She was Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister – and has faced questions for years about why she was in the Conservative party. Yesterday, she resigned the whip. She explains why
By Aamna Mohdin
Until yesterday, Sayeeda Warsi was one of the highest-profile Muslims in the Conservative party. Some hailed her as a symbol of Tory diversity; others criticised her for sticking with a party that appeared to harbour Islamophobes. So when the 53-year-old peer announced on X that she was resigning the Conservative whip, it wasn’t just Westminster-watchers who were shocked.
Even Warsi seems a little dazed when we talk the morning after. She remains a Conservative at heart, she says, laughing when I ask if she is about to join Labour or the Liberal Democrats. Politically, she remains to the centre right. “I just don’t think my party is any more,” she says.
She had been a party member for nearly three decades and likens the situation to the breakdown of a toxic relationship: “You have to recognise that the person that you’re in the relationship with is so harmful and so toxic that you have to take a breather. You have to work out whether they’re prepared to change.”
Long before this week, however, she had had enough of being an acceptable, palatable Muslim. She is the granddaughter of two men who served in the British Indian army and the daughter of a man who broke his back, literally, while working in the mill towns of Yorkshire. She is Britain’s first Muslim cabinet member and the mother of a doctor serving in the RAF. “Why am I still perceived as an outsider?” she asks, bristling with frustration, when we meet at the Guardian’s office.
She channelled this anger on to the page and began writing. The result, which took her just 12 weeks to write, is her latest book, Muslims Don’t Matter. “As I was writing the book, I was saying: do people see where this is going to go? Do people understand how serious this could get? Do others realise we have to change course?” she says. And then, as she was editing the book over the summer, widespread violence erupted across England and in Belfast.
Far-right agitators tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers, looted shops, attacked mosques – one with a petrol bomb – graffitied racist epithets, brutally assaulted black and Asian people and blocked roads to allow through only drivers who were white. “That was the most physical manifestation of all the worries that had been talked about and that I had had,” Warsi says.
The responsibility, she adds, doesn’t lie only with the men who committed the violent acts: “It also lies with the editors who ran the headlines, with the papers who ran the front pages, with the thinktanks who poisoned policy, with the politicians who used toxic language. All of these people are responsible for where we ended up.”
For Warsi, the riots were the culmination of two decades of stigmatising, demonising and othering refugees, Muslims and other minorities. “Eventually, you saw young men trying to burn children down in a locked building, young men trying to burn down places of worship. Muslim pogroms came to this country,” she says.
She was grateful for one thing this summer: that the Conservatives were not in government during the riots. “I actually think that it would have been far worse had we been in charge at that time.”
Still, many successful and financially mobile Muslims have told her they are planning on leaving the UK because of the near daily incitement and harassment. “This book is about me saying: no, I’m going to fight. I’m going to stay and fight. I’m going to fight for my rightful place in it and I’m going to do it unapologetically.”
Warsi outside No 10 before her first cabinet meeting in 2010. Photograph: Tony Kyriacou/Rex Features
She is talking about her country and her party. Now that she has resigned the Conservative whip, she says, she will be able to publicly fight a complaint that was made against her for supporting the protester Marieha Hussain, who was recently found not guilty of a racially aggravated public order offence for carrying a placard portraying Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman as coconuts. The prosecutor had suggested the coconut reference was a racial slur, meaning: “You may be brown on the outside, but you are white on the inside.”
In a post on X, Warsi applauded the judge’s decision to acquit Hussain. She was asked to delete the post, but she refused. This is the basis of the complaint against her. “The placard was not classified as a racist placard. It was actually classified as political satire,” Warsi says. “If my party feels that you cannot say that the rule of law is correct and that this decision was right because it offends them, so be it. I’m not prepared to engage in a secret trial behind closed doors, without full transparency, which is basically a retrial of the coconut trial.”
Warsi was born in 1971 to a working-class family in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. She made history in 2010 as Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister, becoming co-chair of the Conservative party. She took her seat in David Cameron’s cabinet wearing a pink shalwar kameez. It wasn’t the only way she stood out: “I sat around a table where so many people had gone to private school, most of them Eton. I went to a comprehensive that shut down.”
Although she speaks fondly of the early years of the coalition government, she notes in her book that she now sees “what we would recognise as one of the first culture wars playing out in the UK. Its victims were British Muslims.”
