Tulip Siddiq has been Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, beforehand Hampstead and Kilburn, since 2015.
When Labour received energy in July, she was appointed financial secretary to the Treasury and Metropolis minister, accountable for the UK’s monetary companies sector.
She is a niece of Bangladesh’s longest-serving prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, who was overthrown by a pro-democracy rebellion earlier this yr.
She has now been named in an investigation into claims her household embezzled practically £4bn from the nation’s infrastructure initiatives.
A supply near her known as these “trumped up prices”.
Siddiq’s father was a college professor within the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, and her mom was given political asylum within the UK because the teenage sister of Sheikh Hasina.
They met and married in London, and later moved their household – Siddiq has an elder brother and a youthful sister – to Hampstead.
Raised as a Muslim, Siddiq stated the household “embraced multicultural Britain… within the coronary heart of the [local] Jewish neighborhood”.
As a toddler, she met Nelson Mandela, Invoice Clinton and Mom Teresa, and her household have been invited to the White Home.
Her maternal grandfather was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first president. He and most of his household have been assassinated when troopers stormed their residence in Dhaka in a navy coup in 1975.
Siddiq’s mom and aunt survived as a result of they have been overseas.
Siddiq joined the Labour Get together on the age of 16, later giving the NHS and the care her disabled father as the primary cause.
She named former cupboard minister Barbara Citadel as her political heroine, and has described her mom and maternal aunt as “two very robust feminists”.
Pre-politics, she labored for Amnesty Worldwide, Save The Youngsters and the Better London Authority, amongst others.
By 2010, she was working with Ed Miliband’s profitable marketing campaign for the Labour management, additionally spending time as a particular adviser to former cupboard minister Tessa Jowell.
She had additionally been elected to Camden council in north London. After former Oscar-winning actress Glenda Jackson introduced she was standing down as an MP, Siddiq was chosen as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for the Hampstead and Kilburn seat.
Elected to Parliament within the 2015 common election, Siddiq was one in all 36 Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the get together management, however she backed Andy Burnham in that election.
She can be re-elected in 2017, 2019 and 2024 with a lot bigger majorities.
Appointed a shadow schooling minister in 2016, she resigned from the entrance bench three months later to vote in opposition to triggering Brexit.
Siddiq might be finest recognized for campaigning for the launch of her constituent, British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was detained in Iran for practically six years.
In 2017, whereas campaigning for Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s launch, Siddiq was requested in a Channel 4 Information interview why she had not challenged her aunt, who had been accused of main an authoritarian authorities in Bangladesh responsible of human rights abuses.
A row ensued, the programme’s editor complained her behaviour to a pregnant producer had been “threatening”, and Siddiq apologised.
She married in 2013. Two days earlier than she gave delivery to her second little one in 2019, she attended the Commons in a wheelchair for an essential Brexit vote. Later that month, after a rule change, she grew to become the primary MP to vote by proxy.
