When Imran Ahmad Khan was elected the Conservative candidate at the last minute for Wakefield in the 2019 general election, he sold himself as a “local boy”. He was very successful in being born at a local hospital, where his late father was a doctor and his mother a nurse, and was educated at Silcoates, the city’s smallest private school.
It may have been strange at the time that none of the local Tories seemed to have any idea who he was, claiming to have been “pushed” into the constituency. He was unknown even to Nadim Ahmed, who was the leader of the conservative group of the Wakefield Council since 2014: “Wakefield is a closely connected place. I didn’t know anyone who knew him. “
He didn’t even pretend to live there, citing his address as a mansion in the Lake District where his mother lived. The Labor Party liked to call him “Windermere’s candidate.”
Khan quickly built a reputation as an eccentric hero with a penchant for telling wild stories of his previous life as a counter-terrorism consultant in some of the most dangerous parts of the world.
With his booming voice, his accent more like the Duke of York than West Yorkshire, he told military stories of his IED blast in Afghanistan – some people were shown the scars he said came from burning shrapnel – and talks with the Taliban.
He speaks proudly of his brothers Karim and Khalid, both high-ranking lawyers – Karim is the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and was in Ukraine this week to investigate war crimes.
To some, he sometimes seemed to play a role, growing extravagant Kitchener-style mustaches and wearing red pants with rainbow shirts. “On Sunday, in memory, I remember turning to the Cenotaph, limping with a cane, almost as if he himself had been wounded in battle,” said a local politician. “Then the next day you will see him turn the cane and walk normally.”
Khan was elected Tory candidate a month after election day after the initial election had to be withdrawn due to offensive Facebook posts. Much of what the Guardian has learned about his past casts doubt on whether the Conservative Party has done the right checks to determine if he is a fit and suitable person to represent them in parliament.
The party claims that there is no evidence that anyone complained to it before the election that Khan is a pedophile – the victim in the process of a sexual crime claims that he did so. But he did not answer a question from the Guardian as to whether he had been checked.
Tony Homewood, a conservative adviser at Wakefield who served as Khan’s election agent in 2019 and previously worked as an “execution consultant” in the United States to teach prison officials how to hang prisoners, said on Twitter. that Khan was “pressed” in the constituency. He claims that Khan “initially applied for the position and was not actually selected for an interview.”
He added: “What we can all ask is how are the candidates selected and how can a situation be reached where someone as completely unsuitable as Khan can be approved?” Homewood did not respond to an interview request.
During his two-and-a-half years as a Wakefield MP, Hahn gave different versions of his CV. He no longer mentions his work for the private intelligence company SCL, the parent company of controversial consultants, according to Cambridge Analytica.
But he did not try to hide his work on the Syrian Media Center, the Syrian government’s propaganda unit in the United Kingdom, where he was director of communications and strategy from 2004 to 2005. On his LinkedIn page, he said that ” successfully organized the official launch party based on my own contacts to ensure that guests include over 200 leaders from the worlds of media, politics, diplomacy, industry, academia and the arts (eg the Honorable Michael Portillo, Sir David Frost ). “
His already deleted profile page for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on foreign affairs claims that he “works with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and M&C Saatchi from 2015 to 2018, where he advocates a new approach to achieving more “Great political and popular support that can provide solutions to problems affecting the destruction campaign.”
But M&C Saatchi insists it worked for them as an external consultant for just one month in 2019. Khan disputes that.
In an article in the Times this week, one of his former interns in parliament, Felix Mohaupt, claimed that Khan had told him that he had completed a postgraduate degree in Georgetown, one of the most prestigious universities in the United States.
Asked why there was no record of this, Khan said he should have visited Georgetown, but could not because his father had died. His lawyers told the Guardian: “We cannot speculate whether Felix misunderstood our client or what was said, and our client does not remember the conversation with him, or in fact by Mr Mohaupt.
One thing missing from his LinkedIn profile is a brief stint at the University of Leeds, where he began a degree in politics, Russian and parliamentary studies in 1992.
Julian Watson, who was on the same course, told Hahn: “He was very full of himself and I think he tends to exaggerate his achievements. One of the things he boasted about was that he was a special adviser to the president of a former Soviet country. It is unlikely, given that he was then 18 years old. He dropped out / was expelled after a few weeks or months. The next time I found out about him, he had just been elected Wakefield MP. I was shocked. “
The Guardian failed to confirm a claim made in his deleted APPG account that “in the early 1990s [when Khan was in his late teens or early twenties] Imran was a special adviser to the President of Belarus Stanislav S. Shushkevich.
But some of Khan’s crazier claims seem to have at least some basis in reality.
Alex Ulster, son of the Earl of Gloucester and a former British Army officer, said he worked with Hahn on anti-extremism projects for the UK Foreign Office between 2008 and 2014, before Hahn left to work for the Organization. of the United Nations.
After meeting in the 1990s, when they were graduating with a degree in military studies from King’s College London, in 2010 the two set up a consulting firm called Xain Research and Communication, which had contracts with the British government.
Ulster was a little vague about what exactly they did – “you’ll have to ask the Foreign Office,” he said. (The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not yet responded.)
But he said Khan was doing what he called an “atmosphere” by touring villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan, finding out what was happening and reporting to the foreign ministry.
“He did a lot of things in Afghanistan. It wasn’t long, but we did a project where he met with people who were Taliban, “he said. “These were people from the village, not the leadership of the organization or senior leaders … He was not negotiating on behalf of the government or anything at this level. We did what was called atmosphere. “
Asked to explain, he compared him to a reporter wandering around Wakefield asking about the by-elections: “Vox populi. We will bring him back. “
He denied that they had in fact gathered evidence. “We absolutely wouldn’t call it intelligence, but that’s, you know, the taste of the streets,” Ulster said. He laughed when asked if Khan was a spy – persistent rumors in Wakefield. “No, he’s not a spy,” he said. “I think I’d find out if he’s a spy.”
But he said Khan was “pretty daring – he went to places I wouldn’t… You know, he was pretty committed to the cause.” The reason is? “Anti-terrorism. And, you know, trying to stop Pakistanis and Afghans from blowing each other up.
Wakefield voters were less in love with their MP, with some complaining that when they went to ask for help, they had to sit under the huge portrait of Margaret Thatcher. After his conviction this week, many were outraged when he initially refused calls to resign.
But by Thursday night, the pressure was too great and he gave up, saying he would focus entirely on clearing his name.
“As I intend this to be my only statement, I would like to apologize to my family and community for the humiliation they have caused them,” he wrote.
“Issues related to sexuality in my community are not trivial, and learning from the press about my orientation, drinking and past behavior before becoming an MP was not easy.”
helen.pidd@theguardian.com
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