I have never voted Conservative. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a degree of delight when Rishi Sunak became prime minister. Not because I expected anything new, or that I agreed with him politically, but because I never imagined such a thing might happen in my lifetime.
Perhaps it’s a sign of where Britain is at that having a British Asian leader is hardly remarked upon. But there wasn’t an Indian family I knew that wasn’t privately thrilled when Sunak took power in 2022, even if only for a moment. We had arrived. I could allow my son to dream of holding the highest public office one day – a dream I never dared to have for myself when I was growing up in London in the 1990s, when the number of ethnic minority MPs was in single digits.