‘He’s Not Your Typical Tory’
During his time as leader of Wandsworth Council, Ravi Govindia’s rhetoric oscillated between ideological and pragmatic, drawing in part on his experiences as a teenage refugee from Uganda.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.
Content warnings: Anti-Asian racism; Death; Islamophobia.
This is the second post in a three-part series on Ravi Govindia, who arrived in Southwest England as a teenager in 1972, he and his family being among the approximately 28,000 Ugandans of Asian heritage who resettled in the country in 1972 after being expelled by the Idi Amin regime, and subsequently became a Conservative councillor and later council leader for Wandsworth in Southwest London. In the first part (see below), I explored how Govindia publicly characterised his experiences of life in Uganda, expulsion, and resettlement, focusing in particular in his contribution to two panel discussions: an episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Reunion programme in 2012, coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of expulsion; and an event at Arundells in Salisbury in 2022 to mark the fiftieth anniversary.
This follow-up piece looks more squarely at Govindia’s career as a Conservative politician. It traces his rise to and time as council leader, amid the party’s long period of unbroken rule in Wandsworth, and explores the ideological dimensions of the rhetoric he espoused during the latter period. It then examines how he, and others, more specifically defined his principles and career as a Conservative politician in relation to his experiences as a former refugee. In the forthcoming final part of the trilogy, I will bring those two components together and reflect more broadly on what Govindia, his backstory, and political career can tell us about the history of British Conservatism, and indeed British politics more generally, since the 1970s.
Govindia, Wandsworth, and Conservatism
Wandsworth long held a reputation as the Conservatives’ greatest metropolitan success story, with the party running the council from 1978 until 2022. During Margaret Thatcher’s time as national party leader, it pioneered at a local level policies such as right-to-buy that would subsequently be rolled out nationally. While elections in the borough were relatively closely contested with Labour over the 1980s, the Conservatives won the vast majority of seats on the council over successive elections in the 1990s and 2000s, when Labour were otherwise for the most part ascendant nationwide and in London. This period of success largely coincided with the leadership of Eddie Lister, during which time Wandsworth developed a reputation for low levels of council tax, widespread privatisation of services, and low levels of social housing construction.
Lister stepped down in 2011 to take over as then Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s chief of staff. He was succeeded by Ravi Govindia, who had himself sat on the council since 1982, representing Nightingale ward until 2010, and subsequently East Putney. Under Govindia, the council continued to pursue retrenchment in expenditure on public services, and piloted projects the new Coalition government intended to implement nationally, such as ending lifetime social housing tenancies. This was also a period of significant regeneration in the district, most notably the redevelopment of the former Battersea Power Station and the surrounding Nine Elms district, and the extension of the Northern Line into the area. This pro-development stance could, however, be a source of controversy, as when the Guardian reported that his friend, former fellow councillor, and lobbyist Peter Bingle had sought to use his connections with Govindia to smooth the passage of major property developments in the borough.
During Govindia’s time as leader, the Conservatives’ dominance in Wandsworth eroded, rather in line with the party’s declining vote in London more generally. In 2020, he survived a vote of no confidence from the council’s Conservative group amid fears of impending defeat in the next local election. Sure enough, Govindia’s time as council leader ended when in 2022 Labour won a majority of seats in the borough for the first time in 44 years (although Govindia retained his seat). It was a result that he and others attributed in part to the Partygate scandal that was eviscerating the Conservatives’ standing nationally. In opposition, Will Sweet subsequently succeeded Govindia as the leader of the party on the council. In 2026, Wandsworth moved into no overall control, with the Conservatives – holding exactly half the seats on the council – forming the new administration; Govindia again narrowly held his seat.
Govindia’s Conservative rhetoric
Over his eleven years as council leader, Govindia often deployed the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility, conditionality, and aspiration, but also of active government, securing of central state largesse, and community-mindedness. The former register was evident in a piece he wrote for Conservative Home after Thatcher died in 2013, celebrating Wandsworth’s status as her ‘favourite council’:
Margaret’s genius was her intuitive understanding of what really motivated hard-working people. They did not want hand-outs or suffocating state socialism – they just wanted the chance to create a better life – for themselves and their family.
There was no more enthusiastic advocate of council tenants’ right to buy than Wandsworth. Our residents could see that for the first time here was the chance to build the kind of asset that others from more privileged backgrounds took for granted.
He adopted a similar tone in justifying Wandsworth Council’s new policy of giving borough residents in or actively seeking work priority when allocating social housing, explaining in a guest article for the Guardian in 2011 that ‘we are using fixed term tenancies to offer a package of support to people. It is essentially a contract; we will do our bit if you are prepared to do yours.’
