Book review: Why? by Mohamed Amersi

Ronel Lehmann

If you want to understand the current condition of the Conservative Party the very last thing you should do is read the memoirs of any of the PMs or Cabinet ministers of the period. These are usually self-serving, the prose ghost-written and burnished, and the anecdotes banal.

The same cannot be said of Mohamed Amersi’s memory Why? Here, in adamant and often ferocious terms is the raw, unplugged version of events. I think it contains more truth in it than all the neatly packaged biographies published by the so-called Big Six publishers, put together.

In fact, it is probably one of the most unusual books I’ve read. This is an author who will not hide emotion. These pages make us see in black and white the resentments, the passion, and the ugliness of high politics.

And Amersi did reach the heights. Born in Kenya to a wealthy family, he had a successful career as a corporate lawyer both in London and in the Middle-East. Over time, he found that he enjoyed the process of deal-making and crossed over from law to deal-making itself. He found he was good at that too.

The early chapters about his upbringing are nostalgic and moving and let us know that the British Empire, now so often derided, could sometimes be a wonderful place to live. Amersi was also very lucky in his parents who made sure he travelled wildly, had his own bank account young, and most of all, understood the importance of the philanthropic spirit.

Amersi comes across in these chapters as kind, thoughtful and eager to do good. Kenya also taught him tolerance:

Our street was home to every kind of religion, and everybody was treated equally: our neighbours included Hindus, Israelis, Christians and other Islamic sects, distinct from our own Shiite practice.

These lessons were not to be forgotten, but first Amersi needed to make his way in the world. The middle chapters of the book read like a sensible business memoir, where we learn a lot about the importance of reacting to opportunities and of following one’s instincts.

Once his wealth was made, Amersi admirably began his philanthropic work and the reader of Why? is left in no doubt that this came from a deep place within him. It was to do with his family ethos, but the scale of ambition of the Amersi Foundation was also individual to him.

Amersi is rightly proud of his achievements. He is probably one of the most travelled men in the world, and a natural curiosity and gregariousness mean that he has obtained a unique worldview. His is a bird’s-eye view: the reader ends up thinking of him in the skies, travelling from one place to the next. He is a man who understands how the world works.

In a sense, Amersi is an outsider: meticulously presented and well-mannered, he has an essential seriousness which you don’t usually find in British high society.

As the book goes on, Amersi is given an education in how the elites work in the UK – and he is given it the hard way. What somebody growing up in Kenya might not know about the elite in Britain is its essential duplicitousness. It is a world where everything has several meanings. Sarcasm, irony, double-entendre: this is the nature of life at the famous private schools and at Oxbridge. Those who attend these institutions carry on their banter at Court and in Westminster.

If you want an archetype of this, then you would have to adduce the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. For Johnson, everything is a bit of a game. Other people matter a bit but not as much as the maintaining of a certain meaningless light-heartedness.

Usually, too, everybody drinks – partly because the British way of discourse is a bit tiring to uphold and it can help to unwind and loosen one’s tongue from time to time. True friendship in British life is often forged over too many glasses and the subsequent mutual decision to forget impropriety for the sake of some broader but usually vacuous propriety.

Over time Amersi discovered he was an outsider. He is a teetotaller and unlike most of the people who run the Conservative Party, genuinely minds about injustice and genuinely wants to change it.

What readers of this book will discover is how deep the rot is. It opens up not so much onto the failure of a few leaders to do their jobs properly, but onto systemic failure. In fact, a few prime ministers come out reasonably well from the book: especially Gordon Brown (‘the only Labour politician who hasn’t asked me for money’) and Theresa May who at one point berates Amersi for his thin skin.

Once Amersi made his money, he became able to help some very important people, not least the future King Charles III who also comes out very well in these pages – and far better than his slippery advisors.

But the real Rubicon was crossed when Amersi decided to give money to the Conservative Party. Anybody who knows how that went for him will find themselves yelling at the page: “Don’t do it!” But he does.

Why did he do it? It’s clear that Amersi felt that by becoming a player in the Conservative Party he would be able to meet people with similar reach. Working together with well-meaning types like himself, he would be able to achieve more.

Sadly, in time, Amersi began to fall out with the Conservative Party. Amersi had the idea that he might set up a group COMENA which would help the Conservative Party to deepen its ties with the Middle East and North Africa. Amersi expected nothing particular in return – he certainly didn’t need the money by this stage.

But there was a catch. A group already existed called CMEC, which was chaired by a former MP Charlotte Leslie. If one were authoring Amersi’s story as a novel you couldn’t think up a more suitable antagonist than Leslie. Having been to Oxbridge, and being at ease in the establishment, she is everything she’s not. At one point, Amersi ruminates on how he would have liked a classical education; well, Leslie has that too.

Here the tone of the book shifts and things get very ugly. Leslie decides she doesn’t want Amersi to set up CMEC, and it isn’t really clear why she takes such a firm position. Amersi suggests throughout that it was in Leslie’s financial interest to keep him at arm’s length. Leslie then writes memos to senior people in the security services and various sitting parliamentarians, in which she expresses concern that Amersi is corrupt and therefore a security threat.

Amersi is furious and his anger comes off every page. In fact, his anger is somehow touching because by the time we get to it, we already have the nostalgic opening chapters by which to measure him.

The last 4o pages of the book are in a different style. They are as if Pope’s Dunciad had been written on psychotropic drugs. Some villains emerge: Dame Margaret Hodge who misunderstands Amersi’s intentions in querying a report written about him by Kings College; David Davis MP used the shelter of parliamentary privilege to lambast him; Tom Burgis writes various articles and a book Cuckooland portraying Amersi in an unflattering light; and Bob Seely MP, defenestrated to Amersi’s delight in the 2024 general election, muscles in as well.

Then there is Leslie herself, who, it seems, is a far smoother media operator than Amersi had expected. The book has many unanswered questions which investigative journalists might pick up. It’s not clear really why Leslie wrote the memos, or how many there were and what her precise motivation was for writing them.

What’s interesting about the book is that Amersi lets his anger show. He doesn’t try and call it something else: the book has a sort of magnificent honesty to it which almost any PR advisor would have argued against.

Most valuable of all, it shows a Britain which is in sore need of reform. In Amersi’s telling parliamentary privilege is too often used for slander and many MPs have no notion of the Nolan Principles. Academia is ignorant. The courts meanwhile are expensive and slow, and sometimes the judges are corrupt. But his most withering criticisms are reserved for the media, and especially Burgis. Usually, they can’t understand the complexities of the topics they are called upon to write about.

One might dismiss this as an eccentric screed had it not all been ratified to a large extent in the 2024 general election. If Kemi Badenoch really wishes to change the Conservative Party, and return her party to power, she will need to read this book, warts and all.

For more information go to: https://y-me.co/who-i-really-am/