Keith Vaz
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Nigel Keith Anthony Standish Vaz known simply as Keith Vaz (born November 26 1956) is a British politician, and MP for Leicester East for the Labour party.
Early life
He was born in Aden in 1956, where his father (originally from Goa) was a foreign correspondent for the Times of India. His family moved to Twickenham in England in 1965. He studied law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, gaining a first.
Career
He contested the safe Conservative seat of Richmond and Barnes in the 1983 general election, and a year later lost a by-election for Surrey West.
For the 1987 election he was chosen to stand for the seat of Leicester East, which had 16,000 Asian voters. He won, and defeated the right-wing Conservative Peter Bruinvels, becoming a popular constituency MP.
In March 1989, he led a protest in Leicester against Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. [link] At this event, Vaz addressed 3000 Muslim demonstrators, stating "today we celebrate one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain" and attacking the Labour Party as a "godless party". [link]
Vaz became a frontbench spokesman for the opposition in 1992. However he was excluded from Tony Blair's government after Labour took power in 1997.
He was quickly promoted though, eventually becoming Minister for Europe in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and it was here that he would meet his downfall. He was implicated in scandal involving donations he received from Lakshmi Mittal's wife and two others [link], and citizenship applications for the Hinduja brothers and was forced to resign. Keith Vaz was also a director of the General Mediterranean Holdings' owned by Anglo-Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi.
He is also trying to have the Rockstar game Bully banned in the UK. [link]
External links
- [Keith Vaz, MP] unofficial blog
- [Guardian Politics Ask Aristotle - Keith Vaz MP]
- [TheyWorkForYou.com - Keith Vaz MP]
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