I’m not a ‘token ghetto boy’, says Shaun Bailey, I want to be the Prime Minister

Have you got beef with this Emma chick?” That’s what a friend of the Conservative politician Shaun Bailey asked him when last week a 2010 blog post surfaced by Emma Dent Coad, the MP for Kensington. Dent Coad called him a “token ghetto boy” being “used” by the Tories who may never “fit in, however hard he tries”.

“I’ve only met her once for all of four minutes when I was organising a charity abseil down Trellick Tower,” says Bailey, aged 46 and a former aide to David Cameron, who is now a Conservative London Assembly member. “That’s when I realised that her comments are about a bigger story. The most offensive thing is it’s about the left and the limitations they put on non-white communities. Non-white people already find it hard to be part of public life and this sort of attack stops them getting involved. You think it’s not worth it.”

When his team told him that the comments had been reposted on a political blog, he called his wife, who is training to be a history teacher and “a bit more sensible than I am”.

“Part of me just wanted to go away,” he says. “I don’t want to have to shoulder the 500 years of black experience in Britain. I don’t want my politics to be about being black because if it is then many people won’t vote for me. I want to talk about the housing crisis, family, education, work. I’m a man who happens to be black. You can be white and have all the issues I have: trying to buy a house, kids going to school. Yes, I have a unique experience, but identity politics is being used to wash away any decent argument. That’s why I took Emma’s comments up; you can’t expect to say that and it not be addressed.”

Dent Coad said she was quoting a constituent in her blog, adding: “If [Mr Bailey] is offended, I apologise.”

“She didn’t apologise,” protests Bailey. “And Labour did absolutely nothing. Imagine if she was a Tory MP — she’d be gone. Jeremy said he’d speak to Emma but what exactly is he going to say to her? The wider issue is this is about “isms”— racism, sexism. Jeremy espoused a more caring, sharing politics and this is not in line with that. There’s people locally standing who are worried they are going to be bullied because people take the lead from their MP.”

“It’s wrong that the left feel they can take the black vote for granted so much that they are allowed to say that. What’s wrong is people defending her. Nobody, left or right, has the right to say that.”

Bailey identifies a sentiment among the left of “we changed the law [for minorities] so you owe us”. “It’s infuriating and patronising. They assume minorities should vote for them. I say look at what you want and decide. She’s telling me I can’t vote Tory because I’m working class. If you can’t do that, what else can’t you do?” He jokes about his black friend who used to be told he can’t play golf because it’s “a white person thing”, “that was before Tiger Woods”.

We are in Bailey’s City Hall office, where he has a mock Oscar award for “most ‘out of the box’ GLA report” and Simon Schama’s History of Britain.

What “rubbed the hardest” was the label “ghetto boy”. He’s spent decades working with youth groups to build children’s self-confidence. “Kids call themselves ‘road’, or street, so I say do you know anyone ‘road’ who is a doctor, a barrister? That word is debilitating. So to have someone hand it to you is hurtful. It’s not just Emma, it’s said all the time, and she’s echoing it. Questioning whether something has happened to you because you are black is a debilitating regular thing you ask yourself. It takes quite a set of internal beliefs to get away from that.”

What does he make of this week’s accusations by writer Zinzi Clemmons that Lena Dunham is a “hipster racist” for using the n word?

“There is hipster racism. I don’t like to hear hip hop because I don’t think you can reclaim a word that has 400 years-plus of pain in it. Black people have always defended that word between themselves, but as a famous rapper said ‘until it’s ok for a white man to call your son that there’s nothing you can reclaim’.”

He kept the news story from his own sons, aged 10 and eight. “This is not the time to terrify them. I hope their generation will be different. They still think it’s exciting when Daddy’s in the paper.”

Bailey grew up in North Kensington, on the Bracewell Road estate (although a troll recently tried to delete this from his Wikipedia to make him look more privileged than he is —“I wish I were that wealthy”, he says). His family are originally from Jamaica and his childhood was “such massive fun it took a while to realise we didn’t have money”. His mother did clerical work and was “a single-parent survivalist, navigating two boys through the vagaries of growing up in a poor area”. She was ambitious for her children and encouraged Bailey to enrol in the cadets (he’s a proud honorary colonel), which taught him discipline, and to do gymnastics, which took him abroad. His best move is a double backwards somersault.

He got into politics through charity work, which he jokes that he started doing “by accident to pass the time”. He wrote a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies about Ladbroke Grove in 2007 that was picked up. “Activists from every party approached me. I hadn’t thought about politics before but I had to think about what’s most in line with my views. Because of my take on family, progress and work I’m probably a Tory. I do not want my community to be welfare dependent, there’s no community in history that’s thrived on handouts.”

He continues: “I want us to be doing things I call ordinary success. The black community has Obama, Stormzy — but they aren’t ordinary. You need black people who are GPs, lawyers, to change the discourse around black people.”

Steve Hilton approached him and introduced him to David Cameron, who “told me I was a Conservative not a Tory”. They are all still in touch. “Steve is clever, thoughtful. He likes to have those conversations about what you’re thinking. David Cameron asked me why people like me don’t go into politics. I thought he was referring to my race but it was my class.”

Now Bailey lives in Romford “because of the cheaper house prices” but he’s still a west Londoner and was devastated by the Grenfell Tower fire. “A friend who lives underneath Grenfell sent me pictures of the shoddy repair work. They knew it was coming. There are issues that will never be resolved, to the point where people will feel they can never trust authorities again.”

City Hall is just the start for Bailey. “My personal philosophy is always forward”. Would he like to be Prime Minister? “Yeah, because you can get stuff done. When I play fantasy politics I’m a great PM. My great mission is to show poor children that they can go anywhere — and poor is not about money; it’s about a state of mind. The second thing is showing white children that diversity is not a guilt payment; it’s a strengthening of the team. I try my best not to do the black/white thing, I do the people thing. I’m always trying to think of how the black community can become mainstream.”

@susannahbutter