...isn't all that surprising. Still, this sort of irrational bigotry is always disappointing, especially from someone who has served as an officer in the British army (including a three-month tour of duty in Afghanistan). Fortunately, not all black MPs who have served in the army are quite so blinkered:
Then again, James Cleverly is a one of those horrible, racist Tories - unlike the very white Labour MP for North Kensington, Emma Dent Coad, who, it emerged this week, posted some extraordinarily insulting remarks about black Tory candidate, Shaun Bailey, in 2010 and 2011:
For good measure, Dent Coad also called Mr. Bailey a "freeloading scumbag" and a "low life". She has also compared the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to the Kardashians, recently claimed that Prince Harry - a qualified Apache helicopter pilot - couldn't fly helicopters, posted a doodle of a Tory strung up from a tree, and once sent a letter to the Guardian containing the following charming suggestion: "Have we forgotten the delights of prolonged snogs, slow caresses, fumbling through clothing? An explicit manual on heavy petting could be given to all 13-year-olds. Embrace the joys of sex; avoid the dangers." Calls for Jeremy Corbyn to remove the Labour whip from this ghasty woman (in any case, one hates to imagine what she does with it) were met with a typically decisive response from the Labour leader - Corbyn said he'd have a word with her about her language. Coo!
Coming out as a black or Asian conservative in Briton (or - even more so - in America) strikes me as a genuinely courageous act. There have been a handful of "token" Tory appointments which have ended disastrously (Lord Taylor of Warwick and Baroness Warsi spring to mind), but the current crop of "ethnic" Conservative MPs (who, unlike Taylor and Warsi, were voted into office) includes Kwasi Kwarteng, James Cleverly, Priti Patel (missing her already), Sajid Javid, Adam Afriyie, Nadhim Zahawi (ex-KCS, by the way), Sam Gyimah, and, of course, Kemi Badenoch. I can't swear that none of them have benefitted from tokenism at some stage of their political careers, but their profiles would suggest that, unlike many ethnic Labour MPs, they've more than earned their seats - and some of them are evidently stars in the making or, even, in some cases, potential leaders. Whatever, there's no sense of them being second-raters parachuted in to make the Tory Party seem less "hideously white". They strike me as true believers, who will have suffered all sorts of nonsense from other blacks and Asians and white Labourites for refusing to toe the line and do what people of colour are supposed to do - i.e. support their benevolent white masters in the Labour Party (whose most senior ethnic politician, let's not forget, is Dianne Abbott!).
Being a black or Asian Tory politician and having to put up with sneers and insults from ethnic members of the divisive, identity-politics rabble opposite - whose passage will undoubtedly have been eased by the colour of their skin - must be bloody maddening. That's evident from Kemi Badenoch's splendid response to Clive Lewis's repellent tweet, which says it all:
I'm aware of the danger of sounding patronising when praising black right-wingers - but I genuinely admire them: they've evidently chosen the road less travelled by, and that takes real courage. I doubt I'd have had the guts.
I'll leave the last word to James Cleverly:
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