Ex-Communist who PM named among his five most influential women
WHEN Boris Johnson was asked to name the five most influential women in his life, his list included one little known outside Westminster. Alongside his grandmother, Malala Yousafzai, Kate Bush and Boadicea, the Prime Minister spoke of the impact Munira Mirza had on him.
The -year-old has been at his side as his most loyal aide since he was elected mayor of London in 2008. In the Grazia magazine interview to mark International Women’s Day in 2020, Mr Johnson said she was ‘capable of being hip, cool, groovy and generally on trend’, but also that she was a ‘powerful nonsense detector’.
As No10’s head of policy, Miss Mirza has been a crucial part of Mr Johnson’s inner circle alongside her husband Dougie Smith, another key Downing Street aide.
Yesterday she blamed the PM’s explosive claim that Sir Keir Starmer failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile for her decision to quit.
She had been ‘genuinely upset’ by the remark, a friend said last night – but they revealed that ‘she has been uneasy with the whole direction of travel for some time’. They told how she was ‘not a great fan of [Downing Street chief-of-staff] Dan Rosenfield’ – who also quit yesterday – adding: ‘The feeling is that this means Dougie has withdrawn his support.’
A minister who is close to her also said last night that the Savile row had been the ‘final straw but not the first’.
Miss Mirza’s rise to the top of government has not been a typical one. She is the youngest daughter of Pakistani immigrants, her father was a factory worker and her mother a housewife and Urdu teacher.
She grew up in Oldham and attended state schools before becoming the only student at her sixth form to win a place at Oxford. It was during her studies at Mansfield College that she joined the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), contributing to its magazine Living Marxism.
She went on to study for a PhD in sociology at the University of Kent under Professor Frank Furedi – who co-founded the RCP, which by then had dissolved.
She had various jobs in the culture and charity sectors, including at the Royal Society of Arts, the Policy Exchange think-tank, and the Tate, before – at the age of 30 – being made arts adviser to Mr Johnson when he was elected London mayor.
Once he became Prime Minister, she was brought in immediately as one of his inner circle. Miss Mirza has mainly stayed out of the limelight, until she was revealed as playing a major role in the setting up of the Prime Minister’s commission on racial disparity in 2020, following the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
Critics said she was the wrong person for the job as she had previously questioned the existence of institutional racism and hit out at a ‘culture of grievance’ among anti-racism campaigners. But Mr Johnson defended her in the Commons as ‘a brilliant thinker about these issues’.
Until yesterday, Miss Mirza had always been one of his arch-defenders.
When in 2018 he was criticised for an article suggesting burqa-wearing women resembled ‘bank robbers’ or ‘letterboxes’, she launched a passionate defence of him, calling the reaction to his comments ‘hysteria’.