Lady Warsi: An uncomfortable fit with Tory ranks

London Lady Warsi, the first Muslim to sit in the cabinet when she was made Conservative party co-chair after the 2010 election, was an uncomfortable fit with Tory ranks.

Her appointment was seen by many as an attempt by David Cameron to broaden the party’s appeal to women and minorities, but she was moved to the post of minister of state at the Foreign Office and minister for faith and communities in the 2012 reshuffle.

The perceived demotion came despite Warsi making a public appeal to keep her job. “I’m a woman, I’m not white, I’m from an urban area, I’m from the north, I’m working class, I kind of fit the bill,” she told one interviewer.

Warsi made waves in March when she held up a sign suggesting there needed to be an end to the “Eton mess” at the heart of Downing Street; a reference to the public school backgrounds of the prime minister and many of his top advisers. In a gift to Labour and Ukip, Warsi appeared on ITV’s Agenda programme holding up a mocked up newspaper headline reading: “Number 10 takes Eton mess off the agenda”.

The fake front page is meant to be a regular, light-hearted feature on the programme, but probably did not endear Warsi to No 10 days after Michael Gove, the then education secretary, attacked the “preposterous” number of Etonians in Cameron’s inner circle.

Warsi told the programme: “Michael was making an incredibly serious point that it can’t be right that the 7 per cent of kids who go to independent school end up at the top tables, not just of politics, but banking and law and every other profession, and that what Michael wants to create is a first-class, world-class state system which means that in future years you will have more pupils from state schools, people like me, around the cabinet table, and in that I fully support Michael Gove.”

In December, reports emerged that Warsi was working on a memoir that could unsettle the party.

The behaviour of the outspoken Tory peer during meetings had become a hot topic among colleagues, the Observer reported.

“She sits in cabinet and just writes furiously throughout,” said one government source. “She doesn’t even look up. It looks like everything is going down.”

Warsi was the co-architect of Cameron’s controversial speech on multiculturalism and British Islam at the Munich security conference in February 2011, in which he called on Muslims to embrace British values. Throughout her political tenure, she has been key to helping the party formulate its policy on terrorism and extremism.

— The Guardian News and Media Ltd