A schmoozer in handmade shoes... and leader Tories feared most
EXIT the schmoozer. Chuka Umunna is a sleek six-footer with babydoll eyelashes and Centrist politics mood music. Smooth as cat’s fur, he purrs through London’s fancy salons like an hors d’oeuvres trolley on Goodyear tyres.
Here’s a man who, if he were not in politics, could as easily be a male model.
Labour’s loss is the Conservatives’ gain. Though we may not know the exact reason he sensationally quit the leadership race yesterday, Umunna was (to the Tories) the most dangerous potential opponent.
Middle England’s voters might have found him an amusingly Smooooth Operator — you can almost hear that Sade song when he enters a room — but they would have liked him, too.
Pukka Chuka is a class apart from the grievance grinders and professional Northerner grudge farmers elsewhere in Labour high command. Part Nigerian, part Irish ascendancy, he shaves his head weekly until it dazzles like a licked lollipop.
His £1,200 suits are from Alexandra Wood on Savile Row and his pointed shoes look handmade. This one-time DJ shimmers through Westminster to a soundtrack of ghetto chic.
His whole bearing screams languor, international fashion, the easy, shrewd ennui of one au fait with the beau monde. See him enter the Commons Chamber and it is as though he is detached from lesser beings’ burdens as he slides into his place, arranging his limbs with exquisite slowness. Though Streatham, South-East London, is his seat, he could be the Rt Hon Member for Ibiza West, where his family has a £1 million villa.
He launched his short-lived leadership campaign in Swindon — a counter-intuitive move for so metropolitan a figure. He did so on a rough-made Facebook video aimed at the rising generation, not at Labour’s ageing core vote. He was trying to expand Labour’s appeal.
The Ed Miliband years went wrong for Labour because the party spoke only to its partisans. Its ‘offer’ was flecked by class warfare, a dated Northern parochialism, an unremittingly cross sense of entitlement.
Umunna’s video may have had iffy sound quality, but at least that showed he was not as smooth as sceptics say. He was behind enemy lines, on the Tory streets where Labour needs to be if it is to rebuild its electoral fortunes.
His father, Bennett Umunna, was a middleclass Nigerian trader who travelled to England in the Sixties, landing at Liverpool Docks with not much more than a suitcase and a will to work.
He started by cleaning cars. He married High Court judge’s daughter Patricia Milmo (Sir Helenus Milmo, her father, had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War II). Bennett prospered and became a director of Crystal Palace football club.
CHUkA was born in 1978. Bennett returned to Nigeria to build a political career there as an anti- corruption campaigner. He died in a mysterious car crash when Chuka was 13. Patricia, a former probation officer who became a solicitor, was left to bring up Chuka and his sister Chinwe (known as Chichi).
The Milmos are bohemian posh, minor gentry from County Sligo. The surname may mean ‘devotee of the cows’ in Gaelic, but Milmos have gone forth and prospered in all sorts of fields. One of Umunna’s forebears founded the Milmo National Bank in Texas. Another, Don Patricio Milmo, was a svengali in 19th century Mexican politics.
An impressive family tree is not necessarily an advantage if you want to do well in the post-Blairite Labour party. Umunna makes no mention of his parents in Who’s Who.
In his early years as a Labour parliamentary candidate, he was opaque about having attended St Dunstan’s, a private school in Catford. The Old Dunstonians’ Association proudly relates that young Chuka had a sweet singing voice (he was a chorister on the theme tune to Mr Bean), played the cello and became deputy head prefect. He edited the school magazine, was captain of swimming and won the political studies prize.
Yet when he stood in Streatham in the 2010 General Election, a voter tried to engage him in amicable conversation about his school-
days. Umunna backed away like a frightened horse, wary that local Labour activists might dislike him for being privately educated.
He read English and French l aw at university and went to work in the City as an employment lawyer, soon moving to Herbert Smith, a large, ruthless firm with big-hitter Labour connections.
Umunna had joined the Labour party in 1997, but at university had been little gripped by politics. He did occasionally stuff envelopes at the Labour party offices in Streatham, where jovial Blairite Keith Hill was MP. Only when he joined Herbert Smith, however, did he see the possibilities of a political career.
