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London — He dislikes being called Britain's Obama.

He downplays the shared features that prompt many to compare him with the first black president of the United States. Yet he vigorously pursues a career that he hopes could ultimately make him the first black prime minister of the United Kingdom. Chuka Umunna, the 33-year-old half-Nigerian half-British Shadow Business Secretary, is a rising star in British politics. Some of the country's leading newspapers are already tipping him to be the next leader of the opposition Labour Party.

Earlier this month The Sunday Times ran a story and features on him, variously describing him as "clean-cut Labour star", "popular" and "tasty". It is worth noting that the paper is known more for running exclusive stories about under-hand deals than for promoting politicians. One of its reports in October 2010 ruined Amos Adamu's FIFA career after "exposing" his alleged money-for-vote scam. But it is soft on Chuka Umunna, though with a caution. "He is young, handsome and tipped to be the next Labour leader, but in his past lie some youthful indiscretions and the mysterious death of his father," it blares.

The "indiscretions" relate to the fact that he took marijuana when he was young; and the "mysterious death" had to do with his father's demise in an unexplained car crash. Both were handled with sympathetic tones; and are among the experiences resembling Obama's.

But the key areas of comparison with Obama are far stronger and wider than those. "Not only do their names have identical syllable counts, but they're also both good-looking, mixed-race lawyers-turned-politicians of the centre-left," notes Tim Walker of the Independent newspaper. They both have African fathers and white mothers (with Irish ancestry), adds blogger Harry Mount in the Daily Telegraph.

Mr Umunna's story is as colourful as his rapid rise in politics. His father was an Igbo trader who reportedly sailed from Nigeria to Britain.

"My father arrived here after a very long journey on a boat from Nigeria in the mid 1960s," Umunna told a youth gathering in London. "When he arrived at Liverpool Docks he had a suitcase and no money. A random stranger lent him the cash to pay for his train fare to London where he was due to take up lodgings with friends.

"Once settled in London, he did various jobs. He washed plates in kitchens and he washed limousine cars too," he said.

"Within 15 years he worked his way up from arriving with nothing to running a very successful import and export business doing trade between Europe and West Africa, selling all manner of goods until his death," he added.

His mother, an English-Irish woman, is a daughter of a High Court judge, who had once worked as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial of the Second World War's suspected criminals.

A union between a struggling black immigrant and a white daughter of a judge was unlikely; but it happened, though both sides of the family had initially disproved of it, Umunna revealed.

"In an ideal world on father's side, I think if he'd found a good Nigerian wife that would have been viewed as preferable," he told The Sunday Times. "On my mother's side there was a bit of concern about what will this mean for the children, how will they cope with dual heritage? But when my sister and I arrived those concerns just dissipated. It sits very easily with us."

They were brought up in Brixton (south London), once known for its poor black population and riots but now partly becoming middle class, with the Umunnas being part of the latter. Their parents sent them to good schools. After attending Church of England primary school in Brixton, young Chuka went to St Dunstan's, an independent secondary school in Catford in south London. He studied law at Manchester University and began to practise at the City of London before he gave that up in favour of active politics.

He had joined the Labour Party way back in 1997 while at university; established good relations with some of its leading figures; and has been promoting the party among ethnic minorities, using an online political magazine TMP which he edited.

Good press coverage, apparently helped by his cultivation of the media and his exotic background, might have enhanced Mr Umunna's current profile; but it was his election into the British Parliament in 2010 to represent his Streatham Constituency that really put him on the limelight.

In the two years since becoming a Member of Parliament, he has got many roles and promotions. He was selected to serve in the Treasury Select Committee and appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary for the Labour leader Ed Miliband whose leadership bid he had earlier supported. Later he was appointed Shadow Minister for Small Business and Enterprise and in October 2011 promoted to his current post of Shadow Business Secretary.

