Paul Boateng

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The Rt Hon. Paul Boateng preaching at a Christian Aid service in Wesley Memorial (Methodist) Church, Oxford, 2005, a few days before taking up the post as High Commissioner to South Africa.

Paul Yaw Boateng (born June 14, 1951) is a British Labour Party politician. He became the UK's first black Cabinet minister in May 2002 when he was appointed as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Brent South from 1987 to 2005, and is the current British High Commissioner to South Africa.

1 Background and early life
2 Political career
3 Son Benjamin accused of rape
4 External links

[edit] Background and early life

Boateng was born in Hackney, London of mixed Ghanaian and Scottish heritage. He lived in Ghana, where his father was a cabinet minister under Kwame Nkrumah, until the 1966 coup that ousted Nkrumah. The family moved to Hemel Hempstead where he attended Apsley Grammar School. After graduating from the University of Bristol, he became a civil rights lawyer, originally as a solicitor, though he later retrained as a barrister. He gained some notoriety through this work in Lambeth in the late 1970s, when he was a familiar figure at protests against the kinds of police activity that built up to the 1981 Brixton Riot.

[edit] Political career

Boateng was elected to the Greater London Council in 1981 as a member of Labour's left wing and a supporter of Ken Livingstone. As chair of the GLC's police committee and vice-chair of its ethnic minorities committee, he continued to be a persistent critic of the police, especially in relation to their dealings with the black and Asian communities.

He stood, and lost, as a parliamentary candidate for Hertfordshire West in the 1983 general election. He had more success in the general election of 1987, when he was elected to the House of Commons for Brent South, in succession to Laurence Pavitt. During his victory speech, he famously declared "Today Brent South, tomorrow Soweto!"

Like many other members of the left in the 1980s, he became more moderate under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, who made him a junior spokesman in 1989. In 1992, he became shadow minister for the Lord Chancellor's Department, a post he held until the 1997 general election.

With Labour's victory, Boateng became the UK's first black government minister (that is, of African or Afro-Caribbean descent), as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health (UK) (Baron Sinha, an Indian, was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for India in the House of Lords in 1919). In 1998 Boateng became a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Home Office and subsequently became Minister for State for Home Affairs. At the time a loyal supporter of the New Labour project, he defended the police and criticised his former GLC colleague Ken Livingstone's mayoral campaign.

In 2001, he was made Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and stepped up to become Chief Secretary to the Treasury and so a member of the Cabinet in May 2002. He had been senior to Charles Clarke when both were at the Home Office, though Clarke was appointed Home Secretary when David Blunkett resigned.

In March 2005, he announced that he would not stand for re-election as an MP in the May 2005 general election. Labour having won the election in May 2005, he was named as the next High Commissioner to South Africa, replacing Ann Grant. Dawn Butler was selected by the local Constituency Labour Party to replace him and was elected by a comfortable margin. Coincidently Butler is only the third black female MP in the commons (Diane Abbott and Oona King being the others)

Boateng was featured on an episode of current affairs spoof The Day Today, in which Chris Morris complained to him about the explicit content in music by fictional artists such as 'Herman the Tosser'.

[edit] Son Benjamin accused of rape

Benjamin Boateng, the 21 year-old son of Paul Boateng was accused of rape on January 1st 2006 by a 17 year old white girl in South Africa when he was visiting his father there. Benjamin Boateng, a university student in the UK, who met the girl at a night club whilst drinking champagne, admits having sex with the girl in an alley outside the club and on the beach but denies raping her. According to the ‘Evening Standard’ (January 25th 2006), a friend of the Boatengs, who would only be named as Sophie said: “The allegations were made by someone desperate enough to ruin his life for the sake of making money. She was a table-whore - a girl who wanders around a nightclub looking for rich men to prey on.” [1] The ‘Evening Standard’ (January 25th 2006) reported that Benjamin Boateng ‘spent an agonising 18 days waiting to be cleared of the allegations and being allowed to fly home’ [2]. This explanation differs from that by ‘The Scotsman’ (January 21st 2006), which claims that the prosecuting authority, after making an attempt to hush up the matter, decided after “careful consideration” that there was “no reasonable prospect” of securing a prosecution. National Prosecution Authority spokesman, Makhosini Nkosi, had earlier confirmed confirmed that police had investigated and added that the question of diplomatic immunity needed to be taken into account (Daily Mail, 13th January 2006). A police source said: "She claims they were violent rapes -so much so that she suffered injuries. "Statements will have been taken from both the victim and the accused but it's not normal for any details of the offence to be released until a formal plea has been taken. "It's being treated with the utmost sensitivity in view of the status of the people involved." It usually takes up to four months for files to be prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions in South Africa. But in this case a decision is expected by tomorrow. A police source said: "There's no question it has been fast-tracked. Someone clearly wants it resolved in a hurry." (The Sun, 12th January, 2006). In 2001, while still at an exclusive private school, Benjamin began a fledgling acting career when he appeared at London's Royal Court Theatre playing an asylum seeker in a play called Credible Witness (Daily Mail, January 13th 2006). Benjamin plays a boy who has just been admitted to the country and the play shows how unfair life is (Evening Standard, February 27th 2001).