A Nigerian Igbo descent is a potential British PM. Could this be true? Chuka Umunna- By George Parker. Chuka (his name rhymes with “cooker” and means “God is the greatest”) was born in 1978 in London, the son of Bennett, a Nigerian immigrant from the Igbo tribe, who arrived at Liverpool docks in the 1960s carrying a suitcase on his head and no money. Bennett began an import-export business trading with Nigeria and was starting to make a decent living when he met Patricia Milmo, a solicitor, at a London party. She happened to be the daughter of Sir Helenus Milmo, High Court judge and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Nazi trials. Did their marriage raise eyebrows at the time? “It was very unusual, no doubt about that,” Umunna says. It was at the Labour conference in October 2012 that it first really hit home. Chuka Umunna, the 6ft-tall, immaculately tailored former lawyer, strode through the detritus of political pamphlets and sleep-deprived party activists on his way to give his first speech from the platform. A small entourage followed, expectation buzzed around him. He spoke in deliberate tones of his African father arriving in Britain with nothing, his white mother benefiting from equal pay laws, growing up in a fairer society shaped by a centre-left government. It was not exactly Obama at the Democratic convention in 2004 – Umunna’s friends say he kept his speech low-key to avoid stoking the hype – but the comparisons were inevitable. So inevitable, indeed, that a Wikipedia entry apparently originating from the wannabe MP’s campaign team – but not written by him, he insists – helpfully drew attention to the “British Obama” way back in 2007, in case anyone might have missed them.Chuka Umunna sharply divides opinion. Good- looking, articulate, new-media-savvy, a formidable TV performer and strangely unpolitical. Umunna laughs when asked if he wants to be prime minister? “Oh for God’s sake,” he says. “I just want to be business secretary.” But few believe that is where his ambitions ultimately lie. Umunna gives the sense of a politician aware of his potential but still trying to work out exactly how he is going to fulfil it. His detractors may not believe it, but those who know Umunna believe him when he says: “I am very self-critical.” He pauses and adds with a defiant intensity: “I’m still evolving.”
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 19:23:09 +0000
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