An Indian-born Conservative (Tory) Party donor has warned that Britain will be viewed as “racist” if Rishi Sunak, who is of Indian heritage, loses the contest to replace Boris Johnson, despite the party favourite being Kemi Badenoch, a black woman of Nigerian heritage.
74-year-old Rami Ranger — elevated to the House of Lords as the Lord Ranger in late 2019 — has donated some £1.54 million to the Conservative Party and Conservative Members of Parliament (MPs) through his Sun Mark supply and distribution company since 2009, according to The Telegraph, is backing Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, to replace Boris Johnson as Tory leader and, by extension, Prime Minister.
“If people reject him, it will be a bad name for the party and the country because this will be perceived as racist,” Lord Ranger is said to have told the Indian media.
“And so there is pressure on them to prove that here race does not matter. Calibre matters, and Rishi’s calibre is above everyone. I am optimistic that people here will be fair and will not reject anyone on the basis of race,” he added.
Ranger underlined the point in a further email statement to Insider, warning that “[i]f the majority of [Conservative Party] members overwhelmingly reject Rishi Sunak, it will create a negative perception in the minds of ethnic communities,” appearing to try and guilt-trip his audience by adding: “It does not matter what I say [about racism]; what matters is which way the public vote.”
Sunak has significantly more supporters among Tory MPs than rival candidate Liz Truss, winning every MPs-only round of the leadership contest handily, but is predicted to lose the membership vote by a wide margin, possibly because he is viewed as having betrayed the still-popular Johnson, and also because, somewhat bizarrely, he is campaigning on a platform of opposing tax cuts.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) acolyte also has the dubious distinction of being the Chinese Communist Party’s candidate of choice.
Curiously, Ranger does not appear to have implied that Tory MPs’ failure to support anti-woke candidate Kemi Badenoch, a Nigerian-heritage black woman who was the favourite for Tory leader among ordinary party members — though they never got a chance to vote for her due to her being winnowed out of the leadership race by Tory MPs — would be racist.
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