Kenny Imafidon talks Peckham, prison, Parliament and the pen

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Theresa May looked 17-year-old Kenny Imafidon straight in the eye. She was nodding and ‘genuinely taking in my words’ as he shared his ideas on how to reduce youth violence and knife crime. Imafidon had been a prefect, an A-Level student with a robust CV of political work experience, including this presentation to the then home secretary. He was also, his new book That Peckham Boy details, a drug dealer, just as likely to be carrying ‘a hundred grams of weed’ in his backpack as his philosophy and history books.

Does the former prime minister know about this paradox? I ask as I sit across from the 30-year-old entrepreneur, social commentator — and now author — in the lobby of a London Bridge hotel. ‘No… I think that’s the beauty, that nobody knew. I was trying to have it all!’

Teenage double lives don’t get much more extreme than this, but in Imafidon’s autobiography his foray into criminality is presented as understandable, rather than simply harrowing. One of two children his formidable-sounding Nigerian mother raised in a pre-gentrification SE15 between working round the clock to make ends meet, Imafidon is the prodigal son who never fully lost his way. Going from working for London’s big-name politicians as a teenager to a six- month stint behind bars and facing 30 years in prison, he is now a BBC Children in Need trustee, a Commonwealth Trust advisor (yes, he’s met Harry and Meghan, who he calls ‘very nice people. They seem down to earth and the last time we met we had some good laughs’). He also works with oodles of charities and has a parliamentary pass.

Imafidon’s story began in substandard housing, with a mum doing everything at once and his ‘shockingly stingy astonishingly absent and unbelievably unempathetic’ father. Soon, he found alternative protection and affirmation from local older boys who happened to be drug dealers and followed their career path. How important was it to not depict his experience as an inevitable pipeline? ‘Research shows there are a lot of negative life outcomes that can happen as a result of not having a dad around. However, we also know that despite this, many people obviously still have positive outcomes. It’s never so straight-forward,’ Imafidon says diplomatically, before putting his fists out and adding: ‘It’s like driving a car, it’s much better to drive with two hands than with one, even if you’re great at driving with one.’

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Despite his mother’s best efforts at discipline, he hustled hard, juggling B-class drugs with A-grade school work and girlfriends while pushing for work experience placements in the offices of politicians such as former deputy London mayor Valerie Shawcross and local MP Harriet Harman. But two days after Imafidon’s 18th birthday, his freedom was taken away as he was charged with the murder of a 17-year-old friend. The Metropolitan Police used circumstantial evidence to place him at the scene of the fatal shooting, and ‘for the first time ever, I wished I had been caught for something I actually had done’, Imafidon writes. After months on trial, he was acquitted on the direction of the judge.

He writes of community sentences and ‘focusing on wider issues that lead people to crime — like poverty — before investing so much in more prison places.’ But what could fix a problem like the Metropolitan Police? Imafidon chuckles. ‘One of the key things the Met lacks is humility. And also understanding that reconciliation is needed and that it’s an intentional process. And action! There’s a whole report clearly articulating what needs to happen.’

‘The Black community knows the Casey Report is evidence of what they already knew and felt,’ he adds. ‘A big part of it is the culture, it’s dangerous, not just for young Black men; it’s dangerous for women, dangerous for Asian men and women, dangerous for everyone who’s not a white man… and even then they have issues.’ I wonder if he thinks that under Suella Braverman there might be an… but before I even reach the word ‘improvement’ he laughs again, a little louder. ‘Why are we not dealing with the issues but the symptoms? There’s enough socioeconomic issues that exist that they can be dealing with, you can’t be having lazy policing and narratives being pushed out.’

There are young people growing up in some deprived areas and all they know is their area and Westfields. Some people haven’t even seen a beach

Having been stopped and searched often enough to have ‘lost count of how many times’, Imafidon is critical of the current home secretary’s plea to police forces to amp up deployment of the tactic: ‘At the same time Braverman made that announcement, she disbanded the Windrush unit that had all these recommendations. When you look at it in the wider context of what she’s actually doing, it’s dangerous.’

Keen to a firm balance — Imafidon left the Labour Party almost as soon as he joined it as a teenager, and has no affiliations with any party now — he adds, ‘I know they’ve got a battle against wokeism, but what we are discussing now isn’t wokeism, it’s just a case of: there are better ways to do things and let’s deal with the real issues at hand. And to do that we’ve got to be collaborative.’

He collaborates by mentoring young Black men and ‘giving back’ as a newly privileged member of society. ‘I love the fact that when I meet young people, I can take them to a private member’s club. Let them see that, yes, it’s still very elite. However, it’s about people understanding; there are people like this, who look like you or come where you come from.’

‘Growing up, I lacked exposure — I may have been curious but the streets became my whole world,’ he explains. ‘There are young people growing up in some deprived areas and all they know is their area and Westfields. People don’t know what Manchester looks like, some people haven’t even seen a beach.’

Keeping informed of the truth is vital to Imafidon, and soon after he was acquitted, he developed The Kenny Report, a research project building on the same topics he discussed with Theresa May. That provided the springboard for him to co-found ClearView, ‘a market and social research agency. A lot of our focus is actually on engaging and working with people from diverse backgrounds and under-represented groups. A lot of other research tends to focus on the same old people.’

And none of his work to make the streets better for the young would-be Imafidons of today would happen without his spirituality. God’s role in Imafidon’s life has grown from obligatory church attendance as a child through to his mum citing him psalms over the prison phone line, to him today acknowledging ‘it’s been the biggest factor for me in terms of transformation. By having Jesus in my life, that’s what gave me the resilience to get through such a time like that. That wasn’t my willpower.’

He still visits the friends he was on trial with and who were, he believes, wrongfully convicted. Has he made amends with the enemies he made while dealing? ‘Over time I’ve met several people and it’s been positive, I think because they’ve seen the change in myself and that I’m no longer that person — the proof is in the pudding.’

Now married and living in east London, he’s made peace with his father and is ‘blessed and fortunate to have the role models I’ve had in my stepfather and Lord Hastings [with whom he co-founded prisoner support group My Brother’s Keeper], and I want to make sure my kids will have that too. Through being patient and through working on myself, and building my character, I have the things that I really wanted when I was younger.’ And this time, it’s legit.

‘That Peckham Boy’ by Kenny Imafidon is published on 13 July (£16.99; Torva)