When Hill retired, Umunna was well placed. He was young, multi- cultural, clever, connected, handsome. In those days he was a Left-winger, a disappointed Blairite who felt New Labour had drifted from its task of mending the public services.
He had been a supporter of blue-collar Leftist Jon Cruddas in a contest for the party’s deputy leadership and belonged to Compass, an urban, driven, Left-wing movement.
The Streatham nomination fell into his lap. Aged 31, Chuka Umunna became an MP.
With Ed Miliband needing supporters for his leadership bid, Umunna was quick to see a chance and was one of his proposers. When Ed unexpectedly won, Umunna became the new leader’s bag carrier and soon made it to the front bench. It was around this time that, allegedly, he tweaked his own Wikipedia entry — hardly a cardinal sin.
The higher he rose, the more pragmatic his politics looked. When he became Shadow Business Secretary, he did not rage at the coalition government as some of his Shadow Cabinet colleagues did. In the Commons, he adopted a tone of cautious scepticism.
Labour partisans found him a bit bloodless, but political neutrals may have warmed to him for resisting the daft melodramatics of Opposition. The Blairites took interest. Umunna was ushered into the presence of Blair and Bill Clinton for private audiences.
He distanced himself from the antibusiness hollering of the Miliband leader- ship. When the Post Office was privatised, he upset the union heavies by not opposing it with quite the vigour they wanted. He went down well with the small business lobby and won some respect in the Labour movement for the power with which he attacked Ukip.
Not everything went right. There was a minor disaster when he gave an interview to BBC Hereford & Worcester and managed to make a hash of the word ‘Worcester’. It came out as ‘Wichita’. His speech to last year’s Labour conference was little better than perfunctory. Andy Burnham’s speech, by contrast, was a stormer and hailed as the best of the week. Perhaps Chuka lacked the bombast to be a party leader.
For a while he reportedly stepped out with fellow Labour MP Luciana Berger and there was talk of another girlfriend. After that the trail went cold until last week when he popped up en route to a TV studio hand in hand with lawyer Alice Sullivan. With her shires background and cool dress sense, she could have been the new Sam Cam. Not now, though.
SARTORIALLY, aesthetically, culturally, Umunna is different from the wheezing trades union grunts who remain such an unhealthy influence in the Labour party. He wears big, designer wristwatches, likes soul music and occasionally litters his language with urban ghetto street slang.
He does not drink much. He eats salad! Politically, he is not much into red meat either, for he does not hate the Tories. That, indeed, is why Tory voters might have liked him. He’s said he is a ‘ big fan’ of Michael Heseltine.
Socially, he has more in common with City lawyers and Cameroons and can-do tycoons (and immigrants, for that matter) than he does with Scouse union bosses and hectoring Socialist obsessives.
Since the end of the Blair years, Labour has projected a glum sense of victimhood, never more disastrously embodied than by Ed Miliband’s sidekick, the insistently Mancunian Lucy Powell. The Tories have been allowed to hijack any notion of Northern aspiration and recovery and have packaged it as the Northern Powerhouse. Umunna would have helped Labour move on from the stereotypes of Coronation Street and Andy Capp. He would have been 21st century, exciting, emollient, interesting.
Labour dinosaurs will be glad he has gone. One MP this week said that ‘he looks as though he enjoys musicals and likes his peas minted, and the Labour movement is not yet ready for that sort of leader’.
Unless the talented leadership contender and MP for Leicester West Liz Kendall can upset the odds, we look destined for Labour’s tunes being called by the needle-sharp tones of yvette Cooper or the permanently plain- tive Burnham, who always sounds as though he is about to burst into tears. Umunna was the candidate for the future. Former Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw saw his potential, as did that old fox Peter Mandelson.
Last Christmas, a friend of mine attended an extravagant corporate shindig. It was at the Tate Gallery and thrown by City Pr supremo roland rudd. Plenty of top tycoons were there. Champagne. Designer nibbles.
Click, click, click went the cameras when Mandelson arrived. Prince of Darkness Peter — clever, cruel, calculating — scanned the throng and clocked the man he wanted.
Ignoring some of the City’s most powerful figures, Mandelson made a beeline for Chuka.
He was the leader Labour needed. The leader the party will now not have.