While a number of people who have worked alongside Munira Mirza praise her intellect and character, it appeared paradoxical that having led No 10’s efforts in stoking culture war issues she has eventually resigned in protest over low politics. Mirza, who quit over Boris Johnson’s false claim that Keir Starmer held back attempts to prosecute Jimmy Savile, was the official behind Downing Street’s much criticised report into racial disparities, which downplayed structural factors. She also defended earlier statements by Johnson, dismissing as “hysteria” the reaction to his 2018 newspaper column that likened Muslim women in burqas to letter boxes and bank robbers. What is certain is that her loss will be significant. Mirza worked with Johnson for 14 years, including his eight-year stint as London mayor. She began as an adviser on the arts and became his deputy mayor for education and culture. While largely associated in No 10 with culture war issues, as is her husband and fellow No 10 adviser, Dougie Smith, Mirza was seen as valued by Johnson because her views were not easily defined and could be unexpected, with the prime minister praising her as a “powerful nonsense detector”.
In a 2020 profile of Mirza, Andrew Gimson, the prime minister’s biographer, said she and Johnson were both not easily pigeonholed by ideology. He said: “Of the two of them, she is the more rigorous and scientific, he more inclined to rely on instinct and intuition. But there is an affinity between them, especially as she also possesses, in the words of a senior minister, ‘a wonderful, waspish sense of humour which is attuned to the prime minister’s’.” Her political journey has certainly been a long one. Born in Oldham in 1978 to parents who came to the UK from Pakistan, she went to her local comprehensive school and Oldham sixth form college before studying English at Mansfield College, Oxford. Unlike Johnson, who was president of the Oxford Union and involved in Tory politics, Mirza was a student radical, becoming a member of the Revolutionary Communist party, contributing to its magazine Living Marxism. But she got frustrated at what she saw as the narrow-mindedness of the left, and embarked on the journey across the political spectrum that resulted in her being hired by Policy Exchange, the modernising Tory thinktank, and ultimately took her to Downing Street. One of her most-expressed views has been to contest the idea that challenges faced by black and minority ethnic people in the UK result from structural racism. In 2018, she accused the then universities minister, Sam Gyimah, of “a cynical game of hot potato” after he criticised Oxbridge for failing to admit more black students rather than investigating the deeper causes of the disparity. And she repeatedly criticised the Labour MP David Lammy’s report on the justice system, which was commissioned by David Cameron and expanded under Theresa May. Framing the issue in terms of institutional racism “only clouds the reality of what is happening and in the end could lead to worse outcomes for ethnic minorities”, Mirza claimed in an article for the contrarian website Spiked. • This article was amended on 4 February 2022 to name David Cameron as the prime minister who commissioned the Lammy Review, rather than Theresa May. The latter supported continuation of the review, published in September 2017.