At the heart of this culture war was the government’s policy of disengagement with the British Muslim community. This first began under Labour, which suspended cooperation with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the UK’s largest Muslim umbrella group, in 2009, after the then deputy secretary general, Daud Abdullah, was accused of supporting violence against Israel.
Change in leadership in the MCB led to a re-engagement in the last year of Gordon Brown’s government, while Lib Dem ministers in the coalition government elected in 2010 also engaged with the MCB.
The policy of disengagement was, however, “supercharged” under the Conservative government, Warsi writes. She says it went much further than just one group. She writes that when Sir William Shawcross was the chair of the Charity Commission, more than a quarter of the statutory investigations launched between 2012 and 2014 targeted Muslim organisations.
The commission went on to label 55 charities with the issue code “extremism and radicalisation” without their knowledge. “Disturbingly, no written criteria existed for applying or removing this label; it was described by critics as ‘non-evidence-based’ targeting of Muslim groups,” Warsi writes in her book.
Asked to comment, the Charity Commission said: “The commission is, and always has been, a fair, balanced and independent regulator – we refute any allegation of bias … Many of the charities on our register advance the Islamic faith and we work closely and positively across faith groups.”
Despite extensive contact with the MCB while in opposition, Labour has confirmed that it will continue with the Conservative policy of refusing to engage with it. Warsi describes the decision as stupid.
“Why are we holding Muslims and Muslim communities and Muslim organisations to a standard higher than anybody else?” she says. “Why is it that politicians feel that they can make the most horrendous of mistakes and be forgiven, but there’s no road to redemption and no path to rehabilitation when it comes to Muslim communities and organisations?”
These double standards reached a crisis point in 2014, when the previous war in Gaza was raging. “I think the war in Gaza and previous wars in Gaza have shaped my whole political career,” she says. Warsi quit her post as a senior foreign minister over the government’s “morally indefensible” position. She suggested Cameron had been “mealy-mouthed” over his refusal to condemn Israel’s conduct. She feels little has changed since.
“We have a policy in government which talks about a two-state solution and yet we don’t recognise one of those states,” she says. “We have a policy of a two-state solution and yet we do nothing to stop the physical change on the ground through illegal settlements and occupation, [nothing to preserve] the viability of a Palestinian state.”
As well as stopping all arms sales to Israel, she says the government must recognise Palestine and do everything it can to protect the future territorial integrity of a Palestinian state. “We have a permanent seat on the UN security council. We need to use that. We need to stop being cowards and abstaining and vetoing things, and we need to support resolutions of the United Nations. We need to absolutely stand behind the ICJ [international court of justice] and the ICC [international criminal court] as it does its job in the international space.
“I think that if you look at international reports now, there is no doubt that the crime of apartheid is being committed in the West Bank. There is no doubt from the language that has been used and the acts that have been done over the last year that the act of genocide is being committed.”
Recent Conservative cabinets have broken new ground for diversity, with Sunak becoming the first British prime minister of colour. But the past decade has also seen extreme discourse and views about Muslims and migrants normalised by those holding the great states of office.
Sunak made “stop the boats” a key plank of his premiership – and it was this slogan that the far-right mobs were chanting during this summer’s riots. What does Warsi say to those who feel hopeless that so little has come from diversity in higher office? “You shouldn’t be hopeless. You should feel hope because he lost, right? ‘Stop the boats’ didn’t win. If ‘stop the boats’ didn’t win, and ‘stop the boats’ is a chant that’s been used by a bunch of people behaving like hooligans on the streets, then not only did we [Tories] lose the election, we lost the argument,” she says.
Far-right protests in Bournemouth in August. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images
On the question of representation, she argues it is not just about the colour of someone’s skin. “Representation is also about authenticity. Representation is about being able to bring your whole self and your true self to the table. It’s not just about sitting at the table. It’s about having a true, authentic voice. If what you end up with is sitting at the table – maybe even sitting in the biggest seat on that table – but you are constantly having to play to somebody else’s tune to be accepted, what’s the point of having that seat?”
