It’s a drizzly grey morning in London when I meet Kanishka Narayan, the former VC-turned-Labour MP, for brunch.
I arrive, somewhat drenched, at the Old Queen Street Café, an upscale eatery nestled between Westminster Abbey and St James’ Park. Narayan is sitting at the table closest to the door, pre-empting the possibility he could be called back to the House of Commons on urgent business at any moment.
When we meet, it’s been just under a year since the 2024 general election, which saw Labour return to power after almost a decade-and-a-half in the wilderness and Narayan, Wales’ first ethnic minority MP, elected to represent the Vale of Glamorgan.
“I think it’s going well,” Narayan says, in characteristically upbeat fashion. “The first three months are super reactive. You have a bunch of stuff coming in, you’re trying to get a grip on how parliament works [...] I feel like I’m starting to hit my stride.”
Armed with an MBA and a career spent advising and investing in startups across Europe, he’s among the few MPs in Britain with much knowledge of the VC world, a skillset he’s actively drawing on in office.
Earlier this year, he launched All Hands On Tech, promising to secure 1,000 tech jobs in the Vale by 2030, while providing mentoring for local startup founders and an upskilling scheme for small businesses.
When he’s not championing his constituency, he’s an active voice in UK tech policy circles, most recently seen popping up on panels at SXSW London and Startup Coalition’s Progressive Tech Summit to talk regulation and innovation.
Not long after I’ve sat down, a waiter arrives to take our order. I opt for the “full Old Queen Street breakfast”, while Narayan asks for the eggs royale. As we await our food, he laughs often and enthusiastically, asking as many questions as he’s asked (“Amazing! Amazing! I should be interviewing you!”).
Narayan’s background in tech has helped him stand out from his peers on the Labour benches. When the government announced a sweeping AI Action Plan to ensure Britain’s future prosperity, he seized the opportunity, calling for an “AI growth zone” to be set up in the Vale.
When we meet in Westminster, he’s on the verge of launching “Kanishka Kloud”, a data-scraping tool designed to help constituents see what he’s been saying in parliament. A snappy social media video announcing the Kloud seems tailormade to appeal to younger voters.
Despite his outwardly upbeat persona, he makes no secret of his pre-election jitters. “The polls had me at like a 90% chance of winning, but when you’re all-in — knocking on doors for months and having people say they’re not sure who they’re voting for — you develop some paranoia,” he admits.
“There’s a fear the whole party will sweep to power but you’re gonna be left standing on the beach by yourself.”
Old Etonians
Narayan is used to being an outsider.
After emigrating from India to Wales at the age of 12, he studied at an inner-city state school in Cardiff, before winning a scholarship to Eton College, the illustrious boarding school and alma mater of much of Britain’s aristocratic elite, including former prime minister Boris Johnson and several members of the royal family.
“I remember, when I was still living in India, reading that Prince Harry had gone to Eton and thinking, ‘That must be a good school,” Narayan tells me. He recalls waiting for a teacher to finish breaking up a fight before asking them to sign his application form.
“None of us quite understood what Eton symbolised or what I was in for.” For a time, he found it difficult to understand what some of his teachers were saying, so thick were their cut-glass English accents. While his friends spent the holidays skiing in the Alps, he earned extra cash taking shifts at a kebab shop in Cardiff.
“But I didn’t come away with any resentment because, for me, it was just the most incredible, practical opportunity,” he says. “It allowed me to understand the world and understand Britain, in the context and contrasts of what my family was experiencing in Cardiff and what we were doing at Eton.”
I used to think the City was a slightly dirty, morally questionable place.
He went on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford — another rite-of-passage for Britain’s governing elite — before working in the civil service under the coalition government, formed by David Cameron’s Conservative Party and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.
I have many questions about this segment of his career, particularly his time spent at the environment department under Liz Truss, the Conservative politician who would become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, immortalised by her failure to outlast a rotting lettuce. He politely declines: “You’re trained quite well not to talk about the period in which you were working.”
His last day as a civil servant coincided with the 2016 Brexit referendum, a nationwide in-out vote which forced Cameron out of office, split the country down the middle and continues to cast a long shadow over British politics to this day.
