Lisa Nandy is the only person of Indian origin in Keir Starmer’s cabinet, which met for the first time on Saturday following Labour’s 174-seat landslide victory in Thursday’s general election.
Appointed the new secretary of state for culture, media and sport, she will very quickly discover she will be attacked by the Right-wing media if she does anything they consider “woke”.
It’s a word that is used to condemn anything that is even vaguely progressive in Britain’s raging “culture wars”.
For example, to argue Winston Churchill could have done more to help the victims of the 1943 Bengal famine is most definitely “woke”, as would be the suggestion the British empire was anything other than a civilising force for good, especially in India.
Culture is a contested area, not least because Britain’s creative industries — everything from pop music to theatre, film and literature — contributed a staggering £125 billion to the British economy in 2022, according to government figures. How much of that is British Indian is not known but it is safe to assume it is substantial.
Nandy, who was “thrilled” to get her job, said: “From rugby league to Royal Opera, our cultural and sporting heritage runs through our towns, villages and cities and is one of our country’s greatest assets.
“As culture secretary, I will do everything I can to harness the limitless potential of the extraordinary people in these amazing sectors to drive economic growth, unlock opportunities for everyone and change lives for the better.”
Nandy once joked that her father considered her Right-wing, but then Dipak Nandy, who was born in Calcutta on May 21, 1936, won the Tagore Gold Medal for an English essay at St Xavier’s College, and arrived in England in 1956, was once described by the Sun newspaper as a “Marxist academic”.
He made a name for himself in race relations and became founder-director of the Runnymede Trust, an important race equality think tank.
In 1960, while a student at Leeds, Dipak met Margaret Gracie; they married in 1964. They separated in 1971, and in 1972, he married (Ann) Luise Byers, daughter of Lord Byers, leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords for 19 years.
Their youngest daughter, Lisa Eva Nandy, was born in Manchester on August 9, 1979. She went to a local school and studied politics at Newcastle University and public policy at Birkbeck.
On Thursday, she was re-elected MP for Wigan in Greater Manchester with a majority of 9,549. It is a constituency she has represented since 2010.
She stood for party leader in 2019 after Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat, but the contest was won by Starmer who appointed her as shadow foreign secretary, before moving her to housing and communities and, most recently, to international development.
Nandy got her cabinet job because the woman who was shadow culture secretary, Thangham Debbonaire (née Singh) — she was born in Peterborough to a father of Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil origin and an English mother — suffered a shock defeat to the Green Party on Thursday in Bristol Central.
As culture secretary, Nandy will be invited to many glamorous events. But the job is a difficult one.
Previous Tory culture secretaries have included Rishi Sunak’s great supporter and deputy Prime Minister, Oliver Dowden, who threatened the National Trust, a much-loved charity with over 5 million members, with dire consequences after it published a report revealing nearly a hundred of the 500 fabulous properties it looks after were built with either colonial loot from India or proceeds from the slave trade.
Another culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, the leader of Boris Johnson’s fan club, wanted to punish the BBC allegedly for being Left wing. The most recent incumbent, Lucy Frazer — she, too, has lost her seat — was involved in stopping the sale of The Daily Telegraph to the UAE on the grounds that selling a newspaper to the Arabs would be “against the national interest”.
As culture secretary, Nandy will be urged to make it easier for Indian art groups to get travel visas.
