Sayeeda Warsi: OIC Speech
The Rt Hon Baroness Warsi, Thursday 30th June 2011
Speaking at the OIC Foreign Minister’s Conference as the first British Government Minister
Archive for June, 2011
Jun 28
Jun 23
Total Politics interview: Baroness Warsi: the campaign poster girl
Published in Total Politics, Thursday 23rd June 2011
by Amber Elliott
Her mother wanted her to dress like Margaret Thatcher when she first entered politics, but Baroness Warsi has never felt the need to imitate anyone. She has her own way of doing things, and they are having some success.
Heavy losses were expected at the local elections in May. Instead, the Conservative Party gained four councils and 85 new councillors.
Sayeeda Warsi, a politician who has never won a seat personally, was partly responsible for the results. She has only been in Parliament for six years, and co-chairman of the party for just one.
Jun 23
The Guardian interview: Sayeeda Warsi takes on critics in the rightwing press
Published in The Guardian, Thursday 23rd June 2011
By Nicholas Watt, Chief Political Correspondent
Sayeeda Warsi rolls back in her chair and bursts out laughing. “I don’t read her, actually. I call her Mad Mel,” Lady Warsi says of Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, who has denounced her as “stupid”.
Warsi, a proud Yorkshirewoman, rarely pulls her punches. As the first Muslim to sit as a full member of the British cabinet, she fell foul of Phillips in January after she declared in the Sternberg lecture that Islamophobia had “crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability”.
Phillips’ barbed response was to describe Warsi, the Tory co-chair, on her Spectator blog as ”at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process”.
