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Sides of the story – the Baroness Warsi scandal

Facts of the matter

Baroness Warsi, long treated with contempt by fellow Tories, has come under fresh criticism this week for her expenses, only one week after the embarrassing revelation that she failed to declare rental income to the Lords. Between October 2007 and March 2008, Warsi claimed £12,000 for 74 nights spent in a party member’s property in Acton, West London. The trouble is, the landlord, Dr Moustafa, claims he let Warsi use the bedsit for free.

Yet Cameron will not find it as easy to let go of Warsi as he did Liam Fox or Jeremy Hunt, assuming the Culture Minister falls on his sword in light of the Leveson Inquiry. The Baroness, ennobled in 2007 after failing to win her parliamentary election in 2005, embodies everything the Tories are not: ethnically diverse, Northern, working-class, urban and female. Her appointment as Conservative Chair and minister without portfolio at the tender age of 39 was part of Cameron’s attempt to detoxify the Tory brand. Her fate will ultimately not be dictated by the tabloids, or even her perceived value as a minority, but by the potency of the allegations and whether in time they will prove accurate.

Laugh-a-minute

Andrew Pierce of the Daily Mail smells blood. His article screams ‘A Muslim working-class mum hand-picked for Cameron’s A-list…But is Sayeeda Warsi up to the job?’ It somewhat tarnishes the Mail’s enlightened attitude towards women in government. The article implies she was promoted because she ‘symbolised the public face of a Conservative Party modernised and reformed by David Cameron’, seething at the idea that any unembarrassed social equity should belong in the Tory Party. He attacks her as ‘weak’ and the beneficiary of tokenism. As the only gay commentator on the Mail, is Pierce by his own logic not subject to the same charge? Wherever the allegations now lead, she should be sacked. After all, she isn’t a ‘Tebbit-style heavy hitter’, reflecting on the affable and measured minister of ‘Get on yer bike’ fame.

Voice of reason

Michael White of the Guardian questions the real motives behind the attacks. The rental income was declared to the Cabinet Office and to the taxpayer, so it seems credible that the failure to declare it to the Lords was an oversight. But as the long postponed Cabinet reshuffle approaches, backbench MPs, who increasingly see her as ‘lightweight’, are piling on pressure to replace her with a more ‘robust’ party figure (for ‘robust’ read ‘white, male, Home Counties’). If Cameron wishes to throw his backbenchers some red meat, then Sayeeda Warsi is surely a likely sacrifice, with these allegations sealing her fate. Would that represent a backwards step for diversity in the upper echelons of government? Perhaps, but as he points out, Priti Patel, a fiery Hindu backbencher, ticks every box that Warsi does, without the limpness that local Tories despise in Warsi.

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