Keith Vaz

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Keith Vaz (2017)

Nigel Keith Anthony Standish Vaz (born on 26. November 1956 in Aden ) is a former British politician of the Labor Party . He was a member of the lower house from 1987 to 2019 .

Life

Vaz's parents are originally from Goa , now India . He was born on November 26, 1956 in Aden, then a British colony , where his father was a correspondent for the Times of India . In 1965, the family immigrated to the United Kingdom and settled in the London district of Twickenham down. Here the father worked for an airline and the mother as a teacher. Vaz visited a school in Hammersmith and then took a degree in Law at Gonville and Caius College of the University of Cambridge . After graduation, he worked as a solicitor in various local governments, first in Richmond , then in Islington and finally from 1985 in Belgrave , a district of Leicester . Vaz ended this activity in 1987 after moving into the House of Commons.

Vaz is married to a lawyer and has two children. He has two sisters: Penny is a lawyer, Valerie is a member of the House of Commons for Labor in the constituency of Walsall South .

politics

In 1982 Vaz joined the Labor Party. In the 1983 general election , he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Richmond and Barnes constituency . In the 1987 election he ran again, now in the constituency of Leicester East , where he managed to beat the mandate holder Peter Bruinvels from the Conservatives . In the following elections, Vaz was able to defend his seat, most recently in the 2017 election .

Over the years, Vaz was a member of various committees in parliament, and he headed the Interior Committee from 2007. From October 1999 to June 2001 he was State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry with responsibility for the other European countries. In 2006 Vaz was appointed to the Privy Council . At Labor he was a member of the party executive from July 2001 to May 2010.

Vaz is considered to be well connected in the Indo- British community and as a media-savvy politician who is always looking for the limelight. Since he had been brought into connection with political affairs and scandals on several occasions without anything being proven, he was dubbed in the press as "Keith Vazeline " and " Teflon MP". Critics accused him of a lack of ideological backbone and that he turned his flag to the wind. Although he was a Catholic himself, he joined Salman Rushdie's call for a ban on The Satanic Verses after several thousand Muslims called for a ban in his constituency.

In the summer of 2016 press reports appeared that Vaz had used the services of two male prostitutes and promised them payment in the form of cocaine for another meeting . As a result of these allegations, he resigned from his position as Chairman of the Interior Committee on September 6, 2016. The committee of the lower house, which deals with the general rules of conduct of the MPs, ruled at the end of October 2019 that Vaz should be suspended for a period of six months due to the events. Since the parliament dissolved in the run-up to the 2019 election at the beginning of November, this decision could not be implemented. It also lapsed, which meant that the committee should have looked at the matter again after the election. Therefore, Vaz decided not to run again in the constituency and thus resigned from the lower house after 32 years as a member of parliament.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Helen Pidd: Keith Vaz: one scandal too many for the publicity-seeking MP. The Guardian , September 4, 2016, accessed November 19, 2019. (English)
  2. ↑ British MP after intercourse with male prostitutes under pressure. Zeit Online , September 6, 2019, archived version from the same day in the Internet Archive
  3. ↑ Keith Vaz quits as Home Affairs Committee chairman BBC , September 6, 2016, accessed November 19, 2019. (English)
  4. ↑ MP Keith Vaz suspended from Commons after drug and sex inquiry BBC, October 31, 2019, accessed on November 19, 2019. (English).
  5. ↑ General election 2019: Labor's Keith Vaz will not stand for re-election. BBC, November 10, 2019, accessed November 19, 2019. (English)
personal data
SURNAME Vaz, Keith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vaz, Nigel Keith Anthony Standish (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Aden