Telegraph e-paper

‘I’m the linchpin to the Tories winning the next election’

Party heavyweights believe the former latchkey kid can beat Sadiq Khan to become London mayor – and spark a nationwide revival. Gordon Rayner meets him

You may not have heard of Samuel Kasumu, but if Rishi Sunak manages to win a record fifth term for the Tories next year he might well be a big part of the reason.

Kasumu, 35, wants to be the Conservative candidate in the London mayoral election in May 2024. If he is selected – and goes on to beat Sadiq Khan – he believes Sunak’s chances will dramatically improve. “We need to win in London and hold on to the mayoralties in Tees Valley and the

West Midlands,” he says.“If you show you’re able to win in all those areas, all bets are off. So I am the linchpin!”

It may sound cocky, but Kasumu is laughing as he says it. He is not lacking in confidence or an infectious belief that he can win, yet he never comes across as arrogant.

Before he can think about taking on Khan, he must first beat eight other Tories to the nomination, including front-runner and Minister for London Paul Scully, Duwayne Brooks, the former Lewisham councillor and friend of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, and two members of the London Assembly. The winner, chosen by Party members from a shortlist, will be announced on July 19.

There is no shortage of Tory heavy-hitters who regard Kasumu as the best chance of stopping Khan from winning a historic third term: Priti Patel, Grant Shapps, Steve Baker and Nadhim Zahawi are among those who have thrown their weight behind him.

They have seen him in action as Boris Johnson’s most senior race adviser in Downing Street – a post he quit two years ago in the wake of the Government’s racial disparity report, which concluded that Britain was not “rigged against ethnic minorities”, a subject we will return to.

Kasumu’s priorities include housing and crime, but he says the key election battleground will be Khan’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone (Ulez) policy, and his plans to extend it to all 32 London boroughs in August. More than a dozen other British cities are looking to follow suit. An extended Ulez, charging drivers £12.50 per day to bring older vehicles into London, will have “a desperate impact on a lot of vulnerable people”, says Kasumu.

Khan’s plans are currently the subject of a legal challenge brought by four Conservative councils. “It’s one of the things that makes me most concerned,” Kasumu says. “It’s not only vulnerable people living in the Ulez zone but people who come into London to serve and have to come in by car, like social care workers and health workers who spend their time going from house to house, who will be penalised by this.

“If it goes ahead we are going to have to try to find a way to reverse it and essentially the next election will be a choice for people – whether they continue with the expansion or not.”

If Kasumu does get chosen as the Tory candidate his biggest problem will be name recognition, something others have struggled with against household names like Johnson and Khan. But another black Tory candidate, Shaun Bailey, came within five percentage points of beating Khan on first preference votes in 2021 – a difference of 120,000 votes out of more than 2.5 million votes cast – despite a troubled campaign during which there was a plot to replace him as the candidate. Kasumu believes he can build on the relative success of Bailey, who came far closer to Khan than did the 2016 Tory candidate, Zac Goldsmith, and he puts a convincing case as we meet at the Institute of Directors in Pall Mall, of which he is a longstanding member.

Kasumu certainly looks the part, dressed in a well-cut navy suit, and he leans forward with purpose on the restaurant table between us in the Directors’ Lounge as he sets out his stall. The Regency interior of the IoD’s headquarters is a networking nerve centre for entrepreneurs which seems like his natural habitat. He is confident, engaging and full of enthusiasm that spills out in every sentence, and he asks several times whether his answers are too long, too quickly delivered, keen for feedback and betterment.

From the walls around us stare down portraits of great industrialists, whose fame Kasumu stands to surpass if he pulls off the victory he craves. “I’m the best chance of winning next year,” he says, “because I believe I can hold onto that block of votes that Shaun won and then some. Every other candidate has an element of the unknown, because they will have to build their own block of votes.” If he can reach an extra 10 per cent of London’s one million black residents, he believes he will beat Khan.

