"You Are Scared”: Uma Kumaran Says Abuse Nearly Made Her Give Up Dreams Of Being An MP

Former Keir Starmer aide Uma Kumaran talks to Harriet Symonds about working for Loto, a gloomy economic forecast, and fears for her safety. Photography by Louise Haywood-Schiefer

“Being in the public eye, there’s an elevated level of being aware of where you are and who you’re with,” says Uma Kumaran. “In the back of your mind, you are scared.”

The new Labour MP for Stratford and Bow, 36, sits down with The House just hours after having security fitted at her home – a necessity now that she is an MP.

“Someone said they were going to rape me. I’ve had some horrible stuff,” Kumaran says. On one occasion during the campaign, she says a man driving past her mounted the curb with two children in the backseat and started hurling abuse about Gaza: “He said he hoped I’d die and suffer and get raped.”

But reporting incidents of serious threats of violence to the police has led nowhere. “I’ve never had any action taken with anything,” she says.

The daughter of Tamil refugees who fled the civil war in Sri Lanka, Kumaran grew up in Harrow with the support of a “close-knit” Tamil community that became her extended family.

In 2015 Kumaran unsuccessfully stood for Parliament in her hometown Harrow East. But after enduring a “vile” election campaign, that at the time she branded “unashamedly religiously divisive”, she was adamant that she would never stand for Parliament again.

“It was the test campaign for what they ran the next summer for the Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq campaign,” she explains, referring to the Conservative Party’s controversial 2016 mayoral campaign which was marred by accusations of Islamophobia.

Despite being asked to stand at every election since, it is only now – nearly a decade later – that she felt ready to try again.

But