(May 13, 2026) He arrived in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, at twelve years old, part of a family sharing a modest one-bedroom flat. Each morning, he and his brother walked together to Cathays High School, a local state school in the heart of the city. Two boys from Bihar, finding their footing in a new country, in a new city, and a new life.
Today, Kanishka Narayan sits in the House of Commons as Wales’ first ethnic minority Member of Parliament and as the government minister responsible for shaping Britain’s approach to artificial intelligence and online safety. The distance between those two points is, by any measure, remarkable.
But Narayan is careful not to frame it as a personal triumph. “I am determined to give back,” he mentions on his website, “and am privileged to have the chance to do so as the Welsh Labour MP for the Vale of Glamorgan.” As Labour MP for the Vale of Glamorgan and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Online Safety, he now has the platform to do something for the community he deeply cares for.
Muzaffarpur to Wales
Born in Muzaffarpur, a city in the state of Bihar, Narayan moved to Wales, UK just before he entered his teens. The family settled in Bedford Street, Cardiff, a short walk from Cathays High School, where he spent a year in the Welsh state school system.
What happened next feels almost improbable in hindsight. But Kanishka Narayan recalls it through the small moments that made it possible. A teacher, convinced beyond all reason of his ability, pushed him to apply for scholarship places at private schools. Standing in a school corridor as a headteacher broke up a bus fight, young Kanishka presented the scholarship application for Eton College, one of Britain’s most prestigious private schools, located in Berkshire, England. “He seemed totally surprised,” Narayan recalls. “My youthful naivety ignored it.”
The scholarship came through. He attended Eton on a bursary, and went on to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, part of the University of Oxford. He then completed an MBA at Stanford University in the United States.
The institutions changed. The person, he insists, did not. His parents still live within walking distance of where the family first settled in Cardiff.
Wide-ranging career in the US and UK before Parliament
Narayan’s career before Parliament was deliberately wide-ranging. He worked as an economist and senior adviser in the Cabinet Office, the department at the heart of the British government, advising Cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister. He then served as expert adviser to Britain’s Environment Secretary, helping draft the UK’s 25-year environment plan.
In the private sector he joined Lazard, a leading global investment bank, advising major British company boards, government finance ministries, and technology entrepreneurs across Europe and the United States. He later spent time in Silicon Valley, California’s global hub for technology and innovation, supporting founders working in artificial intelligence, financial technology, and climate change. He brought that experience back to Westminster as Head of Tech Policy for Labour’s Shadow Digital Secretary.
Throughout, he maintained roots in community work. He volunteered with Citizens Advice, a national network offering free guidance on legal, financial and other issues, and the Trussell Trust, a UK-wide food bank network. He also used his finance background to produce national research on households in severe debt.
The gap he never forgot
Narayan describes his educational journey as one of extraordinary privilege: bursary support that took him to Eton, a degree at Oxford, and an MBA at Stanford. But through all of it, he says, one reality never left him.
“There was no difference in talent between my friends at Cathays in Cardiff, and my friends at each of the institutions I experienced since,” he reflects. “There was only a difference in opportunity.”
It is a conviction that has shaped everything since. At university, he founded Attain Wales, a mentoring programme designed to help Welsh state school students access top universities. He also co-founded a student thinktank focused on tackling homelessness. And it is the same belief, he says, that brought him into politics.
“That simple reality is why I pursue politics with a simple mission: to spread opportunity to every child in the Vale of Glamorgan, and across Wales.”
His rise is extraordinary by any measure. Yet what has driven him is not ambition but that same conviction: that talent needs no postcode, only a chance.
Becoming Wales’ first ethnic minority MP
In 2023, selected as Labour’s candidate for the Vale of Glamorgan, a coastal constituency in South Wales, Narayan moved from Cardiff to Barry, a seaside town within the constituency, shortly after his selection. The seat had been held by the Conservative Party for fourteen years, represented most recently by the incumbent MP Alun Cairns.
His campaign was emphatically ground-level. He and his volunteer team knocked on 30,000 doors. They delivered medicines for neighbours, collected litter, raised money for the RNLI, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a charity that saves lives at sea, and supported local veterans. It was a campaign built, he says, on “relentless door-to-door engagement and an unwavering commitment to local issues.”
On the night of the July 2024 general election, he won. The seat returned to Labour, and Narayan became Wales’ first ethnic minority MP. The BBC described it as one of the most significant developments in Welsh political history since Lady Megan Lloyd George became the first woman elected from Wales, back in 1929.
A minister for the age of AI
After the election, Narayan was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, a senior support role to the Secretary of State. Then, in September 2025, he was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Online Safety at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, a junior ministerial role that sits at the intersection of all his previous experience.
For a man who has moved between government offices in Westminster, investment bank boardrooms across Europe, and the start-up garages of Silicon Valley, the portfolio feels less like an appointment than an inevitability. He remains, he says, “convinced that changing technology offers the greatest opportunity for the Vale, and for Britain, to reclaim its proud heritage of innovation.”
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Purpose unchanged
The journey from Muzaffarpur in Bihar to a modest flat in Cardiff, the Welsh capital, to the halls of Westminster has been long. But the mission, he says, has always been simple. “I am determined to bring everything I have learnt, from the heart of government, from business across the UK and Silicon Valley, and from community work, to the service of the Vale of Glamorgan.”
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