What does the Conservative Party offer ethnic minorities?

It was the ethnic minority vote that swung it for David Cameron. Had it voted in line with expert pre-election predictions – which foolishly forecast that the Conservatives would scrape a mere 16 per cent of Britain’s non-white English voters – a hung Parliament would have resulted, and he might have been condemned to a fractious coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

Instead, marginal seats tumbled into the Tory column: Chris Philp in Hampstead and Kilburn won by a whopping 10,034; Mark Clarke in Tooting by 5,421 (thus unseating Sadiq Khan, that rising Labour star); even Nigel Dawkins in Birmingham Selly Oak scraped home by 599 votes – re-taking a seat for the Conservatives that they last won in 1987, the best part of 25 years before. “This election has proved that the Conservatives are a party for the whole country,” an exultant David Cameron proclaimed on the steps of Downing Street, framed in the bright light of the mid-day sun.