NUS chief deposed by ex-drug runner

THE hard-Left leader of the National Union of Students has been ousted by a candidate who says she gained ‘business skills’ from working as a drug dealer’s runner.

Malia Bouattia, 30, lost her reelection bid yesterday amid claims of anti-Semitism and concerns over her radical views.

Undergraduates complained about her policy of banning ‘offensive’ speakers and said she ‘does not represent the ordinary student’.

Her replacement as president, 28-year-old Shakira Martin, has claimed to be more radical than Jeremy Corbyn – and has run her campaign on a platform of ‘saying it like it is’ and increasing university access for poorer students.

The single mother of two from Lewisham, south-east London, was one of nine children born to working-class Jamaican parents.

She left home at 16 and survived on benefits, resorting to being a runner for a drug dealer before she found her feet at college. Miss Martin told The Guardian: ‘I did it for about a month … I found it wasn’t for me. I was too emotionally attached to the customers.

‘What I did realise was that the skills behind doing it were business skills. There was confidentiality, data protection, maths, customer service.’

At Lewisham College she took a management course and an education diploma. She went to her first NUS conference in 2013.

She said: ‘I wanted to empower other women…I saw a poster for women’s officer at my college. I ran for the position and won.’

Asked recently if she wanted to enter politics, she said: ‘Politics isn’t ready for me. People think Jeremy Corbyn is radical!’

The result, in which she won just over half the vote, is an expression of no confidence in Miss Bouattia. Last October, the Commons home affairs committee found her description of Birmingham University as a ‘Zionist outpost’ smacked of ‘outright racism’.