Labour may have removed hereditary peers from the House of Lords, but the party has its own dynasties. This government has a Kinnock, a Falconer, a Miliband and a Reeves, all representatives of famous political families. But the minister with perhaps the most intriguing ideological ancestry is the Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh.

No one denies that Fahnbulleh is an intellectually formidable operator in her own right. With a PPE degree from Lincoln College, Oxford, she speaks with a poised confidence. She has described herself as a Liberian ‘refugee’ and the inference many will draw is that she is a child of poverty, not privilege. But Fahnbulleh was educated privately at Beechwood Sacred Heart School in Tunbridge Wells, where fees to board are now more than £40,000 a year.

Fahnbulleh’s parents are not, however, perhaps typical of public-school parents. Her father, Henry Boima Fahnbulleh, is generally styled as a ‘former diplomat’. He was indeed foreign minister in Liberia in the 1980s, and latterly a national security adviser to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. But he is also a Marxist radical who dedicated himself over a long career to the violent overthrow of those who got in his way.

In the conflicted world of West African politics, Henry Fahnbulleh was one of the founders of a far-left militant group – Front for Popular Democracy in Liberia (FPDL), whose members, several sources allege, received training from Colonel Gaddafi. And he was no mere theorist of revolution – he wrote incendiary speeches designed to inspire comrades. He also had personal connections to alleged Liberian war criminals.

Miatta’s narrative is that her family fled Liberia because of her father’s outspoken views and that was that

Miatta’s narrative is that her family fled Liberia because of her father’s outspoken views and that was that

The story of Henry Fahnbulleh is tied intimately to the travails of his home nation. The Fahnbulleh family belong to the Vai ethnic group, one of the indigenous populations whose presence in Liberia pre-dates the arrival of freed African-American slaves in the 19th century. The dream of Liberia was of a free African republic, in a sea of colonial states, with former slaves establishing a liberal democracy modelled on the US. But the freed slaves themselves emulated the oppressive rule they had escaped from in the old American Confederacy, lording it over the indigenous peoples. Henry would call it a ‘primitive oligarchy entrapped in the........

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