Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series show what a diverse party the Conservatives have become in England.

More black and ethnic minority Conservatives entered Parliament during the years when David Cameron was Prime Minister between May 2010 and June 2016.

The list continues.

James Cleverly (Braintree)

James Cleverly is a Londoner, born and bred.

He has served the Essex constituency of Braintree since 2015. He also was the London Assembly member for Bexley and Bromley between 2008 and 2016, during which time Boris Johnson was Mayor of London.

Prior to entering politics, Cleverly worked in publishing, both print and digital.

He has also been a member of the Territorial Army since 1991 and is currently a Lieutenant Colonel.

James Cleverly’s father is white British. His mother is originally from Sierra Leone. In 2020, at the height of last summer’s protests, to which he firmly objected, Cleverly told a BBC Question Time panel that he grew up at a time when interracial marriages were unusual. He said that the early 1970s for him were unpleasant and hurtful as a child as people sometimes made open remarks to or about his parents as they walked down the street.

One of his pet peeves is the biased BBC:

Cleverly is the first black to be appointed as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party (2018-2019) and Co-Chariman (2019-2020). Ben Elliot was the other Co-Chairman:

He laid out the Party manifesto in this short video:

Prior to that appointment, he worked on Brexit as a junior minister for the Department for Exiting the European Union:

Later that autumn, he campaigned tirelessly for the Conservatives before the December 12 general election, in which they routed Labour …

… including in constituencies that had never before had a Conservative MP, such as Bishop Auckland (near Durham) and North Stoke (Stoke on Trent):

Early in 2020, he enjoyed posting this video in which Prime Minister thanked Labour voters for their support:

He was also able to get his Brexit countdown clock back on the wall:

Cleverly is currently the Minister for State for the Middle East and North Africa, to which he was appointed on February 13, 2020.

He is married and has two children.

Nus Ghani (Wealden)

Nus Ghani has served the constituency of Wealden, East Sussex, since 2015.

She was born in Kashmir to Pakistani parents in 1972. Her parents later moved to Birmingham, where she grew up.

Ghani worked in the charity sector before becoming an MP.

Since 2015, she has held a variety of posts on parliamentary committees and all-party groups.

She was Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, serving under Theresa May (2019) and was also Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Aviation and Maritime under May and Boris Johnson (2018-2020).

Ranil Jayawardena (North East Hampshire)

Ranil Jayawardena is the son of a Sri Lankan father and Indian mother.

He has served the North East Hampshire constituency since 2015. He knows Hampshire well, having spent most of his life there. His parents moved there from London when he was a boy.

He graduated from the London School of Economics and worked as a senior manager for Lloyds Banking Group in capital markets, corporate banking and group executive functions.

Between 2008 and 2015, Jayawardena was a councillor of the borough of Basingstoke and Deane.

Since becoming an MP in 2015, he has held a number of positions on All-Party Parliamentary Groups. He has also served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Department for Work and Pensions as well as to the Ministry of Justice.

He was Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party in the early part of 2020.

Jayawardena is currently the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Trade and helped to formulate Britain’s new trade deal with Japan:

He is now working on enhancing Britain’s trade with India:

Jayawardena is a Christian and was a trustee/director of the Conservative Christian Fellowship.

He is married and has two daughters.

Alan Mak (Havant)

Alan Mak has been the MP for Havant, Hampshire, since 2015.

His parents were born in Guangdong then lived in Hong Kong before moving to England. Alan was born in Leeds in 1983.

He is the first MP of Cantonese and Asian origin. However, he wants to be known for representing all of Havant, as he told the South China Morning Post‘s Post Magazine:

It’s a stupid story. I am not standing for the Chinese population of Britain. I am standing for the people of Havant and my country.

Mak is a high achiever. He read Law at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he won the coveted ECS Wade Prize for Administrative Law. He then completed a post-graduate law and business diploma at Oxford, where he was runner-up for the Oxford Leadership Prize.

Before entering politics, he practised law as a solicitor for a large firm in the City of London and, in 2010, won the award of Young City Lawyer of the year in Square Mile magazine’s 30 under 30 awards.

Suella Braverman (Fareham)

Suella Braverman was first elected in 2015 to represent the constituency of Fareham in Hampshire.

Born in 1980, she is the daughter of Christie and Uma Fernandes, both of Indian origin, who migrated to England from Kenya and Mauritius.

Suella Fernandes grew up and attended schools in North West London.

She read Law at Queens’ College Cambridge, where she was Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association.

Afterwards, she completed a master’s degree in European and French Law at Pantheon-Sorbonne University. She was an Entente Cordiale Scholar.

She was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 2005 and was a barrister until 2015.

She married Rael Braverman in 2018 and took his name. The couple have one child and are expecting a second this year.

Braverman is a practising Buddhist.

A firm Brexiteer, she came to prominence in 2018, being one of the MPs who objected to Theresa May’s Chequers agreement with the EU:

She also said that Britain could survive a no-deal Brexit:

She further objected to May’s deal in early 2019, when it went through a series of unsuccessful votes:

During that time, she came under fire for using the term ‘C u l t u r a l  Marxism’. It turned out that many of her critics thought she was white because she was a ‘Conservative Brexiteer’:

It took some time for the dust to settle.

Suella Braverman is currently Attorney General for England and Wales and Advocate General for Northern Ireland.

I wish her and all the aforementioned MPs continued success.

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Rishi Sunak, Chancellor to the Exchequer, who also began his term as an MP in 2015, will be the subject of a post next week.