Govindia proved equally adept, however, as his leadership of the council went on, in speaking the language of local boosterism. Writing for the Local Government Chronicle following the opening of the Northern Line extension to Nine Elms and Battersea in the borough in 2021, he stressed the council’s early partnership with George Osborne as Chancellor and Boris Johnson as Mayor in facilitating the project, with funding for the project borrowed against future business rates. He argued it was right for councils like Wandsworth ‘to be in the front seat when it comes to place making and regeneration because if we do not champion our communities and businesses, who will?’ He was also not shy of making capital from political opponents’ praise, playing up here former Labour minister Alan Milburn’s endorsement of its record on social mobility and Mayor Sadiq Khan’s of its housing agenda.
This latter positioning echoed elements of the ‘levelling-up’ agenda that Boris Johnson briefly promoted during his time as prime minister, previously pioneered by Putney MP and Conservative government minister Justine Greening. Govindia also at times combined localist with environmentalist rhetoric, denouncing Thames Water’s plans to install a combined sewer overflow in Barn Elms playing fields when he first became leader, and later proposals to expand Heathrow Airport for the negative impact they would have on local residents. He also voiced his ambition ‘to make Wandsworth inner London’s greenest borough, together with our commitment to be carbon neutral by 2030’.
However, the second half of the 2010s was also one in which the more socially liberal brand of Conservatism that had been integral to David Cameron’s previous overhaul of the party’s image lost out nationally and globally to a more reactionary and often racially exclusionary version. This contributed to both the narrow vote in favour of Britain leaving the EU in the June 2016 referendum, and then in November, of Donald Trump’s victory in the US Presidential Election. Both episodes had implications for Wandsworth. The 2011 census had demonstrated a substantial rise in the numbers of EU citizens living in the borough (accounting for nearly 8% of its total population) – a fact Govindia had welcomed at the time. Unsurprisingly, Wandsworth voted 75% in favour of remaining in the EU in the referendum. Meanwhile, the US Embassy was set to relocate to Nine Elms in 2018 as part of the regeneration project in the district
Shortly after assuming the presidency at the start of 2017, Trump announced a 90-day travel ban on citizens from seven different Muslim-majority countries. The Labour group on the council responded with a motion for Govindia to sign a joint-letter with their own leader Simon Hogg to the US ambassador condemning the decision. Labour councillor Aydin Dikerdem argued during the debate on the motion that the fact some 4,000 residents of the borough originated from affected countries made this an issue of local significance. Nonetheless, the Conservative majority on the council voted the motion down. Govindia explained at the time:
I share the distress caused by Mr Trump’s divisive and ill-conceived policy.
Sadly, across the world there are many political leaders who, like Mr Trump, pass deeply unjust laws and persecute people based on their faith.
This is clearly wrong but it is not the role of local councils to hold foreign governments to account and our residents understand that our attention is focussed on the services they pay us to deliver.
Yet later that same year, Govindia was also one of three Conservative London council leaders who sought to rise above the fray of UK-EU negotiations by appealing directly to EU chief negotiator Michael Barnier to prioritise securing the rights of EU nationals living in the city. Their joint letter asserted:
We consider EU nationals living in our boroughs as our citizens. Most come here to work and, through their work, they create important economic ties between businesses in London and other parts of the EU.
Many of them are raising their children and contribute a great deal to our communities here. We are proud to serve them and it is our job to represent their interests.
Therefore we asking for these London families to be treated fairly. They should not have to wait for so long to have their residential status confirmed.
From a Ugandan Asian to a Conservative subjectivity
When characterising himself, and being characterised, as a Conservative politician, Govindia’s roots as an Ugandan Asian and former refugee were often a component of the narrative. Upon being announced as new leader of Wandsworth Council in 2011, he told his fellow councillors:
I came to this country with aspirations and I hope to provide that for people in this borough. I am proud to take on this role and I hope to make you all proud.
Interviewed by the Wandsworth Guardian shortly afterwards, he located this backstory and his experience of expulsion at the centre of his political journey and ideals:
When you have lost everything, when the state has taken all your possessions and freedom and has chewed you up, it’s inevitable that you feel that what you have lost is important and that you must do something so that it doesn’t happen again.
I saw the Conservative party as the party of opportunity, the party of choice, a party of small state and scepticism of the state and it chimed with my own view.
Having worked for Conservative Central Office, Govindia attributed his decision to run for the council in the first instance to a desire to rectify what he saw as the failed outcomes of socialism or more specifically the housing policy of 1970s Wandsworth’s Labour administration, in Balham, where he lived:
It was a desire to be part of a process which helps shape the community I live in. There’s no point moaning about something going wrong and then saying I'm not going to do anything about it. I wasn’t prepared to sit at the back, I’d much rather say I’ll see what I can do and maybe I’ll change it.
