You don’t have to like them. You can find their views repellent. You can promise never to vote for a single one of them. But you have to admit: the fact that six of the initial 11 candidates for the Conservative party leadership, four of the eight who made it on to the first ballot, are from an ethnic minority, and the fact that the next prime minister is all but certain to be a woman or a person of colour, or both, is a big deal. It is a significant moment in the politics of this country – even if it has induced conflicted and contradictory feelings in progressives.
Consider what is actually happening here. Just before the election of 2010, the Tories could point to a grand total of one black and one Asian MP. Those two represented half the number of MPs from a visible ethnic minority that had represented the party since 1895. The general election of 2001 had brought 38 new Conservative MPs to Westminster: 37 were white men and the 38th was a white woman.
