There is one thing Britain's first Muslim cabinet minister and the president of the United States have in common — they share the same middle name, "Hussain".

The similarity ends there. While President Barack Obama has spent his years in the White House battling "accusations" from conservative hawks who believe him to be a "secret Muslim" — Baroness Sayeeda Warsi is both a conservative and a proud Muslim. And what is more, the Tory party co-chairman tells Weekend Review she doesn't see why the United Kingdom shouldn't have a prime minister who is Muslim. "When we had a Jewish prime minister of this country," she says, "there were huge challenges for the British Jewish community at the time, and despite that we came through that. I don't see why there shouldn't be. I think you need to have a person with good leadership, the strength, courage, principles and the right values to lead. What their religious background is, what their racial background is, I think adds to them — I don't think it detracts from that."

The interview with Warsi takes place in the majestic House of Lords building at Westminster. At the appointed time the press officer leads me to her office. When I enter, Warsi is at her desk. She gets up to greet me with a friendly Asalam o alaikum. We shake hands. As I ease into my chair, the baroness is already firing away questions in my direction. She wants to know where I come from, if I had studied journalism at university?

I assure her that journalism cannot be learnt at university, although I acknowledge having attended a course at one. Suddenly mindful of who is meant to be conducting the interrogation, I hastily turn on the dictaphone.

We begin with Warsi's childhood. She was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, in 1971 in a working-class household. Her father had migrated from Pakistan about 50 years ago to work in the mills. She describes her upbringing as "traditional", with lots of Pakistani culture and Islam.

While Warsi was out having "adventures", her father was working hard to provide for the family. She has memories of him doing various jobs — as a factory worker, bus conductor and a taxi driver. When she was a teenager, he started his own business and in time he became a very successful bed manufacturer. But she never forgot her working-class roots.

"There was a sense of responsibility," she says. "We didn't demand things because we realised how hard abu jan worked to get the things that he gave us." Because her family wasn't in the income bracket, Warsi received state support to study Law in university.

In 2002 Warsi left the UK to live in Pakistan for almost a year. She was based in Islamabad and worked on a series of projects, such as looking at human rights legislation and covering the issue of forced marriages. Over the weekend she would visit various villages. It was at this point, when she was in her thirties, that Warsi decided to turn her attention to politics. "I came back and I felt that my country could be better," she says. "I think sometimes being away from somewhere makes you realise how much of a role you have to play."

The first time she met Prime Minister David Cameron was when he visited her constituency in Yorkshire, back when he was shadow minister for education. "But then I suppose the big kind of defining moment in many ways came when he put in his bid for leadership," she recalls. It was a major conference in Blackpool in 2005 where contestants were expected to make speeches for the leadership. The location was not too far from Dewsbury and Cameron came to visit Warsi for a project she was involved in. She then went to introduce him at the conference in Blackpool for his speech.

"If you ever watch that speech, his first few words are ‘thank you, Sayeeda'," she says. "And then he tells a joke about me." And what was the joke? It was that "when Michael Howard first met Sayeeda, he came back and he said to me and George Osborne, ‘If that girl ever gets into parliament she is going to make your life difficult — or something like that'. And so I always say to him I am your good luck charm."

It turned out to be a fateful speech because soon after Cameron was chosen as the new leader of the Conservative Party. Since then, Warsi's own public profile in the British media has grown. In 2009 she was chosen by a panel as "Britain's most powerful Muslim woman". The same year she drew media interest when she was bizarrely pelted with eggs by a group of Muslim protesters in Luton. After the Tories came to power in 2010, Warsi made international headlines as the party's first Muslim chairman. Last year she attracted both applause and criticism when she said prejudice against Muslims had "passed the dinner-table test".

But while Warsi's public forays into religion have offered an entertaining side-show, the British people's real concern with the Tory party has been the harsh austerity measures it has adopted to deal with the economic downturn. Therefore it is to the topic of "cuts" in public spending that our discussion inevitably turns to.

"I have a lot of discussions where I go and speak to women's groups," Warsi says. "I always ask them the question: If you suddenly found out that the income was lower than the spending, and your husband had gone out and spent a lot of money on the credit cards which you didn't even know about, what would you do? And the women always say that they would stop spending, they would look at cheaper alternatives, they would try and increase their income."

One particularly sensitive topic has been the increase in university tuition fees for local students in Britain. In November 2010 the Tory party headquarters in Millbank Tower, London, was attacked by hundreds of protesting students. At the time Warsi was actually inside the building. "I wasn't scared for myself," she recalls. "I am a huge believer in fate, kismat — you know if it is meant to happen, it will. But I was scared for the people around me — my team." The media reported that windows were smashed and graffiti sprayed, causing tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage.

Warsi doesn't want to give me too many details on what happened that day, explaining it as still an ongoing case. "What I would say is that, it was a very terrifying experience." Warsi and her immediate team were the last to leave the building when it was evacuated. "For me this is what that day was about," she says. "To make sure that everyone is safe."

