Clive Lewis is a Labour MP. Laura Trevelyan is a former BBC journalist. His ancestors were once enslaved by her ancestors, on a plantation in Grenada. “We make an unlikely pair as two sides of a horrible shared history,” Lewis says in the opening episode of their podcast Heirs of Enslavement. This six-part series, which examines the impact of slavery on today’s politics, derives its power from the awkward juxtaposition of its presenters.
Both are known as expert voices on this topic. In February 2023, the Trevelyans made a public apology for their family’s historical involvement in the slave trade and donated £100,000 in reparations to an education fund in Grenada. The next month, Lewis raised the issue of reparations in a House of Commons debate, calling on Britain to confront its colonial legacy. Neither of them expected this would eventually lead to their making a joint trip to Grenada, to visit that infamous plantation, meet Lewis’s father and try to resolve the pain and contradictions of the past.
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