“I remember: 9am, the prime minister’s resigned, the department’s in crisis and I was clearing my desk,” Narayan recalls. “One of my colleagues said ‘It’s very sad to see you leave public service,’ and I told them then I was definitely coming back.
“It wasn’t a goodbye; it was a ‘See you in a bit.’”
In the big City
Our food arrives and I lavish my full English breakfast with a generous helping of ketchup. I feel bad for Narayan, who makes the occasional attempt to eat his eggs, but pauses regularly to consider my questions, fired off between mouthfuls of bacon and hash brown.
Narayan left the civil service to join financial advisory firm Lazard, where he advised big corporates and tech startups alike on M&A and capital markets in the City of London. He was personally recruited by the company’s chair Archie Norman, historically the only person to have chaired a FTSE100 company and been an MP at the same time.
“I used to think the City was a slightly dirty, morally questionable place. But here they were working on the big questions for the boards of international companies, startups and governments,” says Narayan. “It felt like somewhere I could learn a lot.”
After three years at Lazard, Narayan quit to study for an MBA at Stanford, working with leading European VC firm Atomico on the side. “I thought about what was really driving the world, forecasting 10 years ahead, and it was technology rather than finance. I wanted to be at the frontier of understanding that.”
He dipped a toe back into politics, working part-time as Labour’s head of tech policy, when the party was still years away from regaining power. “Public sector reform is my first and enduring professional love,” he says without a jot of irony.
“I spent five years working on how you improve public services: through devolving power and money, through technology, through different means of public financing or running a department in a very different way.”
A stint at Clocktower Ventures, the fintech-focused VC firm based out of California, followed. Narayan launched and oversaw European operations for Clocktower, which has invested in a handful of companies in the region, including vehicle financing startup Carmoola, fertility insurance business Gaia and B2B finance platform Melio.
“I was there for about two years before I became a Labour candidate. We had a bit of a lowkey presence here, it’s a very small team.”
I’m curious how different it is, sitting in boardrooms convincing CEOs and investors of a winning strategy, compared to travelling around a constituency, asking members of the great British public for their vote.
Wherever he’s been, Narayan admits to having always felt slightly out of place — be it working a customer service job while studying at Eton or supporting left-wing causes while earning a crust in the City of London.
With anti-immigration sentiment on the rise and mounting frustration with the Labour Party across Britain, Narayan has learned to channel his experiences in a way he says helps him understand voters’ concerns.
“Knocking on doors, sometimes people would tell me: ‘My biggest concern is immigration.’ And I think they could be slightly nervous about saying this to me,” he says. “But I tell them the values driving those concerns are probably values I share. If that’s the case, why don’t we talk about that and see where we get to?
“I try to leave those conversations with people feeling comfortable and aligned with what I’m focused on: building a really strong Wales, with deep pride in Welsh heritage and British culture, but also a genuine sense that we want to grow and move forward.”
All Hands On Tech
Since becoming an MP, Narayan has been drawing on his experience as a VC to try and improve access to opportunities in his constituency, a relatively affluent area of south-east Wales, with pockets of deprivation in places like Barry Island and poorer parts of Penarth.
All Hands On Tech scheme has been working to deliver the “single biggest technological upgrade for a constituency” in UK history, bringing new education, internship and job opportunities to the area.
At the time of writing, AHOT had signed up more than 50 leading tech and ventures businesses promising to give internships to promising state school kids, including Amazon, Dawn Capital and Synthesia.
“If I achieve this, it could add a couple of percentage points in the labour market in the Vale,” Narayan says. “That would be way more impactful than any number of regulatory things I could try and do.”
Between constituency duties and his active engagement with the UK tech community, Narayan has returned to the environment department, this time as a government official, rather than an impartial civil servant.
Clearly, he’s keen to get stuck in. Inevitably, I ask the question every MP must field at some point in their career: does he want to be prime minister?
“I’m a first-term MP, nine months into the job,” he demurs. “I think it would be absurd for me to think about that right now.”
The top image for this article was generated using ChatGPT.