But life has not always been so smooth. His father died when he was 13. He was killed, he said, in a mysterious car crash in Nigeria after losing a rigged election in his home state Anambra.

When asked whether his father was murdered, Mr Umunna said: "There was a lot of speculation in Nigeria... I don't really want to go into it, but things in Nigeria don't operate like here. It's not like you're going to get an official post-mortem or a proper police investigation."

After his father's death, life became difficult. "I had to grow up very quickly," he said. "I don't think you have a sense of mortality when you're young. But that event meant I really learnt what mortality was.

"It shook my faith," he added. "Definitely shook my faith. The question, you know, why my family? But despite the huge loss, my dad left me with so much. I don't think I'd be sitting in this office were it not for him."

His mother, who had given up her probation work "to become a full-time mum" when he was born, was forced to look for job again when her husband died. "When my father passed away she had to go back to work, but she couldn't face going back to her old job because she'd been through a massive trauma, and probation work can be quite emotionally draining. So she decided to re-qualify as a solicitor at the age of 46. She became a partner in her firm (last) year, at 61," he told Independent.

As a teenager, young Umunna had some experiences with music and marijuana, he admitted. "I've smoked soft drugs. But it's not something I'm proud of," he said, "Certainly nothing beyond marijuana".

His drugs confession didn't draw condemnation -- perhaps partly because a growing number of politicians are now coming clean with their drugs past and partly because the practice is now being seen as a strategy of showing the current users that they too can give up drugs and become useful members of society (even an MP or a president).

But while comparison with the US president in many areas helps to sustain the hope of his becoming British Obama, in the critical areas that really matter, the growing feeling is that Umunna is simply nowhere near Obama.

"I wouldn't say his intellect or oratory matched up to Obama's levels," says Harry Mount. Nor has the British level of racial tolerance yet reached that of allowing a black to be a prime minister.

OFFLINE

My, Chuka Umunna and Vince Cable are cut from different cloth.

There's Umunna's almost offensive youth for starters. He is 33, but looks even younger. I'm tempted to ask if he shaves, but it doesn't seem quite the thing.

Then there's the bit that he doesn't like talking about – that he is one of the very few faces in Whitehall that aren't white. He comes from mixed Nigerian and Anglo-Irish ancestry, making him the first ever black MP to serve in a Shadow Cabinet.
And whilst Cable is a surprisingly adept ballroom dancer, Mr Umunna outdoes the Business Secretary's fleet-footed foxtrot with even cooler DJ skills. He used to have a regular club night in Brixton, though won't say where because it was the centre of controversy over noise at the time.

"I seriously toyed with becoming a house music DJ," he says.

But arguably the most significant difference with Umunna is his obvious delight in stirring things up a bit. The London-born MP for Streatham entered Parliament two years ago and made his mark at the start of last year, when Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond came before the Treasury Select Committee.


In a splendid episode of Parliamentary theatre, Umunna squeezed out of him that the bank had paid just £113m in corporation tax in Britain, despite clocking up £11.6bn of profits. Did Mr Diamond know how many subsidiaries Barclays has in the Isle of Man, Jersey and the Cayman Islands, he asked. No? Not a problem, Mr Diamond, because Chuka had the answer.

More recently, Umunna's had his sights trained on fat-cat pay, and he has provided a running commentary on the growing trend for shareholder rebellions. He and Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, made a sport of bating RBS chief executive Stephen Hester over rewards for failure to the point where he gave up his bonus.

Some die-hard Blairites have started to get a bit worried that all this banker-bashing and the gathering pace of the so-called Shareholder Spring reflects unfavourably on the party, that Labour's forthright stance makes it appear anti-business. But for Umunna, this is far from the case.

Business doesn't get the credit it deserves, he says. It paid £163bn in taxes in the last financial year, the equivalent of the defence, education and transport budgets combined, but that "huge contribution that business is making is getting lost" because of a few "baddies".