But for the vast majority of the 50,000 protesters who did not break in and resort to violence, that day was also about raising their voice against rising tuition fees. I point out to Warsi comments she made in a TV interview while on a trip to Pakistan. She had said she could not have risen to have the same career opportunity in Pakistan as the one Britain has given her. "It's true," she says.

One of the differences between the dev-eloped world and the developing is, in the latter, the more financially well-off are the ones who get to send their children to the good schools and colleges. While not on the same scale, isn't there something similar happening with the rise in tuition-fees in Britain? I ask. "But there is a big difference between opportunity and a safety net," she insists. "In this country there will always be a safety net for people who are unable to work," she says, "who can't find a job or who through illness need support. There will always be the safety net of the National Health Service where you will always get treatment to the point of need. There should always be a good state-paid education system, which is why we are investing so much in free schools, in academies — you know that is absolutely what we are as a nation. But I think even more than that is opportunities."

Still, many don't see her party's logic in its austerity measures. Last year, hundreds of thousands of angry protesters took to the streets as the Tories made deep cuts in various sectors. Does she blame the previous government for a lot of the mess the country is in? "I think Labour is to be absolutely blamed for a lot of the mess," Warsi concurs, no surprises there. "But then it is nothing new. If you go through history, every time Labour come in they spend, and they spend, and they spend. And then they leave the country in a mess. And then we have to come along and we have to start clearing up the mess again. I mean history dictates that."

Being a Tory Muslim

Would she like to be prime minister one day?

"No," she says. "One, it wouldn't happen. And second, I wouldn't want it to." Why? "It wouldn't happen because you can't be a prime minister if you are member of the House of Lords. You have to be a member of the Commons. But also in terms of my political ambitions, I like to deal with issues. And there are certain issues I would love to be involved with, there are certain jobs that I would love to do. The prime minister's job — I see how David deals with it, the pressures of that job, the sacrifices that he makes. And I just don't feel I am up to making those sacrifices. And therefore it is not something that I think of, want or would like to do."

However, she believes there is no reason why someone else from the ethnic minority cannot become prime minister of Britain. "Nobody ever predicted that a black man would become the president of the US," she says. "I think, in Britain, those barriers had never been placed. We have had a Jewish prime minister in the Conservative Party. We have had a female prime minister in the Conservative Party. So there is no reason why a black or an Asian person can't be a prime minister of this country. You know, I would be delighted if they were actually from the Conservative Party."

Since they came to power, what does she see as her party's greatest achievement? "Being a stable place in a very unstable world," she says. "We are in charge of our own financial destiny as much as you can be in the world that you live in. Where you have got the IMF and the eurozone telling countries what to do. We don't have people telling us what to do."

The recent decision by Prime Minister David Cameron to reject a treaty aimed at tightening fiscal rules across the eurozone appeared to some observers to have left the country isolated in Europe. Britain has also been resisting pressure to contribute billions to save the euro, a currency the country is not even a part of, Warsi says.

At present, in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the big challenge she faces as Tory co-chairman is for her party to win a full majority in the next election. For that, the party needs to tap into a different kind of voter base. "I think the party realises that unless we win over more members of non-white Britain to vote for us," Warsi says, "we can't win an outright majority."

But despite someone like Warsi at the helm of the party, courting ethnic-minority voters remains something of a struggle for the party. "One of the things that I have been concerned about for many years," Warsi says, "is that where you have large communities who are an ethnic minority whose values are very much conservative in the way they live their lives — entrepreneurship, the community of small businesses — and who so share our values, they don't translate into votes for the Conservative Party."

The role of religion in society is one of the points of differences between the two parties. For one the Tories have not been shy to "do God". In a recent speech in Oxford, Cameron said that Britain is a Christian country and "we should not be afraid to say so". Warsi herself in a newspaper article called for Christians in Britain, alongside members of other religions, to be "proud" of their faith — just as she is "proud" of her Muslim faith.

Certainly she appears to be quite at ease with her Islamic identity in an age when Muslims attract a lot of negative media attention. "The reality is that the world is very interested in religion at the moment," Warsi says. "And the world is very interested in Islam, for all sorts of reasons, rightly and wrongly. And so therefore that is a part of your identity which I am very proud of. You know I am a practising Muslim — I don't try and hide it. I don't make any secret of it, and therefore people define you. And I suppose where you get so many bad news stories sometimes of people who are from the Muslim faith and have done bad things, it is sometimes good to hear about the fact that people have done extremely well. And you know what? They also happen to be Muslim."

So it gives her pride when someone describes her as Britain's first Muslim cabinet minister?

"I don't think pride is the right word," she says. "I hope what it does do is not what it does for me, rather what it does do for others. I hope the message that goes out when somebody defines me like that, is to everybody who is in this country who is Muslim: if she can do, it I can do it. That actually, it is not an impossibility any more."

 

Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.