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Sam Gyimah, the former universities and science minister, has faced three attempted deselections and a no confidence vote from inside his association.
He voted Remain, yes. He didn’t back the Prime Minister’s deal and thinks no deal is lunacy. So is he just another Conservative MP, like Dominic Grieve and Nick Boles, being hounded by WTO Brexiteers in their constituencies? To a degree. But the issue with Gyimah goes deeper. “In my case the ringleaders are people who never reconciled themselves to me as their MP. The polite way to describe it is that I am a ‘modernisation too far’ for that particular group of people.”
Gyimah is black. Did they have a problem with that? He deflects. “It will be everything.” He lists policies they might disagree on: gay marriage, climate change, NHS funding, graduates. “We just have a different world view.” But then he says: “The astonishing thing for me is that I had a career before politics and I never thought about my colour.”
Of course, the notion that in the UK in 2019 anyone could feel they are being harassed out of their job in part because of the colour of their skin is appalling. But the Conservative Party that he joined in 2010 as a shining star, and in which he quickly rose (he was David Cameron’s parliamentary private secretary as Prime Minister, a government whip and a minister of state) is much “changed”. It has, he says, “moved a long way in a very short space of time from where it was when I first became an MP”. Back then, ambitious MPs were talking about the Big Society and “writing pieces on fraternity and how we could rescue our economy. Now ambitious Conservative MPs are saying, ‘I have no fear of no deal.’ ”
As far as the vast majority of his constituents in East Surrey are concerned, Gyimah is an excellent MP and has increased the majority by some 10,000 since he was elected. He has the full backing of the association chair, Eithne Webster, who said the group are “not representative of the association”.
The problem comes from a faction of “ringleaders” who have “Tory heads and Ukip hearts”, says Gyimah. “Every election cycle there has been some manoeuvre against me, so at some level I am used to it.” His position on Brexit, however, has given grist to their mill. “They see an opportunity to build a coalition to unseat me.” To some extent, he lays the blame for the “deselection” culture — and it’s language of “betrayal” — at Theresa May’s door.
“The absence of that leadership means that people feel they can legitimately take the process into their own hands to achieve the Brexit that they want. And if you are an MP and perceived to be standing in their way, they want to get rid of you.” In this way, he feels “thrown to the wolves”.
Speaking yesterday, before the Prime Minister offered talks with Jeremy Corbyn, he says, “The Tory Party only talks to Brexiteers. It almost demonises…” he hesitates. “It comes across as dismissive of those who are not.”
The biggest obstacle to the future of the Conservative Party is that they don’t appeal to the young, he says. For the Party, “young” is now “below 47”. “We need to find new voters,” he says.
We have met in the office assigned to him by the whips after he resigned from the Government over May’s deal last November. I’m guessing it’s a mark of how cross they were that it’s down a network of corridors so complicated the Viet Cong would get lost. Jo Johnson, who also resigned in November, is on the same floor. “It feels like we are sharing the same prison wing.”
Gyimah, by the way, is well liked in Westminster. Even those who don’t share his politics call him “one of the good guys”. A former Government colleague adds that he is “thoughtful, kind, funny, and — this one really is unusual — normal. If the Tory Party is pushing people like Sam out, we really are stuffed.”
And actually Gyimah was surprised after his resignation by the frostiness he encountered. There were “snide comments” and “awkward conversations” and “little things, [like] there are groups I am excluded from. People who I thought were bosom buddies [were] suddenly, ‘You’re not one of us’.”
How does that feel?
“It’s kind of weird. Parliament is a tribal place. So the most difficult thing is to be labelled disloyal, even if you think you are standing up for a principle. The rejection is quite strong.”
He is still on 10 WhatsApp groups. He jokes that “the only person who knows what is going on [in Parliament] is whoever holds the data on WhatsApp.”
Tories once expressed their allegiances through their membership of a dining club, sometimes switching freely between them. Post-2016, the fracturing is more concrete.
“The ERG have whips, send press releases, have their own funding, research. They will choose their leadership candidate in an election. They are a party within a party.” Other groups have followed suit. Last weekend a One Nation group said it would choose its leadership candidate and lobby for a specific agenda.
Is the Tory party now, in a sense, a coalition of these groupings?
“You also have it in Labour with Tom Watson [the deputy leader]”, Gyimah points out. “It may be a feature of a minority government. Backbenchers are incredibly powerful — if they organise.”
