When Imran Ahmad Khan was selected as the last-minute Conservative candidate for Wakefield in the 2019 general election, he sold himself as a “local lad”. He made a big deal of being born at the local hospital, where his late father was a doctor and his mum a nurse, and educated at Silcoates, the town’s lesser private school.
It was perhaps odd, then, that none of the local Tories seemed to have any idea 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 leader of the Conservative group of Wakefield council since 2014: “Wakefield is a close-knit place. I didn’t know anybody who knew him.”