“My story is London’s story,” he says. “The median age is 35. I’m 35. I have studied, set up a successful business, but I’ve had to move out of London because I can’t afford a house. London is ready for change, and you need to have someone that can reach different audiences. You have to approach London as a city with many small parts. It’s not just at borough level. It’s also at ward level. And then you have to have the ability to reach those people. There are only two or three of us in the Conservative movement who can do that.” Kasumu is confident he can beat the incumbent because, “Sadiq Khan has set an incredibly low bar. He has an annual budget of £20 billion but you wouldn’t think that because he spends a lot of time saying what everybody else isn’t doing for London and not focusing on what he can do with the resources he has.” Kasumu is refreshingly direct in his answers to questions about everything from a well-publicised spat with Kemi Badenoch to his difficult childhood, during which he was excluded from three different schools.

The son of Nigerian immigrants, Kasumu grew up in Barnet, north London, where his parents separated when he was six. He and his five siblings (he is the third youngest) were left to fend for themselves for up to six months at a time when his mother returned to Nigeria to look after her elderly parents. During her longest absence, he was 13 and his eldest sibling 19. He blames this lack of stability for his patchy schooling record.

“I was a disruptive kid,” he says. “I had a short attention span. Things that were going on at home manifested themselves in my behaviour at school – going to school and knowing that when you go home there’s no parents there. But I never resented my parents. We just got on with it.”

His parents are deeply religious and the church provided an anchor in the turbulence of his childhood. “The church was a surrogate parent. There were times we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from but I remember the pastor coming round with a box of corned beef and I think some pasta for that next week or two.”

Hardship gave him two assets in life: resilience, and a determination to make sure he never ended up in such poverty again. “It’s daunting for someone to put themselves forward to be mayor,” he says, “especially if you’ve never been a government minister or anything, but because of the things I have been through in the past it’s not daunting for me.”

Having knuckled down at school and won a place at university, he “fell into” politics as a student because of a row over an event he wanted to put on for the African-Caribbean society at Brunel University in west London, of which he was president. The university’s student union refused him permission (“I can’t remember why,” he says) so, with his blood up, he decided to run for the post of vicepresident of the student union, receiving a record number of votes. “My slogan was ‘vote for a passionate voice’,” he says, “and that was all I had.” His attendance at National Union of Students meetings brought him into contact with officials including Wes Streeting, now shadow health secretary, and Bell Ribeiro-Addy, later to be Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow immigration minister, and exposed him to party politics.

“The way they were engaged in politics was just not something that sat well with me,” he says. “I didn’t like the idea of being outside with a placard and not having a seat at the table. I didn’t like the idea of not having any agency over my life. I didn’t like the idea of not having an aspiration.”

At the age of 19, he joined the Conservative Party, which “sounded more like me”, and when he graduated from Brunel with a degree in business and management accounting he set up his own business, Inclusive Boards, helping firms to bring diversity to their boardrooms. He now employs 20 people and has 130,000 clients.

Having been priced out of London he lives in Hertfordshire, 10 miles north of Barnet, with his wife Barbara, a senior director of the charitable arm of Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospital, and their two young children. Since 2018 he has been a Conservative councillor for the Hatfield Villages ward on Welwyn Hatfield Council, but his relationship with the senior echelons of the Tory party has had its moments.

He served on Theresa May’s Race Disparity Audit advisory board, and in 2019 Boris Johnson asked him to work as his special adviser on civil society and communities. He spent much of the Covid pandemic working with then vaccines minister Zahawi on increasing vaccine uptake in the black population. But in April 2021 he resigned in the middle of a growing row over the report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which concluded that there was no evidence of institutional racism in Britain.

He says he will reveal the truth about his resignation in a forthcoming book, out later this month, though he insists “it wasn’t because of the report”. A clue might lie in the fact that he had tried to resign from Number 10 three months before he quit, complaining in a letter to Johnson that equalities minister Badenoch may have broken the ministerial code when she criticised a black journalist on social media. Badenoch called HuffPost reporter Nadine White “irresponsible”, “creepy” and “bizarre” after White asked why Badenoch had not appeared in a video in which black MPs encouraged the public to get the Covid vaccine. Badenoch was backed by Number 10 and there was no investigation. In his letter he also cited “unbearable” tensions over race policies in Downing Street.

