Who is City minister Tulip Siddiq?
Who is City minister Tulip Siddiq?
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Tulip Siddiq has been Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, previously Hampstead and Kilburn, since 2015. When Labour won power in July, she was appointed economic secretary to the Treasury and City minister, responsible for the UK's financial services sector. She is a niece of Bangladesh's longest-serving prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, who was overthrown by a pro-democracy uprising earlier this year. She has now been named in an investigation into claims her family embezzled nearly ?4bn from the country's infrastructure projects. A source close to her called these "trumped up charges".
Siddiq's father was a university professor in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, and her mother was given political asylum in the UK as the teenage sister of Sheikh Hasina. They met and married in London, and later moved their family - Siddiq has an elder brother and a younger sister - to Hampstead. Raised as a Muslim, Siddiq said the family "embraced multicultural Britain... in the heart of the [local] Jewish community". As a child, she met Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa, and her family were invited to the White House. Her maternal grandfather was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh's first president. He and most of his family were assassinated when soldiers stormed their home in Dhaka in a military coup in 1975. Siddiq's mother and aunt survived because they were abroad.
