It was perhaps strange, then, that none of the local Tories seemed to have any idea who he was, claiming that he had been “pushed” into the constituency. He was even unfamiliar with Nadeem Ahmed, who has led the Wakefield board’s conservative group since 2014: “Wakefield is a tied-up place. “I did not know anyone who knew him.” He did not even pretend to live in the area, giving 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 established a reputation as an eccentric character with a tendency to tell wild stories about his past life as a counterterrorism adviser in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. In his raised voice, pronounced more like the Duke of York than West Yorkshire, he told war stories about being blown up by an IED in Afghanistan – showing some signs of burning scraps – and negotiating with them. . He spoke proudly of his brothers, Karim and Khalid, who are both senior lawyers – Karim is the attorney general 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, leaving an extravagant Kitchener-style mustache and wearing red trousers with rainbow striped shirts. “On Remembrance Sunday, I remember him turning to the Cenotaph and hitting with a cane, almost as if he had been wounded in battle,” said a local politician. “Then the next day you would see him spinning his cane and walking normally.” Kahn was nominated by the Tories a month after election day after the initial election had to be scrapped due to offensive Facebook posts. Much of what the Guardian has learned about his past casts doubt on whether the Conservative Party did the proper background checks to see if he was fit and appropriate to represent them in parliament. The party says it has no record of him complaining before the election that Khan was a pedophile – the victim in a sexual injustice trial claimed he had done so. But he did not answer when asked by the Guardian if he had been checked. Tony Homewood, a conservative adviser in Wakefield who served as Khan’s election agent in 2019 and previously worked as an “execution adviser” in the US to teach prison staff how to hang prisoners, said on Twitter that Khan had ” pushed “in the constituency. . He claimed that Khan had “applied for the position initially and had not actually been selected for an interview”. He added: “What we could all ask is how the candidates are selected and how can a situation arise where someone as unfit as Khan can be approved?” Homewood did not respond to a request for an interview. During his two and a half years as a Wakefield MP, Khan has given different versions of his resume. He no longer mentions his work for private information company SCL, the parent company of controversial Cambridge Analytica data consultants. But he has made no attempt to hide his work by setting up the Syrian Media Center, the UK government’s propaganda arm, where he was director of communications and strategy from 2004-05. On his LinkedIn page, he says that he “successfully organized the formal opening party based on my own contacts to ensure that the guests included over 200 leaders from the worlds of media, politics, diplomacy, industry, academia space and art (e.g. Rt. Honorary Michael Portillo, Sir David Frost). His now deleted profile page for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Foreign Affairs claimed that he “worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and M&C Saatchi from 2015 to 2018, where he advocated a new approach to achieving greater policy and popular support that could provide solutions to issues affecting the eradication campaign. “ But M&C Saatchi insists it worked for them as an outside consultant for only one month in 2019. Khan disputes that. In an article for the Times this week, one of his former members of parliament, Felix Mohaupt, claimed that Khan had told him he had done a master’s degree at Georgetown, one of the most famous universities in the United States. Asked why there was no record of this, Khan said he was going to go to Georgetown, but could not because his father had died. His lawyers told the Guardian: “We can not speculate as to whether Felix misunderstood our client or what was said, and our client does not remember talking to him, or even Mr Mohaupt.” One thing missing from his LinkedIn profile is a brief stint at Leeds University, where he began a degree in politics, Russian and parliamentary studies in 1992. Julian Watson, who was on the same path, said of Hahn: “He was very full of himself and prone, I think, to exaggerate his achievements. One of the things he boasted about was that he was a special adviser to a president of a former Soviet country. Hardly possible, since he was 18 at the time. Quit / repulsed after a few weeks or months. The next time I met him, he had just been elected to Wakefield. “I was surprised.” The Guardian could not confirm a claim in the deleted APPG profile that “in the early 1990s [when Khan would have been in his late teens or early twenties] “Imran served as Special Adviser to President Stanislav S. Shushkevich of Belarus.” But some of Khan’s wildest claims seem to have at least some basis in fact. Alex Ulster, the son of the Earl of Gloucester and a former British Army officer, said he worked with Khan on anti-extremism programs for the UK State Department between 2008 and 2014, before Khan left to work for the United States. Nations. Having met in the 1990s when they graduated in war studies at King’s College London, in 2010 the couple founded a consulting firm called Xain Research and Communication, which had contracts with the British government. Ulster was a little vague about what exactly they were doing – “you should ask the State Department,” he said. (The Foreign Office had not responded at the time of publication). But he said Khan used to do what he called “atmospheric”, walk to villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan, find out what was going on and report it to the Foreign Ministry. “He did a lot of things in Afghanistan. “It did not take long, but we did a project where he met people who were Taliban,” he said. “These were people at the village level, not the leadership of the organization or senior leaders. They were not negotiating on behalf of a government or anything like that. We did what was called atmospheric. “ Asked to explain, he compared it to a reporter wandering in Wakefield asking about the election: “Vox populi. We would give it feedback. “ He denied that it was essentially a collection of evidence. “We would not call it intelligence at all, but it is, you know, the taste of the streets,” Ulster said. He laughed when asked if Khan was a spy – a persistent rumor in Wakefield. “No, he is not a spy,” he said. “I think I would know if he was a spy.” But he said Khan was “quite aggressive – he was going to places I would not go; he was quite dedicated, you know, to the purpose.” The cause is? “Counter-terrorism. “And, you know, he’s trying to stop the Pakistanis and the Afghans from blowing up each other.” Voters in Wakefield loved their MP less, with some complaining that when they went to ask for help they had to sit under a huge portrait of Margaret Thatcher. Following his conviction this week, many were outraged when he initially refused to resign. But by Thursday night the pressure had become too much and he resigned, saying he would focus solely 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. “Questions about sexuality in my community are not trivial and learning from the press about my orientation, my drinking and my previous behavior before I became an MP was not easy.” [email protected]
