eating any of the wine gums.

In her public appearances, Mirza’s radicalism is belied by her manner. She seems to have just the right blend of politeness and firmness in her arguments, all put in her measured, soft Lancashire burr. There’s a lightness of touch of the kind you’d experience at some dinner party, and none of the histrionics of her boss. She says she is “not a strident person”, and indeed she is not. She obviously enjoys challenging and testing ideas, albeit mostly other, more orthodox, ones than her own. The last word may as well go to “Dr Mirza” as apparently Johnson calls her, because something very like it will be the conclusion of her race commission, something very different to anything that has gone before. Referring to one of Theresa May’s more memorable quotations, Mirza declared of, and for, British Bame people: “We have earned the right to focus on the positive. For the prime minister to claim that we have a serious problem with racism really would be a burning injustice.”