As a first time MP, 35-year-old Kanishka Narayan, who won the Vale of Glamorgan by only 4,216 votes in last year’s general election, wouldn’t normally expect to be on the Power List. But then someone who went to Eton and Balliol College, Oxford (as Boris Johnson did) would not be considered obvious Labour material either.
So long as he manages to keep his seat, big things are expected of Narayan – as it was of Rishi Sunak – in the years to come.
There is a bit of Indian history on his side. He was born in Bihar in north-east India in the home state of Rajendra Prasad, independent India’s first president.
Over lunch at the Old Queen Street Café in Westminster where he chooses sticky toffee for his “pudding” – a dead giveaway he went to Eton – he casually mentions Rajendra Prasad was his great grandmother’s uncle.
There is a sketch to show the lineage. Kanishka’s father, Santosh Kumar, had married Chetna Sinha (at home his parents still speak to their children in Hindi). Santosh’s mother, Bina Devi, was the daughter of Janki Devi. And her father was Mahendra Prasad, whose brother was Rajendra Prasad.
This sort of family connection matters a great deal in India should Kanishka Narayan ever get a ministerial job that involves dealing with India.
For now he is parliamentary private secretary in the department for environment, food & rural affairs.
He explains his responsibilities: “That means I’m the main interface between the department and parliament. My job is a to understand where colleagues are in parliament on all issues to do with the environment and the portfolio of the department. Then go into the department and be an interlocutor between those two sets of people.”
He was born in Muzaffarpur in Bihar on 30 November 1989, not far from the capital Patna. He lived briefly in the coal-mining area of Dhanbad until his parents shifted to Delhi when he was two. His mother’s uncles, who had trained in the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad, moved to South Wales to working in its mining industry.
“My mother came to Cardiff to study as a post graduate” he says. “She went back in the 1980s and got married. My parents, who were a normal middle class family, decided it would be a pretty amazing opportunity for me and my brother to move to the UK. So we moved to Cardiff when I was 12 and my brother, Gautam, was 13.”
After a year of life in Wales, Narayan sat the scholarship exam for Eton and got in as an Oppidan Scholar (he could put “OS” after his name as some who had distinguished himself academically). Most of his fees were paid through a bursary.
After he had taken his exam, “I remember Eton calling me and saying my performance in English, history and geography and all those sorts of things were ok but I had really spiked in maths and science.”
Eton inculcated a sense of independence. “I hadn’t lived away from my parents ever and, suddenly, for five years I was living by myself. There is a deep sense of inquiry in the academic training that you get. I turned up wanting to become an engineer or doctor but left wanting to do philosophy and politics and economics. I did PPE at Oxford.”
“I had a really lovely time at Oxford in a very different way. I think Eton made me much more confident about my place in Britain. Whereas Oxford really deepened my intellectual interest in philosophy and political history. I spent summers working in India on rural development.”
He has just finished reading Tony Blair’s book, On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century – “it’s compelling to read someone who has been the most successful electoral force in the Labour party”.
If cast on a desert island, he would take the “whole collection of Sherlock Holmes stories”, plus In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman and Amit Chaudhuri’s Telling Tales: Selected Writings, 1993-2013.
“But I’m really passionate about politics and political history,” he says, which is why he would take books on the founding moments of the US constitution.
He lived for a while in Palo Alto near San Francisco to “gain time and space to reflect on all the things I loved about Britain”.
He wouldn’t be without Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.
He also picked Robert Caro’s four-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson – The Path to Power; Means of Ascent; Master of the Senate; and The Passage of Power.
Before entering parliament, “I used to invest in AI companies across the US and Europe. One of the things I found was that it is absolutely not the case that the companies in which people were working the longest hours were the best performers. The companies which knew how to use the best science and technology and combine that with the talent of their people got much further.”
A two-hour train journey from Paddington to Cardiff followed by a short drive takes him to the Vale of Glamorgan. His constituency contains Barry Docks, which is still functioning but which in 1913 was “the largest coal exporting port in the world”.
“I try and walk quite a bit,” he says, adding the coastline and the rural parts of his constituency have “really great trails”.
The Vale of Glamorgan isn’t ethnically diverse. “For the Labour party it’s relatively rare for non-white candidates to be running in seats that not ethnically diverse. It’s a pretty great test of how genuinely focused you are on the attributes of the individual and their merit, rather than sort of crude ethnic representation.”
He points out: “For 30 years the Vale of Glamorgan has always voted for an MP of the party that has won in Westminster. I think half our MPs are first time new MPs. The most exciting diversity is in their professional backgrounds. You have military veterans, scientists, economists, business people, investors like me, people who’ve worked in the non-profit sector, writers.”
He stresses: “People in the Vale of Glamorgan know that I was born in India, and have a background which is British Indian and Welsh Indian. That’s both enriching and exciting and a part of me, but also something that can be valuable for them.
“My broad sense is politics increasingly rewards authenticity. Trying to hide parts of your identity that are important and inform you – not exclusively but are a big part of informing who you are – is not going to work.
“In the modern context, it’s being a good constituency MP, doing my case work really well, but it also means trying to be a national voice in the policy areas that most matter for my constituency, so I can make a difference, not just for one project, but at scale for the Vale of Glamorgan, and for the wider country as well.”
