"You Are Scared”: Uma Kumaran Says Abuse Nearly Made Her Give Up Dreams Of Being An MP
9 min read
Former Keir Starmer aide Uma Kumaran talks to Harriet Symonds about working for Loto, a gloomy economic forecast, and fears for her safety. Photography by Louise Haywood-Schiefer
“Being in the public eye, there’s an elevated level of being aware of where you are and who you’re with,” says Uma Kumaran. “In the back of your mind, you are scared.”
The new Labour MP for Stratford and Bow, 36, sits down with The House just hours after having security fitted at her home – a necessity now that she is an MP.
“Someone said they were going to rape me. I’ve had some horrible stuff,” Kumaran says. On one occasion during the campaign, she says a man driving past her mounted the curb with two children in the backseat and started hurling abuse about Gaza: “He said he hoped I’d die and suffer and get raped.”
But reporting incidents of serious threats of violence to the police has led nowhere. “I’ve never had any action taken with anything,” she says.
The daughter of Tamil refugees who fled the civil war in Sri Lanka, Kumaran grew up in Harrow with the support of a “close-knit” Tamil community that became her extended family.
In 2015 Kumaran unsuccessfully stood for Parliament in her hometown Harrow East. But after enduring a “vile” election campaign, that at the time she branded “unashamedly religiously divisive”, she was adamant that she would never stand for Parliament again.
“It was the test campaign for what they ran the next summer for the Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq campaign,” she explains, referring to the Conservative Party’s controversial 2016 mayoral campaign which was marred by accusations of Islamophobia.
Despite being asked to stand at every election since, it is only now – nearly a decade later – that she felt ready to try again.
But her introduction to the job hasn’t been easy. Kumaran lost her grandmother, Kamala, during the election campaign and on her first day in the Commons as a new MP her husband Jacob suffered a stroke. “I’ve had a tough election, when I look back on it,” she says. “I’m usually not this unlucky.”
After the news about her husband broke, Kumaran received overwhelming support from her new parliamentary colleagues. “We’re a very collegiate bunch,” she says, recalling a gesture they made at her swearing in ceremony. “Calvin Bailey organised for some colleagues to come and sit there so that I was not being sworn in on my own. I was just blown away. There were 40 or 50 MPs there, loads of people I’d never met before. It was really, really heartwarming. And I remember looking up and feeling quite choked up, and I’m not really that emotional a person.”
“I had a message from Keir [Starmer] at the time as well, who was at NATO,” she adds. “He was really busy, but still made the time to find out if he was okay – and so did most of the Cabinet.”
Kumaran was passionate about politics growing up but says she didn’t see it as a career straightaway. The first in her family to attend university, she read politics at Queen Mary before studying for a master’s in public policy. “My mum was still holding out hope that I’d become a doctor or accountant or lawyer – the Asian route of aspiration.”
After graduating she “stumbled” upon the w4mp recruitment site and landed a job working for Dawn Butler. She later became a senior adviser for the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, before eventually joining ‘Loto’, the name for the leader of the opposition’s office.
“I was in Loto in the tough days. It’s no secret that it was a really tough time,” says Kumaran who joined Starmer’s office in 2020, mid-way through the Covid-19 pandemic and at a crucial period of rebuilding for the party. “In the Labour Party, it was like a bad breakup, it was a tough time. You had the remnants of the Corbyn era still around.
Boris is the most predictable opponent of all time for PMQs... People give him more credit than he’s worth, he’s not some master politician
“Lots of sensible people had left the Labour Party and lots of people with experience had gone on to do other jobs outside of politics. It was almost a reforming of the band, but it was a new band because not all of us had worked together.”
As deputy director of parliamentary affairs for a little over 18 months, she helped the Labour leader with weekly PMQs preparation against Boris Johnson. “Boris is the most predictable opponent of all time for PMQs. There is not one week where he did or said something that we hadn’t pre-empted. People give him more credit than he’s worth, he’s not some master politician.”
