Keith Vaz
Nigel Keith Anthony Standish Vaz is a British politician who served as the Labour Party Member of Parliament for Leicester East for 32 years, from 1987 to 2019. He is the UK Parliament's longest-serving British Asian MP.
Vaz served as the Minister for Europe between October 1999 and June 2001. He was appointed a member of the Privy Council in June 2006. He was Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee from July 2007, but resigned from this role on 6 September 2016 after the Sunday Mirror revealed he had engaged in unprotected sexual activity with male sex workers and had said he would pay for cocaine if they wished to use it.
At the end of October 2016, Vaz was appointed to the Justice Select Committee; a parliamentary vote to block his appointment was defeated. On 10 November 2019, he said in a statement he would not be standing for re-election at the general election the following month.
He stood in the 2024 United Kingdom general election in Leicester East for the One Leicester party. He was consequently expelled from the Labour Party. He failed in his election bid, finishing fifth with 3,681 votes.
Early and personal life
Keith Vaz was born in the British crown colony of Aden, on 26 November 1956, to Anthony Xavier and Merlyn Verona Vaz. The Vaz family hailed from Goa, now an Indian state, which accounts for his Goan-Portuguese surname. Vaz is a distant relative of Saint Joseph Vaz, a 17th-century missionary. He moved to England with his family in 1965, settling in Twickenham.His father, previously a correspondent for The Times of India, worked in the airline industry, while his mother held jobs both as a teacher and simultaneously part-time in Marks & Spencer. Vaz's father took his own life when Vaz was 14. Merlyn Vaz moved to Leicester when her son was selected as prospective parliamentary candidate for the Leicester East constituency. She was elected to Leicester City Council as a Labour councillor and served on the council for 14 years.
While in Aden, Vaz was educated at St Joseph's Convent. In England, he attended Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, followed by Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read law. He graduated from Cambridge University with a BA first-class Honours degree, later promoted to MA.
Vaz has two sisters, Valerie, who has been the MP for Walsall South since 2010, and Penny McConnell, who is a solicitor. He lives in London with his wife, Maria Fernandes, and their two children, a son and a daughter.
Early career
Before his political career, Vaz was a practising solicitor. In 1982, he was employed as a solicitor to Richmond upon Thames London Borough Council; and later as a senior solicitor to the London Borough of Islington. He was selected as the prospective Labour candidate for the Leicester East constituency in 1985. At that time, he found a job in Leicester as a solicitor at the City Council-funded Highfields and Belgrave Law Centre. He remained in this role until his election to Parliament in 1987.Political career
Vaz has been a Labour party member since 1982. In 1983, Vaz stood in the general election as the Labour candidate in the Conservative-Liberal marginal Richmond and Barnes constituency, coming third with a swing away from Labour of 4.3% compared with a national average swing away of 9.3%. He stood as the Labour candidate in the European Parliament election in 1984 for Surrey West, coming third.On 11 June 1987, Vaz was elected as the Member of Parliament for Leicester East by defeating the sitting Tory MP Peter Bruinvels with a majority of 1,924. Three other Labour Party Black Sections members, Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant, entered the House of Commons at the same election.
Vaz was re-elected in 1992, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2017.
Vaz has held a variety of parliamentary posts. Between 1987 and 1992, he was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, of which he was the chair from July 2007 to September 2016. Between 1993 and 1994, he was a member of the Executive Committee Inter-Parliamentary Union. Finally, between December 2002 and July 2007, Vaz acted as a senior Labour Member of the Select Committee for Constitutional Affairs.
In 1992, Vaz was given the role of Shadow Junior Environment Minister with responsibility for planning and regeneration, his first frontbench role. In 1994, the Race Relations Bill, which had first been introduced by Vaz, became law with the support of the UK Government, and which allowed unlimited compensation to be given to those who had suffered racial discrimination. He remained in this position until 1997, when he was given his first Government post as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Attorney General and Solicitor General. Vaz then served as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Lord Chancellor's Department between May and October 1999. This was quickly followed by his appointment as the Minister for Europe, Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He served in this position from October 1999 and June 2001.
Other positions he held included as an elected member of the National Executive Committee and as the vice-chair of Women, Race and Equality Committee of the Labour Party. He held both of these positions since March 2007. Since 2000, he has been a patron of the Labour Party Race Action Group and in 2006 he was appointed the Chairman of the Ethnic Minority Taskforce.
Vaz was also appointed to a public bill committee, which held its first meeting on 15 November 2016, looking at the Criminal Finances Bill which aimed to tackle money laundering and corruption.
Vaz signed several early day motions sponsored by David Tredinnick MP supporting the continued funding of homoeopathy on the National Health Service.
Vaz supported Owen Smith in the 2016 Labour leadership election. He was a parliamentary supporter of Labour Friends of Israel.
