The miraculous rise of June Sarpong

In this season for miracles, the rise of June Sarpong continues: she has been made a trustee of the Donmar Warehouse, that London theatre attended by City snoots and funded partly by taxpayers. Every era has its Widmerpool, the slaloming careerist in A Dance to the Music of Time. Who is our Widmerpool? Gove? Sir Peter Bazalgette? James Purnell? I’d plump for Sarpong.

This London-born daughter of aspirational Ghanaians forewent university to work at Kiss FM radio. She became a teenagers’ TV presenter, appeared on Blankety Blank and was David Lammy’s girlfriend. Soon she was a Prince’s Trust ambassador and pals with Alastair Campbell. She now writes, adorns the British Fashion Council and does corporate gigs. Her agent calls her an ‘activist’ — unusual for an executive at the BBC, where she pockets £75,000 to be Director of Creative Diversity three days a week. 

She first crossed my radar at a 2005 election rally when Tony Blair shared the Old Vic stage with her and two other BBC stars who screamed ‘Vote Labour!’ — the Beeb was more blatant in those days. In 2014, amid talk of June joining Newsnight, she opposed Scottish independence. In 2016 she was hot for Remain, dining with Peter Mandelson and George Osborne on referendum night. She tiptoed away after the Sunderland result. June once asserted that Angela Eagle (!!) would topple Corbyn; in a TV monologue in April 2017 she hailed the ‘sheer political shrewdness of Mrs May’ in calling an election. Newsnight must rue letting a woman of such insight through its net. Her new big thing is ‘allyship’, under which the BBC and contractors will do favours for one another’s BAME employees. It’s almost a Gershwin song: ‘You say cronyism, I say allyship.’

I met June two years ago when ITV wanted her to attack my book about our elite, Patronising Bastards. She hadn’t read it. But she did look at the index and squeal: ‘Most of them are friends of mine!’ June was fun and had a dirty laugh. I’d say with reasonable certainty that she is a meritocrat whose past support for Labour was more about brand management than political convictions. She has ridden the diversity donkey like Lester Piggott. Good luck to her but not to the cause she currently jockeys.