Munira Mirza: The No 10 policy chief whose resignation will be a blow to Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson previously called Munira Mirza, who has resigned as director of the policy unit in 10 Downing Street, one of the five most inspiring women in his life.

Mirza, from Oldham, is independent minded and she believes the prime minister went too far in his debunked remark in the House of Commons that the labour leader Sir Keir Starmer failed to prosecute serial sex offender Jimmy Savile when he was director of public prosecutions. In her resignation letter, published by The Spectator, she said: "You are a better man than many of your detractors will ever understand, which is why it is so desperately sad that you let yourself down by making a scurrilous accusation against the leader of the opposition."

Johnson has belatedly stepped back from his remarks, but has not offered an apology despite Mirza urging him to do so.

Not actually a member of the Conservative Party, in her youth Mirza was “one of the left”, as she often coyly puts it, and was once a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which is to say a Trotskyist. Like Claire Fox, Frank Furedi and others of that diaspora, she’s found libertarianism an equally bracing creed. A little known fact about Mirza – running government policy, remember – is that she is open to legalising drugs because “clearly something is not working”: “People take drugs recreationally and they enjoy it and they’re not going to stop, so something’s got to give,” she said in a 2018 interview.

Her communism lasted until about her mid-twenties. Since then she has been reluctant to categorise herself in a facile left-right way, though she’s definitely liberal or libertarian, not least because she found the intellectual intolerance of the left so irksome. Even now she says the need for more “political diversity” is more pressing than the traditional categories of ethnicity or class.

She may have helped run the country and helped write the 2019 Tory manifesto, but she was hardly born to it. The youngest of four, Mirza went to a local comprehensive, and after university (English at Mansfield College, Oxford, and a postgrad course in sociology and later a PhD at Kent taught by ex-RCP man Furedi) she floated around the arts world before joining the Tory-leaning “Cameroon” think tank Policy Exchange. This was a trendy subset of the Notting Hill set, overseen by Nick Boles and Michael Gove.

That might have been that, sort of, but, at the age of 30, she was despatched to help Johnson when he became mayor of London in 2008. Why? A news report at the time suggested that David Cameron was concerned that the Tories, then in opposition nationally, would be damaged by Johnson’s excesses: “A troupe of minders has been drafted in to guide the new mayor in his first 100 days,” with Mirza recruited in an “attempt to neutralise any accusations that Johnson is racist, especially as he seeks to slash grants to ethnic groups”.

Mirza became deputy mayor for culture and education and set about scrapping some of Ken Livingstone’s pet projects such as the Rise Festival. Her views and Johnson’s were not so far apart, and she has defended him when needed. They appear to share a taste for upending the establishment. Mirza once contributed to the Radio 4 Great Lives programme about her hero, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, a restless and controversial thinker in her day.

In 2020, Mirza was tasked with setting up the commission on race and ethnic disparities – with the decision facing criticism over the idea that Mirza had long since made her mind up about racism in Britain For example, here are Mirza’s own words, in that interview in 2018, on the racial disparities audit ordered by Theresa May, the last such wide-ranging official exercise: “It perpetuated what I thought was a very negative, inaccurate picture of British society.

“It reinforces this idea that ethnic minorities are being systematically oppressed, that there’s a sort of institutional problem, when in fact what we’ve seen in the last 20 years is a liberalisation, an opening up for many people.”

The report from the commission, headed by Dr Tony Sewell, was criticised upon its publication in 2021 for the conclusion that claims the country is institutionally racist are “not borne out by the evidence”.

Meeting Boris was the move that really changed Mirza’s life, and she’s been in or around his orbit ever since. She said this of him in 2014: “I do love working for Boris because he never stops, he’s always fizzing with good ideas.”

Even in her resignation letter, she praised him as “a man of extraordinary abilities with a unique talent for connecting with people”

Not a Tory traditionalist as such, Mirza is more of an iconoclast, though not in a contemporary Bristolian sense. She married a noted libertarian, Dougie Smith, in his youth part of the sometimes unruly Federation of Conservative Students, and later a speechwriter for Cameron who later joined her working for Dominic Cummings in No 10. Cummings has called Mirza’s departure “an unmistakeable signal the bunker is collapsing and this PM is finished”

In her public appearances – “Dr Mirza” – as apparently Johnson called her – seemed to have just the right blend of politeness and firmness in her arguments, all put in her measured, soft Lancashire burr. There’s a lightness of touch of the kind you’d experience at some dinner party, and none of the histrionics of her former boss. She says she is “not a strident person” – but her message to the PM is clear