It makes holding the party, or even a government, together far harder, he says. He looks back at the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010 and thinks “It was child’s play.”
While many associate Cameron’s tenure with toffs — Gyimah remembers someone pointing at him and shouting “He went to Eton” — Gyimah says a childhood in Ghana meant he was blithely unaware of the English class system.
He was born in England. His father, also Sam, was a GP; his mother, Comfort, a midwife. “Things were difficult” is how he describes family life and the struggle his mother had juggling small children and a job. His parents split when he was six and his father “checked out”, leaving his mother with little choice but to take Sam, his brother and sister to Ghana. In 10 years he saw his father only once.
“I met him in London when I was 10. It was a bit weird. We were excited to see him. We hadn’t seen him for ages. My mother was very good at trying to shield us from all the turbulence of the break-up. [But] I am the eldest. I was very aware.”
When Sam was 16 his father got in touch, suggesting he move back to London to finish his schooling. Gyimah jumped at the chance. “I loved school. My work was going well. So I came over and lived with someone I had seen once since I was six.”
The reality was not everything he imagined. His school in Ghana was competitive: “uniforms and discipline”; Freman College, a state sixth form in Hertfordshire was “very, very different”. Also, his father had remarried and had three more kids. “So I am the eldest of seven.” Was it chaotic? “It wasn’t easy. But I threw myself into school work.”
They were the only black family in the town and of 800 children at his school he was one of only three black kids. “But I made friends, I adapted.” Contemporaries remember “a fantastic sprinter” and that on the inside cover of his school dictionary he had written a “a big D with three worlds coming out of it: discipline, determination and dedication.”
Gyimah laughs. “I excelled at hiding the fact that I was a swot.” He decided he wanted to go to Oxford — “I was quite pushy then, I’ve mellowed since” — and his history teacher, Mr Greenhaigh, ordered past papers and gave up his time for extra lessons. “He got me through the entrance exam. I owe a lot to Mr Greenhaigh.”
The experience influenced his Conservatism. He utterly rejects “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” Tories. “To be successful and do well, someone needs to give you a helping hand. Any Conservatism that doesn’t acknowledge that and tries to say, ‘I did it, I expect other people to do it’ — that doesn’t reflect how life works.”
Comfort was “excited” when he won a place at Oxford, but “annoyed” that he was doing PPE, not law or medicine. “She thought anything else, you’re wasting your time.”
It WAS at Oxford, where he was the first British black president of the Oxford Union, that he met his wife Dr Nicky Black, “a Kiwi”. He held a torch for her, and later she got in touch when he was in New York working for Goldman Sachs, and asked to meet, he got spruced up, thinking it was a date. “She arrived. With a 6ft 5in Kiwi boyfriend in tow.” They invited him to go for a walk but Gyimah, who is a compact “5ft four-and-a-half”, decided that he wasn’t going to spend the afternoon “craning my neck”. A year later, when they met up again, she was single. They married in 2012 and have a two-year-old and a four-year-old. “They are still at the age where they come in in the morning and try to open your eyelids to look at their dinosaur.”
While he is “tough” about the nastiness in his constituency (“I’ve been through too much in my life”), he does worry about his family. “I am concerned for my wife, who is incredibly supportive and has to see and be part of all of this.” And, he admits, “I do ask myself sometimes: why?”
That said, he won’t leave the party. “My position is you have to stay and fight. Because if I leave, the person that will be selected instead…” He hesitates. “I need to make sure that it is a party I want to be part of. It’s also about the country. The kind of changes I think the country needs to see means I need to fight for that change in the Conservative Party.”
He still believes the Conservatives could have the first black prime minister. Even before Labour? “Yes, I think so. It doesn’t mind breaking the mould. It has several times. With Jewish leaders and two women. Sajid Javid is in the Cabinet. That’s the part that doesn’t worry me at all. The issue is about being a party of mass appeal.”
The way to deal with the Ukip tendency, he says, is to “dilute their influence by getting a broader membership. Most associations don’t have big memberships so it doesn’t take many to destabilise an association by turning up at meetings, tabling motions, writing the notes, sending emails.”
“Race might be…” He sighs. “I don’t want to go down the race route. What I would say is I don’t have to leave the party. The Conservative Party has always been pragmatic, pro-business, pro-aspiration, not ideological. I am the mainstream of the Conservative Party. And if they don’t believe I am, they should leave. They can go and join Ukip.”
Go back to where they came from? “Ha! Yes, that’s it.”
@chedwardes
