Smoothie with £1,200 Savile Row suits and £1m trust fund home
SMOOTH and urbane, Chuka Umunna is the articulate politician who hopes to make the Labour Party electable again after the humiliations suffered under Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.
But many party workers worry that this 36-year-old, six-foot tall, well-dressed former lawyer may be just a little too smooth. And they wonder whether he will be able to connect with ordinary people.
The grandson of a British prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials, Chuka was educated at a private boys’ school, and was a chorister at Southwark Cathedral. His voice can be heard singing the theme tune to the Rowan Atkinson comedy Mr Bean.
Mr Umunna thinks nothing of spending £1,200 on bespoke suits from Alexandra Wood, an exclusive Savile Row tailor.
He was forced to apologise two years ago after it was revealed he had once commented on an exclusive website that London’s nightclubs were ‘full of trash and C-list wannabes’.
And he lives in a £1million home reportedly funded from a family trust located in the tax haven of Jersey – despite his party’s stance against tax avoidance.
MPs question whether he has any understanding of life outside London, the city he has lived in all his life and where his constituency is located. Could he attract votes in Scot- land and the north of England? And one of the major questions that could dog his campaign is: if the Labour Party has gone so wrong, why did he vote for the disastrous Ed Miliband as leader in 2010, saying the party needed a change from the electorally-successful policies of New Labour.
Last night Simon Danczuk, the outspoken Labour MP for Rochdale, questioned Mr Umunna’s suitability for the role.
‘Is he the sort of person who could win seats in Bolton west, in Bury north, in Glasgow?’ he told LBC Radio. ‘Labour does need to move away from this metropolitan comfort zone. The party has been too London-centric.’
Two years ago Mr Umunna attracted ridi- cule when it emerged his Wikipedia entry had been altered to refer to him as ‘the UK’s Barack Obama’. The change had come from a computer registered at his old law firm.
Born in 1978, Mr Umunna grew up in Streatham, south London – exactly the same area he has represented in the Commons for the past five years.
His father Bennett arrived here from Nigeria in the 1960s with virtually nothing. He began a successful import-export business and later married solicitor Patricia Milmo, the daughter of Sir Helenus Milmo, the Nuremberg prosecutor.
In 1992, Bennett died in a mysterious crash soon after standing to be governor of a Nigerian state on an anti-bribery platform. After his comfortable childhood, Mr Umunna studied law in Manchester, where he even tried his hands as a club DJ. He has spent summers at his mother’s £1million Ibiza villa, which is called the White House.
After several years as a corporate employment lawyer at Herbert Smith in the City of London, he saw his chance and stood as an MP when the Streatham seat came up.
Before entering parliament in 2010 he espoused the left-wing ideals of the Compass pressure group.
After voting for Ed Miliband he became the leader’s aide and then business spokesman. But now he is positioning himself on the right of the party where his supporters hope he can carry Tony Blair’s mantle.