Will voters in Nadine Dorries’ old constituency vote for a Black man?

At the Conservative Party conference in Manchester last week, Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary who is also equalities minister (because why not?) gave a speech that won her plenty of congratulatory headlines. It ought to have shocked every Black person in the country.

For Badenoch declared that “nowhere is better than Britain to be Black”.

As delegates were preparing for their long weekend away, Hubert Brown, a 61-year-old Black man, died from a stab wound on the streets of Bristol in an alleged race hate attack.

It brought back something that happened to me in 2016, when I appeared on Channel 4 News with Kwasi Kwarteng, then a mere vote Leave supporter. I raised the fact that racist incidents had increased following the Brexit referendum. In reply, Kwarteng said that I should consider myself lucky, because if I thought it was bad here, I should see what goes on in France and the rest of Europe.

This put me in mind of the night in 2020 when I saw the rapper Dave perform “Black” at the Brit Awards, a track that contains the lyrics: “They say: ‘You should be grateful, we’re the least racist’ / I say the least racist is still racist.”

Today, whenever race is in the news, we are almost immediately directed to admire the make-up of the Conservative government, and especially the occupants of the major offices of state. We have a brown prime minister (one we didn’t vote for, but why split hairs?). The Tory party has also gifted us home secretary Suella Braverman, foreign secretary James Cleverly, and Kwarteng himself, who was chancellor for 38 whole days.

Like all of them, I was privately educated – but I was also a single Black teenage mum. No one can accuse me of not having range. But I’m kicking myself for having missed out on the public school-to-Black-Tory pipeline, because it looks very lucrative.

But while there is diversity in race at the top of the Conservative Party, there certainly isn’t any diversity when it comes to background and life experience.

Black Tories pretty much fit a mould: all exclusively ex-public school/Oxbridge kids who are successful in every area of their lives, except for when it comes to finding someone to do their hair properly.

Nobody seems to be as happy as Black Tories. And maybe what Badenoch meant to say in her conference speech is that “there is nowhere better to be a Black Tory” than in Britain.

Because statistics almost everywhere else show that Black people aren’t doing so well. Stop and search figures, deaths in custody, maternal deaths, exclusions from schools and so on.

The upcoming by-election in my neighbouring constituency, Mid Bedfordshire, may be the barometer by which we can measure how the UK is doing when it comes to race relations.

Festus Akinbusoye – who is Black, in case the name didn’t give it away – is the Conservatives’ parliamentary candidate for the seat Nadine Dorries recently flounced out of. I have followed his ascension with interest. Being local to the area, I have had dealings with  Akinbusoye, who I admit I rather liked. He was courteous and professional and, in a move that may be frowned upon should he ever become an MP, he did exactly what he said he was going to do.

Dorries had what appeared to be an unassailable majority, having won a 60 per cent vote share at the 2019 general election. So I’ve been keeping an eye on the by-election polls, and for some time Akinbusoye had been neck and neck with Labour’s Alistair Strathern. The last time I checked, during the Tory conference, he was polling in first place by quite some margin.

The Mid Bedfordshire seat has been held by the Conservatives since 1931, and its constituents are 93.8 per cent white. I wonder if these numbers are a true reflection of voting intention, or if the “Bradley effect” was influencing the figures. This is a US theory that describes what happens when a white and non-white candidate run against each other. Before polling day, white voters often say they will vote for the non-white candidate, due to a “social desirability bias”. In other words, they don’t want to be accused of being racist – at least not until they get to the ballot box.

Will Akinbusoye’s story mirror that of John Taylor in Cheltenham? In the 1992 election, Taylor, a barrister of African descent, was selected to be the first Black candidate to defend a safe Conservative seat. On a night of surprises that saw John Major return to Downing Street against all odds, Taylor lost to the Liberal Democrats.

I’m keen to see how the Mid Bedfordshire by-election plays out for Akinbusoye, and whether his race will be a deciding factor. I have made requests to shadow him on his campaign trail, to see him working up close and personal. In fact, I have asked the local Conservative association several times to go canvassing with his team, but to no avail.

It could be that I once went on tour with Jeremy Corbyn and fundraised for the Labour Party – or it could be the video circulating of me screaming at a Tory party canvasser about the NHS. I don’t know.

Maybe I wouldn’t have been the best one to conduct the research anyway. Because, let’s face it, I’m sure that if I asked people if they had any issue voting for a Black man, they probably wouldn’t be completely honest with me if they did.