"The problem is that the perception of UK companies has become characterised by the more extreme examples. What happened in the financial services sector in 2008 and 2009 came in the public mind to characterise people's views around business but it is grossly unfair on the overwhelming majority of businesses in this country who are making a huge contribution to the Exchequer.


"Our business community is incredibly diverse. It is not homogenous. The local independent record company in my constituency is a business, like a bank is a business, but they are both doing very different things and we must not allow people's experiences of [some extreme examples] to colour views of business in general," he says.


Umunna won't name specific companies but, speaking in the week that media giant WPP suffered a 60pc shareholder revolt over pay, and Vodafone was exposed for not paying any corporation tax in Britain last year, the type of business he is talking about is clear.

"These examples bear responsibility for the state of affairs we find ourselves in. It is deeply unfair that the contribution of so many businesses that are doing so much good for the economy at a very difficult time is just being ignored."
To fix this, Umunna has a plan. He wants to oblige companies to declare how much they contribute to the Exchequer in their annual reports, in a single figure that is clear and easy to understand. A lot of the detail might be included in annual reports and accounts at the moment, but often it would take a tax lawyer to decipher.

"[They show] tax accrued, tax which is due and tax which has been paid but it is very difficult to get a sense of what their contribution is. We need... figures which are much more easily identifiable," he says. "For most of the smaller and medium-sized businesses and who have less complex tax arrangements, this should be quite straight forward."
And for the bigger ones, with hundreds of offshore subsidiaries and accounting "jiggery pokery"? Well, such a change might force them into the sunlight.

Alongside this, Umunna wants the Treasury to, once a year, publish a headline figure for how much British business contributes to public coffers, helping the public to recognise it as a force for good, not just the domain of greedy executives. "It's something I have proposed and that [Shadow Chancellor] Ed Balls is very interested in," he says.


Umunna's cosy relationship with Labour's two Eds is arguably another counterpoint to Cable. The Business Secretary does not have enough Downing Street influence to his job, Umunna argues. "His predecessor Peter Mandelson had clout across Whitehall, the support of [former Chancellor] Alistair Darling and the ear of the Prime Minister. Vince doesn't have the same influence and that compromises his ability."


While most of that has to do with Coalition politics, Umunna has a point.
Earlier this year, Cable pledged to introduce binding annual shareholder votes on pay, but he hinted last week that he will water it down to once every three years citing bureaucracy. Umunna's having none of it. "He's blinking in the face of those who wish to continue with business as usual, not least certain forces in Her Majesty's Treasury. People who don't want change and reform."

It is not just those in HMRC who are resistant to a shake-up of the rules, of course. Plenty of FTSE 100 chief executives feel scorched by the wave of shareholder revolts.

Fears are growing that a binding vote or other measures to keep executive pay in check will result in an exodus of executive talent from Britain. But for Umunna, top-flight chief executives need have nothing to fear.

"I don't have an issue with people being well remunerated where they are creating thousands of jobs for our country, but that's the issue isn't it?" he says. "When you see senior executives receiving sums that bear no relation to their performance, completely out of kilter with what others are being paid in their businesses, that totally undermines trust and that is bad for us all."

One wonders how the chief executives Umunna talks to feel about his stance, coming as it does from someone who is at least a decade younger than the average FTSE boss and with barely a quarter of the length of career experience. Never mind Cable's clout with Downing Street, how about Umunna's clout with business? That, surely is one area where Cable blows Umunna out of the water.


He admits he was "expecting my age to be a barrier" and has been surprised by the positive reception he has received from chief executives, who appreciate his "open-mindedness" – as well as other charms. "I've been quite surprised to find I have been commented upon favourably by Tory-supporting businessmen," Umunna says.
But back to the point: "I haven't run a business and I don't pretend to do so, but the important thing is judgement, more than anything else. Experience is important but incredibly experienced people make bad judgements."
Quite right too. If Umunna does manage to befriend business, Cable had better watch out.