The Conservatives have high hopes of regaining control of Westminster City Council on 7 May, having been defeated in the elections of 2022 for the first time in the borough’s history. Local support for the party has been waning in recent years in parallel with its embrace of Brexit and nationalist populism. In view of that, it is intriguing that one of their candidates for 2026 has long been aligned with that type pf politics.
Daniel Kawczynski was the Tory MP for Shrewsbury & Atcham from 2005 until his defeat there by Labour in the last general election. During his 19 years in the House of Commons he was parliamentary private secretary to the Secretary of State for Wales and an adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron on central and eastern Europe. He also chaired all-party groups for Saudi Arabia – a nation he greatly admires – and Libya. But some of his other endeavours while an MP attracted more attention.
The most controversial was his decision to speak at an event in Rome in 2020 that was also graced by Viktor Orbán, the far-Right prime minster of Hungary – regarded by some as Europe’s most corrupt nation state – and Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-Right populist Lega Party
Kawczynski reportedly defended his attendance by arguing that speakers at the gathering represented “serious ideas and concerns, some of which are shared by many citizens of the UK”. However, his fellow Conservative MP, Andrew Percy, who at the time chaired the all-party parliamentary group on antisemitism, had urged him not to go, while the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews described his justification for doing so as “specious” and asked the Conservative Party to discipline him.
Orbán, a politician greatly admired by Donald Trump and his deputy JD Vance – who has travelled to Hungary to support Orbán’s re-election campaign – has long been accused of deploying antisemitic tropes as part of his populist armoury, including before the event in Rome Kawczynski spoke at.
Kawczynski was a supporter of Brexit and a member of the dedicatedly Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG) until 2019, when he left it saying its activities endangered the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. The previous year he had described ERG chair Jacob Rees-Mogg as “a hero of mine” and expressed the hope that he would one day seek to become Conservative leader.
There are other items in Kawczynski’s backstory that might not endear him to Westminster voters the Tories need to enthuse. In 2013, the Telegraph reported that he had, rather abrasively, told a one-legged man in a wheelchair who asked him for money to “get a job”, though Kawczynski assured the paper he had advised his supplicant about government initiatives to help people in his situation find work.
Later, in 2021, Kawczynski apologised from the Commons floor after Parliament’s standards commissioner found he had engaged in the “grossly unprofessional” bullying of Commons staff while under the influence of alcohol. During the same year, The Guardian revealed he had been searching for a well-paid second job with a Saudi company or other work relating to the Middle East.
The Westminster Council ward Kawczynski is set to contest is Maida Vale, where Labour’s 2022 winning margins were healthy. This adds credence to the view that he’s a paper candidate who, according to once source, had hoped and failed to be picked to fight a more winnable ward.
A case could just about be made for Kawczynski (who is also noted for being exceptionally tall) being seen as a cosmopolitan, socially liberal figure: born in Poland, he is married to a man from Brazil. But perhaps those involved in the candidate selection process decided it was better to be safe than sorry. It might, though, have been safer still to have not selected him at all.
Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky and at LinkedIn. Photo from City of Westminster Conservatives.
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As a long term Shrewsbury resident I’ve watched DKs antics and increasingly right wing, antagonist positions from close quarters. He was an embarrassment to our town on multiple occasions and we are feeling so much better off without him. Steer well clear.