Webcam debate: What should Cameron do next?

David Cameron’s Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion was advised against standing in the next election because of fears that voters were not ready for two ethnic-minority candidates to stand against each other, she has disclosed.

Sayeeda Warsi, who was made a peer during Mr Cameron’s reshuffle after Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, had been considering whether to stand again in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, where she was defeated by 4,615 votes by another Muslim candidate, Shahid Malik, at the 2005 election.

In an interview with the Yorkshire Post, Baroness Warsi has revealed how a discussion with local Conservative officials made her think twice about standing again.

She said that in a discussion with the local Conservative party chairman, he had said: “You’re the best candidate we have ever had. You would have made a fantastic MP for this town but at the moment, maybe because of the way that this community is, it still needs a bit of time on both sides.”

He then added: “Maybe the white community is not ready for two ethnic [minority] candidates again and also the Muslim community needs to take a long, hard look at itself.”

Lady Warsi’s account of the conversation, which has not been challenged, will raise concerns among Conservatives who have been trying to widen the party’s appeal to the ethnic minorities.

Lady Warsi was a solicitor running her own practice when she was chosen to contest Dewsbury at the 2005 election.

After her good showing there, she was appointed the Conservatives’ vice-chairman for the cities by Michael Howard, then the party leader. But after her promotion by Mr Cameron, Labour sources in Dewsbury said that the Conservative leadership had chosen a back-door route to get Lady Warsi into Parliament.

In yesterday’s interview she shrugged off criticism of her appointment as a Shadow minister in the Lords. “People say to me, ‘well you could have been appointed because you are a woman, or you’re a Muslim or you’re an ethnic woman, all those boxes that you tick’. I say let me do the job. I’m quite a proud person. If someone ever gave me a job because I felt it made them look good, as some commentators have put to David Cameron, I’ll never do that.”

She told the Yorkshire Post: “We had two quite extreme things working here. We had the BNP with the largest support in the country. I had people who said they had voted Tory in the past slam the door in my face and told me to ‘Eff off Paki, I ain’t voting for you’. That was how blunt it was,” she recalls.

“On the other hand, you had the Muslim community in Savile Town and Ravensthorpe, which I thought I knew well — quite an orthodox community — who just had a real issue with a woman standing.

“Suddenly people who you thought would be there to support you, it stuck in their throat. I always say that in the 2005 election I was too black for half of the community and too white for the other half.”

Lady Warsi emphasised that her approach came from her own experiences.

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