But finding the right strategy for Starmer at PMQs proved a challenge. “He is used to being the director of public prosecutions, and he wants to prosecute an argument a certain way. As a team we’re trying to put him into the bear pit of PMQs, but actually, he won that fight with us.”
Kumaran joins Parliament with more knowledge than most about parliamentary process and with relationships with many of the key players in the Prime Minister’s top team.
One longtime friend and former colleague is Starmer’s senior aide Morgan McSweeney. “The joy of having worked in the tough times in Loto is you know who your friends are. With Morgan I’ve worked with him nearly a decade ago now, I’ve been there to see Morgan bring the party back from the brink.”
There are rumblings of a power struggle between McSweeney and Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray. Kumaran won’t confirm whether a rift exists but hints that the relationship is not entirely harmonious. “Politics is a tough field to be in, you might have some frank conversations, you might have some difficult conversations. I’m sure both of them probably do.”
And there’s not much for Labour to be happy about, with a gloomy economic forecast looming over the upcoming Autumn Budget. Keir Starmer has warned it will be “painful” after claiming to have found a £22bn black hole in the public finances, hinting at possible tax rises and spending cuts.
Kumaran accepts this is the likely outcome: “Coming in and seeing now that there’s been this £22bn black hole, it’s even worse than what we thought. As a result of that, if people have to pay a bit more, that might be what’s ahead.”
“People voted for a change. I don’t think people thought it was going to be easy,” she insists. “There are some really tough choices ahead and Keir is not playing politics with this. He’s being a true leader and telling people that there are some really difficult decisions ahead. We have inherited an absolute disaster.”
The day prior to our interview, a fire broke out in a tower block in Dagenham, one of Kumaran’s neighbouring constituencies. The building was known to have non-compliant cladding and residents had raised safety concerns. After the tragedy of Grenfell, there is great urgency to see justice served. “This is London 2024, this shouldn’t be happening,” says Kumaran. “Bad housing associations need to be held to account. Bad building management needs to be held to account. We’ve got a strong set of new MPs that are not afraid to be tough on it.”
Unsafe cladding is still being removed from tower blocks across London, but it has been a slow process. “I need to contact the other East London MPs and say, right, should we get together here and write to the housing team and see what we can get done a bit quicker.”
“We’ve got flats that are un-mortgageable at the moment because of cladding issues. It’s caused real distress to people”, she adds.
The housing crisis is already a huge challenge for the new Labour government. Kumaran’s former boss Sadiq Khan has long been in favour of imposing rent controls in the capital to combat the rising cost of housing – but she disagrees with him on this issue.
“I grew up watching Friends and always wondered, ‘how do they afford to live there’? And then I found out that there was this thing called rent control. I didn’t understand why we didn’t have that in London at the time. But now that I’m older I don’t know how something like that would be possible,” explains Kumaran.
If we want London to be a 24-hour city, you need to feel safe as well
The way out of the housing crisis, she believes, is by building more affordable houses. “I’m definitely a Yimby,” she insists. “But the question is, who is this development affordable to? I don’t want to see locals being priced out.
“You want to be able to live and thrive in a city as vibrant and as fun as London, but people are living to work, not working to live, at the moment and that’s not okay.”
For any London MP, rising crime is a huge issue and phone theft in particular is now rife. “I had my phone stolen in London last year and it’s horrible,” says Kumaran.
Both the Met police and London Mayor have been criticised for allowing phone theft to become all but decriminalised in the capital. Kumaran, loyal to a fault, defends her former boss’ record, placing blame on police cuts during Boris Johnson’s time in office. “We’ve had over a billion pounds in real terms cut in police funding since the last government was in. Boris Johnson had an abysmal track record as Mayor of London, and then became prime minister and continued the cuts,” she insists. “He closed a number of local police stations. We didn’t see bobbies on the beat.”
“You shouldn’t have that feeling of not being able to walk out and about,” she adds. “If we want London to be a 24-hour city, you need to feel safe as well.”
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