Saqib Bhatti has been a Conservative MP since 2019, for Meriden and now Meriden and Solihull East, and he is one of the few British Muslims on his party's front bench, a chartered accountant who built a name in Birmingham business before he reached Westminster. He is now Shadow Education Minister.

He arrived with a real curriculum. After training at Deloitte he ran his family's accountancy firm and at thirty three became the youngest and first Muslim president of the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce, work that drew an MBE for diversity and inclusion in business. He was not a Westminster careerist. He came to politics from somewhere that does something else.

His politics is the more conventional part of the story. He founded Muslims for Britain to campaign for Leave in 2016 and sat on the Vote Leave board, on the argument that EU free movement disadvantaged South Asian and Commonwealth migrants. After entering the Commons he served as a parliamentary aide to Liz Truss and then to the Health Secretary, before being made the junior minister for tech and the digital economy under Rishi Sunak, where he carried Online Safety Act work through Parliament. As a member of Badenoch's shadow team he has made anti Muslim hatred a public theme, calling for Ofsted guidance to keep schools from becoming what he called breeding grounds for the abuse.

The criticisms run with the loyalty. He is among the most reliable government voters in the Commons, almost ninety nine per cent in line with the Conservative whip, and that has meant voting against measures to improve biodiversity, air quality and water quality, and against a higher windfall tax on oil and gas. In November 2023 he voted against the SNP motion for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, one of only two Conservative Muslim MPs to do so, drawing criticism from Muslim media and community organisations who felt he had chosen the whip over the substance. His register of interests records twenty thousand pounds in donations from Pertemps, the Midlands recruitment firm whose chairman is a long standing Conservative donor, and notes that his wife is a consultant at the strategic advisory firm Flint Global, the kind of overlap that is within the rules and never reads cleanly.

In 2024 he held Meriden and Solihull East with a majority of 4,584, Labour in second and Reform close behind. Badenoch moved him from culture to education in the July 2025 reshuffle.

Bhatti is talented, well credentialled and unusually grounded in business, and a party that has spent years being told it cannot recruit successful British Muslims now has one on its front bench. He is also a study in the cost of loyalty, a minister whose votes have rarely matched the constituencies he speaks to, and whose hardest test, between his community on Gaza and his whip on the line, he answered with the whip. The talent is real. The independence is the part still to prove.