On Friday, we dined at an Oxford college. It was all very graceful and civilised. Unfortunately, a typhoon of fury about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was building up inside me. I needed to discharge the ire.

Thankfully, on hand were a black Peer and a British Sri Lankan ex-journalist. “Remember,” the latter rued, “we have Zia Yusuf.” The Reform radical wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)-like immigration enforcers in the UK.

We, black and Asian activists, fought ceaselessly to get people of colour into Parliament. The first four elected after the Second World War were Bernie Grant, Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz in 1987. Abbott could be abrasive; more seriously, Vaz was caught up in a sex scandal in 2016. But they all stood up for equality and migrant rights.

Too many of those who came after them, however, turned out to be self-servers. Or, like former prime minister Rishi Sunak, pathetically naïve. In August 2022, he promised Tory voters he would reroute public funds from inner-city areas into the leafy suburbs.

I went to some of those suburbs after his resignation. Racism spilled out of the mouths of many: “This is a white country”; “Why should an Indian lead us?”; and so on. Does he now see that for xenophobic Brits, his money and luxurious life are inconsequential? In the race game, he will always be one of them, not one of us.........

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