So how is his relationship with Badenoch now? “We’re not besties,” he shrugs, “but I’m hopeful that one day we might be.”

He is diplomatic when asked about Johnson’s legacy, saying: “I can only say he was always supportive of my work, he was ambitious for the country and he gave me an opportunity to work as a senior adviser.”

The legacy of Johnson’s two terms as Mayor of London “is definitely helpful, because it reminds me what is possible with a strong, dynamic mayor of London”. Is Johnson still an asset when Kasumu is knocking on doors in the capital? “Depends which doors you’re knocking on,” he says with a smile.

As his aborted resignation indicated, he is not a fan of culture wars, putting him at odds with some of the most senior figures in the Conservative Party. “I would rather find ways to agree to disagree rather than isolating certain groups.”

He says he is “completely agnostic” on the issue of Tate Britain relabelling its collection to point up Britain’s colonial links to slavery, but has strong views about how children can be shown that pride in Britain and knowledge of past misdeeds are not mutually exclusive. “Britain did play a significant role in the transportation of slaves, but there is a wider context,” he says. “It doesn’t justify the action but it helps you to understand that moment in history.”

He says all children must be taught that they are important and that they have value, rather than being told early in life that they have been let down by institutions. “You don’t start with a deficit model,” he says. “We need to tell every young person that they are expected to contribute proactively to society.

“My mother used to tell me there is a king and a fool inside every man, and it’s the part that you speak to most that will come out. We’ve been telling our son since he learnt to speak that he is strong, he is a leader, he is courageous – affirming words to make sure he doesn’t ever feel like he’s not adequate because of the colour of his skin. That’s where the challenge starts.”

Kasumu’s pride in Britain extends to pride in the Royal family, another thing he shares with his parents. He is the only one of his full siblings not named after a Royal: as the first born son he is named after his father, but his siblings are Elizabeth, Victoria, Mary and Philip. He marvels at the work of the Prince’s Trust, which has helped more than a million young people to kick start their careers, saying the King is “an incredible force for good”.

When he was working on the vaccine campaign “Nadhim got a call from Charles and he wanted to do everything he could to be involved in vaccine deployment. What could he do? Where did he need to be? And I thought ‘wow’. It said everything to me about the measure of the man.”

Much has been made of comments Kasumu made in April about being “uncomfortable” with Rishi Sunak’s plan to send illegal migrants to

Rwanda for processing, particularly when Priti Patel, the architect of the scheme, is one of his backers. With 37 per cent of London residents born outside the UK, he said any mayor of the city had to be “completely comfortable” with the idea of immigration. He has now honed that message. “The reality is that if you are a leader there will be things that you might be uncomfortable with that you might have to do. There are no easy fixes with the small boats.”

Nor when it comes to crime, another key election battleground. “People feel less safe,” Kasumu says. “They don’t think crimes will be properly investigated. We need a mayor who will grip those challenges but also restore confidence in the Met. I can be a bridge between the Met and communities. I’m not going to be like Sadiq Khan and be abusive towards a force that technically I’m the commander in chief of.”

Kasumu says his top priority is housing, and that 66,000 new homes a year need to be built, possibly rising to 100,000. He refers naysayers to Harold Macmillan, one of his heroes, whose can-do spirit as housing minister enabled him to meet Churchill’s target of building 300,000 houses per year a year early, despite post-war shortages.

Kasumu’s nature is to find ways to turn negatives into positives. His book, published June 22, is called The Power

of the Outsider, and he sees his relative obscurity as a strength. “You can challenge orthodoxy, bring fresh ideas, build bridges and inspire others.”

Benjamin Disraeli, a fellow outsider because of his Jewish background, is another of Kasumu’s heroes.

“Disraeli became Conservative leader not because he was loved, but because he was needed,” he says. “If I become the mayor of London in 2024 it will be because people see me as the type of candidate that is needed at this time. They may not all love me, but we need to show people that I’m the one that is needed for us to win. This is my time.”

‘I’ve set up a successful business, but I don’t live in London because I can’t afford a house’

‘There were times when I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from’

The Saturday Interview

en-gb

2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/282183655439015

Daily Telegraph