SHE’S young, ambitious, libertarian, decidedly rightwing - yet used to be on the hard left. She’s an avowed Brexiteer, believes the problem of racism in the UK has been exaggerated and, since July 2019, has been ensconced at Number 10 as director of prime minister Boris Johnson’s Policy Unit – making her one of the most influential people in the country.
Munira Mirza is one of a thrusting new group of special advisors brought into Westminster by Johnson to promote his vision of a radical right-wing agenda and a hard, no-nonsense approach to Brexit.
Oldham-born Mirza, whose parents came to Britain from Pakistan, was Johnson’s deputy mayor for education and culture throughout his eight-year stint as London mayor.
A critic of multiculturalism as an official government policy, last year she leapt to Johnson’s defence when he compared women in burqas to letterboxes.
“There are many people in this country who are uncomfortable about the burqa. When people argue we should use more sensitive language what they are really saying is let’s not be critical at all, let’s not offend, let’s not criticise this practice because it upsets Muslims,” she said.
Mirza, who has worked for the conservative think-tank Policy Exchange, had previously criticised Labour MP David Lammy’s 2017 review of racism in the criminal justice system. She said his report, commissioned by David Cameron and supported by Theresa May, exemplified how “a lot of people in politics think it’s a good idea to exaggerate the problem of racism”. She said it was wrong to blame institutional racism for the disproportionately high number of BAME prisoners in UK jails, attributing it to social and economic factors.
She wrote: “Paradoxically, just at the point when racist attitudes were declining in society and many ethnic groups were integrating successfully, our political leaders became obsessed with racism… The tragedy is that accusations of institutional racism and their official endorsement have corroded BAME communities’ trust in public services, thereby making things worse.”
Mirza was also an outspoken critic of May’s decision as prime minister to carry out a racial disparities audit of public services, saying the “scene was being set for another bout of political self-flagellation regarding the subject of race in Britain”.
Given her relative lack of experience in government and radical views, many Westminster watchers were surprised by Mirza’s appointment to such a key role as Number 10’s overall head of policy.
Commentators have drawn attention to her unusual background as a young far left polemicist contributing articles to the magazine Living Marxism published by the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party. That said, a number of former members of that party have gone on to wield influence in Tory Eurosceptic circles.
Mirza’s 18-year career has encompassed arts, academia, media and politics.
She is the author of a number of books, including Living apart Together: British Muslims and the Paradox of Multiculturalism; and The Politics of Culture: The Case for Universalism.
In the latter, she challenges the idea that diversity should dominate cultural policy in the 21st century. She believes diversity initiatives in the arts can make black artists feel ghettoised and forced, in some cases, to bear "the burden of representation".
She writes: “Of course, being culturally different in the past was also to suffer prejudice, but much has changed in the past two decades, and old racist attitudes have declined significantly. Barriers today are largely class-based – income, networks, education. And those affect many white people as well.”
As Johnson’s deputy mayor for culture and education, she was in charge of the cultural planning for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and initiated a range of programmes, including the £24 million London Schools Excellence Fund, the London Curriculum and Creative Enterprise Zones.
Her name has since been linked in the media as a possible Conservative Party candidate for the 2020 London mayoral elections.
Prior to her time at City Hall she worked within a diverse range of arts and charitable organisations including at the Tate, Policy Exchange and the Royal Society of Arts. This included a stint as head of digital at HENI, where she initiated the award-winning HENI Talks, a non-profit digital library of short educational films about the visual arts. Most recently she was executive director of culture at King’s College London, tasked with spearheading the institution’s cultural strategy.
She currently sits on the boards of the Royal Opera House and the Illuminated River Foundation and has appeared regularly in the media.
Mirza went to Breeze Hill School, a mixed comprehensive located in the heart of Oldham's Pakistani neighbourhood where most of the students were Asian.
She studied English literature at Oxford University and completed her PhD in sociology at the University of Kent in 2009.
Her libertarian conservative views led her to help found the Manifesto Club, a group campaigning against the “hyper regulation of everyday life” including alcohol bans, photo bans, vetting and speech codes - all “new ways in which the state regulates everyday life on the streets, in workplaces and in our private lives"
An early supporter of Brexit, she says that as someone working in the arts, she did not find it easy to share her views with colleagues: “Straight after the EU vote there were many people in the arts who were horrible. They spoke about leave voters in really demeaning terms, very patronising, and called them stupid, uneducated and old and disrespectful and assuming they were all bigots and racists. It was the new being gay.”
