Newly promoted Welsh MP deletes private sector roles from CV

Martin Shipton

A Welsh MP who was promoted to the UK Cabinet by Andy Burnham has for unexplained reasons deleted references to a number of jobs he had in the private sector from his LinkedIn profile,

Kanishka Narayan was elected as the Labour MP for Vale of Glamorgan at the 2024 general election.

An Old Etonian, he was not well known in local party circles, and many were surprised when he was selected as the candidate in a seat Labour was expected to win.

Nevertheless he won the ballot and defeated former Secretary of State for Wales Alun Cairns to be elected as the Vale’s MP with a majority of 4,216.

Narayan was born in Bihar, India, in November 1989. His family moved to Cardiff when he was 12 and he grew up in the city, by his own account sleeping on the floor of his family’s one-bedroom home off City Road. He spent one year at Cathays High School before attending Eton College with the help of a scholarship. He studied PPE (Philosophy Politics and Economics) at Balliol College, Oxford, before gaining a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University.

He has said that he joined the Labour Party when he was 18.

Narayan was a civil servant in the Cabinet Office under David Cameron and later worked at the Environment Department under Liz Truss.

After being elected as an MP, he was immediately appointed parliamentary private secretary to Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

In September 2025, he was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Online Safety, a junior ministerial role in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. He has now been promoted to the Cabinet.

The satirical magazine Private Eye magazine has now drawn attention to gaps that have recently appeared in his LinkedIn CV.

Private Eye’s story – headed Bio-Engineering – states: “Kanishka Narayan, having survived Andy Burnham’s afternoon of the long knives, saw his role as AI minister promoted to Cabinet level.

“While no one can doubt the minister’s breathless promotion of AI, his LinkedIn profile suggests an aptitude for making investors (and himself) cash from the technology rather than making it work for the public – or at least it did until various jobs disappeared from his CV.

“A civil servant offering economic advice to ministers from 2012-16, Narayan left government for the financial sector, working as an adviser to Lazard bank on finance and mergers and acquisitions, with a focus on tech entrepreneurs, from 2016-19.

“He then spent just under a year at Atomico, a European tech-focused venture capital firm, before two years at the London offices of Clocktower Ventures, a California-based investment firm focusing ‘exclusively on financial technology’.

“These corporate roles were listed on his LinkedIn profile – but for some reason Narayan has now deleted them, only listing his government jobs. He is now in a key position to guide the government down the road of becoming a major customer in the AI tech market. And if that all goes wrong, he can always go back to working in finance.”

The edited version of Narayan’s LinkedIn CV that can now be viewed does not mention that he went to Eton – nor does it mention any of his private sector jobs.

Instead it lists six volunteering activities he has engaged in since 2012 – including a period between 2016 and 2021 when he says he advised Shadow Cabinet Members on economic policy, national security and investment, and public service reform.

We wrote to him stating: “The current edition of Private Eye carries the attached story about deletions from your LinkedIn profile.” We asked him to send us a statement reacting to the Private Eye story and explaining why the deletions had been made.

Kanishka Narayan did not respond.

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