Warsi desperately wants the Conservatives to return to the middle ground. But it is unclear whether that is the direction in which the Conservatives are heading. Kemi Badenoch, one of the leading candidates, has said she is far more worried about the election of five independent MPs “on the back of sectarian Islamist politics”, which she described as “alien ideas that have no place here”. Warsi calls that disingenuous, as the Tories had no qualms about going into coalition with the Democratic Unionist party in 2017. “I question whether Mrs Badenoch is interested in actually dealing with sectarianism in politics or whether she just wants to use it as another excuse to have a pop at Muslim communities.”
Robert Jenrick, another of the Tory leadership favourites, was criticised for saying police should “immediately arrest” any protesters shouting “Allahu Akbar”. Is she surprised? “I don’t think anything that Robert says any more surprises me. Robert’s desperate to be leader of the Conservative party. He’ll say whatever he thinks he needs to say to get to that point.
“But you know what? I always say that these kinds of popular statements might win you a couple of votes. It might win him the votes of some of his fellow parliamentarians in the House of Commons. It might even win him some of the membership vote. But it depends what you are: are you a politician who wants to win or are you a patriot who wants to build a country? Do you want to build a career or do you want to build a country? Do you want to win or do you want to heal?
“I just find it shocking that people who spend so much of their time dividing this nation and setting it alight then have the audacity to define themselves as patriots, because patriots don’t harm the nation. They heal it. And, tragically, much of what some of my colleagues have been doing has harmed the country, hasn’t healed it.”
Badenoch and Jenrick did not respond to requests for comment.
Does she have any hope for any of the candidates? “I think Tom [Tugendhat] and James [Cleverly] have the potential to pivot back into a sensible, rational space, which probably means that the membership will choose either Kemi or Robert.”
Warsi, who was once described as a “one-woman Islamophobia rebuttal unit”, has often been asked why she was a Conservative politician. “I believe in personal responsibility,” she says. “I believe in civil liberties. I believe in the state getting out of your way in most of the way in which you live your life. I believe in a low-tax economy. I believe in you being able to keep more of what you earn. I believe in the welfare state being a safety net of last resort,” she says.
She doesn’t shy away from the austerity implemented by the coalition government – in fact, she defends it. “Did the cuts made during austerity fall in all the right places? Probably not – and we can see the consequences of that – but did we need to have a drive to bring public finances under control? Absolutely,” she says. “There were a lot of things that we did in those early years in 2010 that I completely agreed with and I completely supported, because I’m a centre-right politician.”
Still, she remembers sitting around the cabinet table with Dominic Grieve, Ken Clarke, Justine Greening, David Willetts and David Cameron. “These were really interesting, amazing, huge characters who fundamentally were one-nation Conservatives – decent, centre-ground people. My party has over time purged these wonderful people – and those that it hasn’t purged have slowly stepped away. This is not the one-nation Conservative party that so many people have been proud of,” she says.
She feels frustrated that when she talks about economy, taxes, the NHS, she is a conservative. But when she talks about race or foreign policy, she is a Muslim. She brings up a joke she had with Alastair Campbell about whether Jesus was a socialist. “I said: I don’t know. But I think [the prophet] Muhammad was definitely a conservative. He’s the prophet who believed in a 2.5% rate of tax. He was an entrepreneur!” (The “third pillar” of Islam, zakat, obliges Muslims to pay 2.5% of their wealth for the benefit of the poor and needy, while Muhammad had a successful trading business.)
It is a mistake, therefore, to assume that ethnic minorities or Muslims sit on the left, Warsi says. She has met each independent Muslim MP who was elected over the summer to offer her support. “Westminster can be a pretty lonely and a pretty hostile place, even when you’re part of a large political party,” she says. “Once you start talking about the economy and healthcare and tax and the size of the state, each one of them is a very different kind of politician that’s come to this in a very different kind of route. They’re not this clump that they’re seen as – they’re individuals.”
She hopes the Conservative party realises that it can win votes from ethnic minority communities for the sake of its own preservation, and for the country, too, so it can begin moving forward as one. “It’s not healthy to have to feel you’re fighting for your space and place all the time.” Her relationship with the Tories isn’t over – she has just paused it.
Will she ever leave politics? Warsi, who lives in Wakefield with her husband, Iftikhar Azam, and their five children, has toyed with the idea of retirement. But she is not ready to stop. Instead, she is planning a gap year with her husband.
“We are kids from very poor backgrounds who could not afford to have gap years when we were university students,” she says. It is part of what she describes as her “eff-it 50s”.