Following the vote in October 2019 by MPs to endorse Vaz's suspension the Daily Telegraph published an article asking: "Why is Keith Vaz even in Parliament?" The article noted that: "He resigned as a minister in 2001, was suspended in 2002, named in the 2009 expenses scandal... His ability to survive certainly suggests something in our democratic system is broken."
On 10 November 2019, Vaz released a statement that he would not seek re-election at the 2019 United Kingdom general election that was held the following month. His six-month suspension meant he would have been subject to a recall petition which could trigger a by-election if supported by 10% of his constituents.
Controversies
Rushdie affair
In March 1989, Vaz, a Catholic, led a march of several thousand Muslims in Leicester calling for Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses to be banned, describing the march as "one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain". According to Rushdie's autobiography Joseph Anton, Vaz had a few weeks earlier promised his "full support" to Rushdie, describing the fatwa against him as "absolutely appalling".Leicester IRA attack
In February 1990, after the Provisional Irish Republican Army carried out a bombing attack against a British Armed Forces recruiting centre in Leicester, Vaz caused public outrage by publicly suggesting that the military might have planted the bomb.Filkin inquiry
In February 2000, the Parliamentary standards watchdog Elizabeth Filkin began an investigation after allegations that Vaz had accepted several thousand pounds from a solicitor, Sarosh Zaiwalla, which he had failed to declare. The allegations were made by Andrew Milne, a former partner of Zaiwalla, and were denied by both Vaz and Zaiwalla. He was censured for a single allegation – that he had failed to register two payments worth £4,500 in total from Zaiwalla. Vaz was accused of blocking Filkin's investigation into the allegations.Hinduja affair
In January 2001, immigration minister Barbara Roche revealed in a written Commons reply that Vaz, along with Peter Mandelson and other MPs, had contacted the Home Office about the Hinduja brothers. She said that Vaz had made inquiries about when a decision on their application for citizenship could be expected.On 25 January, Vaz had become the focus of Opposition questions about the Hinduja affair and many parliamentary questions were tabled, demanding that he fully disclose his role. Vaz said via a Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesman that he would be "fully prepared" to answer questions put to him by Sir Anthony Hammond, QC, who had been asked by the Prime Minister to carry out an inquiry into the affair.
Vaz had known the Hinduja brothers for some time; he had been present when the charitable Hinduja Foundation was set up in 1993, and also delivered a speech in 1998 when the brothers invited Tony and Cherie Blair to a Diwali celebration.
On 26 January 2001, Conservative MP John Redwood accused Prime Minister Tony Blair of prejudicing the independent inquiry into the Hinduja passport affair, after Blair declared that the FCO minister Keith Vaz had not done "anything wrong". On the same day, Vaz told reporters that they would "regret" their behaviour once the facts of the case were revealed. "Some of you are going to look very foolish when this report comes out. Some of the stuff you said about Peter, and about others and me, you'll regret very much when the facts come out", he said. When asked why the passport application of one of the Hinduja brothers had been processed more quickly than normal, being processed and sanctioned in six months when the process can take up to two years, he replied, "It is not unusual."
On 29 January, the government confirmed that the Hinduja Foundation had held a reception for Vaz in September 1999 to celebrate his appointment as the first Asian Minister in recent times. The party was not listed by Vaz in House of Commons register of Members' Interests, and Redwood, then head of the Conservative Parliamentary Campaigns Unit, questioned Vaz's judgement in accepting the hospitality.
In March, Vaz was ordered to co-operate fully with a new inquiry launched into his financial affairs by Elizabeth Filkin. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Vaz's superior, also urged him to answer fully allegations about his links with the Hinduja brothers. Vaz met Filkin on 20 March to discuss a complaint that the Hinduja Foundation had given £1,200 to Mapesbury Communications, a company run by his wife, in return for helping to organise a Hinduja-sponsored reception at the House of Commons. Vaz had previously denied receiving money from the Hindujas, but said that he made no personal gain from the transaction in question.
In June 2001, Vaz said that he had made representations during the Hinduja brothers' applications for British citizenship while a backbench MP. Tony Blair also admitted that Vaz had "made representations" on behalf of other Asians.
On 11 June 2001, Vaz was dismissed from his post as Europe Minister, to be replaced by Peter Hain. The Prime Minister's office said that Vaz had written to Tony Blair stating his wish to stand down for health reasons.
In December 2001, Filkin cleared Vaz of failing to register payments to his wife's law firm by the Hinduja brothers, but said that he had colluded with his wife to conceal the payments. Filkin's report said that the payments had been given to his wife for legal advice on immigration issues and concluded that Vaz had gained no direct personal benefit, and that Commons rules did not require him to disclose payments made to his wife. She did, however, criticise him for his secrecy, saying, "It is clear to me there has been deliberate collusion over many months between Mr Vaz and his wife to conceal this fact and to prevent me from obtaining accurate information about his possible financial relationship with the Hinduja family".