Around the same time, he nodded to the political impact of expulsion on him in talking to Conservative Home about his plans for the council:
My experiences have led me to place a high value on individual freedom and personal choice. I want young people in Wandsworth to have the choice of owning a stake in their home. I want parents to have the choice about which school to send their child and I want to find ways of letting more homes on local estates to people who are working to encourage self-help and investment in the local economy.
There is a coherent articulation of a political subjectivity here: having experienced dispossession of home and possessions, from a position of relative group privilege, by an over-mighty and kleptocratic government in the ostensible name of fairness, Govindia instead championed individual liberty and aspiration, in the face of which the state ought never to be an encumbrance. Yet he also touched on the idea of individual service to the common good as an equally necessary antidote to tyranny.
When Govindia was awarded a CBE in 2017, Peter Bingle wrote an enthusiastic piece for Comment Central about his friend and former colleague and why he was so deserving of such an honour. He began by touching on Govindia and his family’s expulsion from Uganda in 1972: ‘They arrived in the United Kingdom thanks to Edward Heath and despite the opposition of the Labour Party.’ He proceeded to champion Govindia’s calibre and tenacity as a politician:
Ravi was always a very special kind of Tory. He was never tribal, even more surprising considering his Ugandan pedigree! Every issue was analysed in detail and his speeches at Committee and Council were always analytical and forensic, often to the despair of [Lister’s predecessor as council leader] Paul Beresford and Eddie Lister. The only time he ever voted against the whip was following (and caused by) one of my more radical speeches!
Reflecting on the time they spent living together in a flat in Earlsfield, Bingle joked that during that time he ‘essentially became a Hindu’, adding ‘I loved the experience of meeting great people from a community that I had never had the privilege to meet before.’ Yet this Conservative brand of multiculturalism came with a qualification that drew a different relationship between Govindia’s background and his capabilities as a politician:
In today’s politics there is so much debate about race and opportunity. Many of the so-called leaders of the minority community are hopeless and wouldn’t be there if they were white. Ravi is the exception that proves the rule. He is one of the leading council leaders in the whole of the UK. The fact that he comes from Uganda merely adds to his narrative.
Bingle connected Govindia to the new political agenda of the then still relatively new prime minister Theresa May (a politician whom Bingle would would soon become far more derisory about): ‘Ravi epitomises one nation Toryism at a time when there is so much bitterness and division in politics.’ He concluded affectionately: ‘My mum loved him and she was right to do so.’
There was a striking paradox in Bingle’s narrative. On the one hand, he routinely defined Govindia’s specialness as a Conservative – and his own fondness for Govindia as a friend – in relation to markers of his ethnicity, vesting almost moral purpose in his politics being distinctive from Wandsworth’s more partisan and ideological Thatcherite mainstream (which Bingle belonged to). On the other, he also portrayed Govindia’s uniqueness as an ethnic minority politician by dint of this same exceptionalism, categorising the majority of other minority politicians as products of racial favouritism rather than the meritocracy that he deemed Govindia and most white politicians to belong to.
The narrative of exceptionalism recurred five years later in a profile Dave Hill – no enthusiast for Wandsworth Conservatism historically – wrote of Govindia for his OnLondon site, which began:
The person who introduced us said “he’s not your typical Tory” and that is patently true of his early life. Ravi Govindia was 17 when he arrived in Britain from Uganda with his family in 1972, one of 27,200 people of South Asian descent who came to the country after being expelled by the despot Idi Amin.
Hill’s subsequent interview with Govindia touched on familiar ground, including his time working as a bus conductor (with Govindia recalling how he would regularly let passengers off their fares). As for his passage into Conservative politics, there was again an element of the disavowal of the 1970s political status quo, albeit couched in a degree of self-depreciation:
He joined the Conservatives through [Queen Mary] student union, largely for social reasons, though his politics became more serious during what he calls “the second of the miners’ elections”, back in February 1974.1 By then he’d moved south and west. “I walked into the Tories’ Battersea South office and said, ‘Can I help?’”
Yet Govindia also highlighted later in the same interview the extent to which, in the present, his leadership of the council marked a break from his predecessors: ‘They made their names by making it the borough that saved the most…In its time that was right, but times changed and we needed to change gear. It’s about taking a holistic view.’
This was a marked shift from his wholesale embrace of that lineage in his earlier days as leader, perhaps in part due to the severity of the challenge Labour posed in the impending local elections, when – as Hill put it – ‘Wandsworth was a firmly remain borough, where some residents who’ve voted Tory in the past might find Keir Starmer’s Labour more to their liking than Boris Johnson’s Brexit-bragging anti-London government’. Whereas Bingle had previously previously drawn Govindia’s political trajectory as being from refugee to embodying a new Conservative mainstream, in Hill’s account that same trajectory marked him as now swimming against the tide of a far more nativist, anti-metropolitan variety.
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Idi Amin: Lion of Africa (2010)
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