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When Imran Ahmad Khan was chosen because the last-minute Conservative candidate for Wakefield within the 2019 normal election, he bought himself as a “native lad”. He made a giant deal of being born on the native hospital, the place his late father was a physician and his mum a nurse, and educated at Silcoats, the city’s lesser personal faculty.
It was maybe odd, then, that not one of the native Tories appeared to have any concept who he was, with claims he had been “pushed” on to the constituency. He was a stranger even to Nadeem Ahmed, who had been the chief of the Conservative group of Wakefield council since 2014: “Wakefield is a close-knit place. I didn’t know anyone who knew him.”
He didn’t even fake to dwell regionally, giving his deal with as a Lake District mansion the place his mom lived. The Labour get together favored to name him “the Windermere candidate”.
Khan shortly established a repute as an eccentric character with a penchant for telling wild tales about his earlier life as a counter-terrorism marketing consultant in among the most harmful components of the world.
In his booming voice, his accent extra Duke of York than West Yorkshire, he would inform warfare tales about getting blown up by an IED in Afghanistan – some individuals had been proven the scars he mentioned got here from burning shrapnel – and negotiating with the Taliban.
He talked proudly of his brothers, Karim and Khalid, who’re each high-flying attorneys – Karim is the chief prosecutor of the worldwide felony courtroom in The Hague and has been in Ukraine this week investigating warfare crimes.
To some, he appeared generally to be taking part in an element, rising an extravagant Kitchener-style moustache and carrying pink trousers with rainbow-striped shirts. “On Remembrance Sunday I keep in mind him turning as much as the Cenotaph hobbling with a cane, nearly as if he himself had been wounded in battle,” mentioned one native politician. “Then the following day you’d see him twirling the cane round and strolling usually.”
Khan was chosen because the Tory candidate a month from polling day after the unique alternative needed to step down due to offensive Fb posts. A lot of what the Guardian has discovered about his previous casts doubts on whether or not the Conservative get together did correct background checks to determine if he was a match and correct individual to characterize them in parliament.
The get together says it has no document of anybody complaining to it earlier than the election that Khan was a paedophile – the sufferer in his intercourse offence trial claimed that he had carried out so. But it surely didn’t reply when requested by the Guardian if he had been vetted.
Tony Homewood, a Conservative councillor in Wakefield who acted as Khan’s election agent in 2019 and beforehand labored as an “execution marketing consultant” within the US to show jail workers how one can dangle inmates, mentioned on Twitter that Khan had been “pushed” on the constituency. He claimed that Khan had “utilized for the seat initially and was in truth not chosen for interview”.
He added: “What we would all ask is how candidates are chosen and the way can the scenario come about the place somebody as wholly inappropriate as Khan can get authorized?” Homewood didn’t reply to a request for an interview.
Throughout his two-and-a-half-year spell as Wakefield’s MP, Khan has given differing variations of his CV. He now not mentions his work for the personal intelligence firm SCL, dad or mum firm of controversial information consultants Cambridge Analytica.
However he has made no try to cover his job establishing the Syrian Media Centre, the UK propaganda arm of the Syrian authorities, the place he was director of communications and technique from 2004 to 2005. On his LinkedIn web page, he says he “efficiently organised the official launch get together drawing by myself contacts to make sure that the friends included over 200 leaders drawn from the worlds of media, politics, diplomacy, business, academia and artwork (eg. Rt. Hon. Michael Portillo, Sir David Frost).”
His now-deleted profile web page for the All Get together Parliamentary Group (APPG) on international affairs claimed that he “labored with the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis and M&C Saatchi from 2015 to 2018, the place he advocated a novel method to realize higher political and common assist that may present options to points affecting the eradication marketing campaign”.
However M&C Saatchi insists he labored for them as an exterior marketing consultant for just one month in 2019. Khan disputes this.
In a bit for the Occasions this week, one among his former parliamentary interns, Felix Mohaupt, claimed Khan advised him he had carried out a postgraduate diploma at Georgetown, one of the prestigious universities within the US.
Requested why there isn’t any document of this, Khan mentioned he was on account of attend Georgetown however couldn’t as a result of his father died. His attorneys advised the Guardian: “We’re unable to take a position as as to if Felix misunderstood our shopper or what was acknowledged, and our shopper has no recollection of the dialog with him, or certainly of Mr Mohaupt.”
One factor lacking from his LinkedIn profile is a short spell at Leeds College, the place he began a level in politics, Russian and parliamentary research in 1992.
Julian Watson, who was on the identical course, mentioned of Khan: “He was very stuffed with himself and inclined, I feel, to exaggerating his achievements. One of many issues he used to boast about was having been a particular adviser to a president of a former Soviet nation. Hardly doubtless given he was 18 on the time. He dropped out/was pushed out after a number of weeks or months. The subsequent time I used to be conscious of him he had simply been elected Wakefield MP. I used to be gobsmacked.”
The Guardian has been unable to confirm a declare made on his deleted APPG profile that “within the early Nineties [when Khan was in his late teens or early twenties] Imran served as Particular Advisor to President Stanislav S. Shushkevich of Belarus”.
However a few of Khan’s wilder claims do seem to have at the very least some foundation in actuality.
Alex Ulster, the son of the Earl of Gloucester and a former British military officer, mentioned he labored with Khan on counter-extremism tasks for the UK Overseas Workplace between 2008 and 2014, earlier than Khan left to work for the United Nations.
Having met within the Nineties when doing a level in warfare research at King’s Faculty in London, in 2010 the pair arrange a consultancy known as Xain Analysis and Communication, which had contracts with the British authorities.
Ulster was somewhat obscure about what precisely they did – “you’ll should ask the Overseas Workplace”, he mentioned. (The Overseas Workplace had not responded by the point of publication.)
However he mentioned Khan used to do what he known as “atmospherics”, strolling round villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan, discovering out what was occurring and reporting again to the Overseas Workplace.
“He did a variety of stuff in Afghanistan. It wasn’t for very lengthy, however we did a venture the place he was assembly individuals who had been Taliban,” he mentioned. “These had been village-level individuals, not the management of the organisation or senior leaders … He was not negotiating on behalf of a authorities or something of that degree. We had been doing what was known as atmospherics.”
Requested to clarify, he in contrast it to a reporter wandering round Wakefield asking concerning the byelection: “Vox populi. We’d feed that again.”
He denied they had been basically evidence-gathering. “We’d completely not name it intelligence, however it’s, , the flavour on the streets,” mentioned Ulster. He laughed when requested if Khan was a spy – a persistent hearsay in Wakefield. “No, he’s not a spy,” he mentioned. “I feel I might know if he was a spy.”
However he mentioned Khan was “fairly ballsy – he went to locations I wouldn’t … He was fairly dedicated, , to the trigger.” The trigger being? “Anti-terrorism. And, , attempting to cease the Pakistanis and Afghans from blowing one another up.”
Constituents in Wakefield had been much less enamoured of their MP, with some complaining that once they went to ask for assist they needed to sit underneath an enormous portrait of Margaret Thatcher. After his conviction this week, many had been outraged when he initially refused calls to face down.
However by Thursday night the stress had grow to be an excessive amount of and he stop, saying he would focus totally on clearing his identify.
“As I intend for this to be my solely assertion, I wish to apologise to my household and neighborhood for the humiliation this has precipitated them,” he wrote.
“Questions surrounding sexuality in my neighborhood usually are not trivial, and studying from the press about my orientation, ingesting, and previous behaviour earlier than I grew to become an MP has not been simple.”
helen.pidd@theguardian.com
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