The chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) comes from a modest background of ethnic origin, but is also about as integrated into new Labour’s inner circles as it is possible to be.

His friendships with key figures in government go back decades. As a student activist in the 1970s he was encouraged by Charles Clarke, now home secretary, to become the first black president of the National Union of Students.

At the same time he befriended Peter Mandelson, who was later best man at Phillips’s wedding. Indeed, Phillips, Mandelson and Clarke once travelled to Cuba for an international conference of student activists.

But even then Phillips was willing to challenge his peers and the status quo: at that conference he led a battle to overturn a motion supporting the Soviet Union.

Too restless and perhaps too chameleonic for politics, he chose instead to pursue a career in the media, joining London Weekend Television as a researcher. The man who interviewed him for the job was John (now Lord) Birt, who is now a special “blue skies” adviser to Tony Blair.

Phillips’s network even takes in royal connections: among his other old friends is Sir Tom Shebbeare, director of the Prince of Wales’s charities.

Phillips’s ability to move across boundaries and between groups with such aplomb may come from his peripatetic childhood. Born in Islington, north London, he grew up in a two-bedroom house. His father, an immigrant from Guyana, worked as a clerk for British Rail.

But Phillips’s parents, who at one point moved to New York, decided to send their son to school in Guyana, an experience he later described as “Edwardian”. The work ethic it instilled, however, may inform his present stance on multiculturalism.

He told one interviewer: “The old-fashioned discipline of Caribbean teachers — uniforms, detentions, tough lessons and, yes, even the possibility of corporal punishment — could stop many a criminal career before it begins.”

His political ambitions reasserted themselves in 1999 when he decided to stand for election as mayor of London. He had the support of Downing Street, which wanted to prevent a Ken Livingstone victory.

But when it became clear Phillips had little public support, he astutely stepped down to back a challenge by the former minister Frank Dobson — thereby winning further favour with Downing Street.

That loyalty can only have helped when the post of head of the CRE became vacant after the previous chairman resigned.

The government chose Phillips, said one insider, because it wanted the CRE to have “a powerful and articulate voice”. He has certainly given it that.

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