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.”
He didn’t even pretend to live locally, giving his address as a Lake District mansion where his mother lived. The Labour party liked to call him “the Windermere candidate”.
Ahmad Khan quickly established a reputation as an eccentric character with a penchant for telling wild tales about his previous life as a counter-terrorism consultant in some of the most dangerous parts of the world.
In his booming voice, his accent more Duke of York than West Yorkshire, he would tell war stories about getting blown up by an IED in Afghanistan – some people were shown the scars he said came from burning shrapnel – and negotiating with the Taliban.
He talked proudly of his brothers, Karim and Khalid, who are both high-flying lawyers – Karim is the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in The Hague and has been in Ukraine this week investigating war crimes.
To some, he appeared sometimes to be playing a part, growing an extravagant Kitchener-style moustache and wearing red trousers with rainbow-striped shirts. “On Remembrance Sunday I remember him turning up to the Cenotaph hobbling with a cane, almost as if he himself had been wounded in battle,” said one local politician. “Then the next day you’d see him twirling the cane around and walking normally.”
Ahmad Khan was selected as the Tory candidate a month from polling day after the original choice had to step down because of offensive Facebook posts. Much of what the Guardian has learned about his past casts doubts on whether the Conservative party did proper background checks to establish if he was a fit and proper person to represent them in parliament.
The party says it has no record of anyone complaining to it before the election that Ahmad Khan was a paedophile – the victim in his sex offence trial claimed that he had done so. But it did not respond when asked by the Guardian if he had been vetted.
Tony Homewood, a Conservative councillor in Wakefield who acted as Ahmad Khan’s election agent in 2019 and previously worked as an “execution consultant” in the US to teach prison staff how to hang inmates, said on Twitter that Ahmad Khan had been “pushed” on the constituency. He claimed that Ahmad Khan had “applied for the seat originally and was in fact not selected for interview”.
He added: “What we might all ask is how candidates are selected and how can the situation come about where someone as wholly inappropriate as Ahmad Khan can get approved?” Homewood did not respond to a request for an interview.
During his two-and-a-half-year spell as Wakefield’s MP, Ahmad Khan has given differing versions of his CV. He no longer mentions his work for the private intelligence company SCL, parent company of controversial data consultants Cambridge Analytica.
But he has made no attempt to hide his job setting up the Syrian Media Centre, the UK propaganda arm of the Syrian government, where he was director of communications and strategy from 2004 to 2005. On his LinkedIn page, he says he “successfully organised the official launch party drawing on my own contacts to ensure that the guests included over 200 leaders drawn from the worlds of media, politics, diplomacy, industry, academia and art (eg. Rt. Hon. 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 novel approach to achieve greater political and popular support that might provide solutions to issues affecting the eradication campaign”.
But M&C Saatchi insists he worked for them as an external consultant for only one month in 2019. Ahmad Khan disputes this.
In a piece for the Times this week, one of his former parliamentary interns, Felix Mohaupt, claimed Ahmad Khan told him he had done a postgraduate degree at Georgetown, one of the most prestigious universities in the US.
Asked why there is no record of this, Ahmad Khan said he was due to attend Georgetown but couldn’t because his father died. His lawyers told the Guardian: “We are unable to speculate as to whether Felix misunderstood our client or what was stated, and our client has no recollection of the conversation with him, or indeed of Mr Mohaupt.”
One thing missing from his LinkedIn profile is a brief spell at Leeds University, where he started a degree in politics, Russian and parliamentary studies in 1992.
Julian Watson, who was on the same course, said of Ahmad Khan: “He was very full of himself and prone, I think, to exaggerating his achievements. One of the things he used to boast about was having been a special adviser to a president of a former Soviet country. Hardly likely given he was 18 at the time. He dropped out/was pushed out after a few weeks or months. The next time I was aware of him he had just been elected Wakefield MP. I was gobsmacked.”
The Guardian has been unable to verify a claim made on his deleted APPG profile that “in the early 1990s [when Ahmad Khan was in his late teens or early twenties] Imran served as Special Advisor to President Stanislav S. Shushkevich of Belarus”.
But some of Ahmad Khan’s wilder claims do appear to have at least some basis in reality.
Alex Ulster, the son of the Earl of Gloucester and a former British army officer, said he worked with Ahmad Khan on counter-extremism projects for the UK Foreign Office between 2008 and 2014, before Ahmad Khan left to work for the United Nations.
Having met in the 1990s when doing a degree in war studies at King’s College in London, in 2010 the pair set up a consultancy 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 Foreign Office had not responded by the time of publication.)
But he said Ahmad Khan used to do what he called “atmospherics”, walking around villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan, finding out what was going on and reporting back to the Foreign Office.
“He did a lot of stuff in Afghanistan. It wasn’t for very long, but we did a project where he was meeting people who were Taliban,” he said. “These were village-level people, not the leadership of the organisation or senior leaders … He was not negotiating on behalf of a government or anything of that level. We were doing what was called atmospherics.”
Asked to explain, he compared it to a reporter wandering around Wakefield asking about the byelection: “Vox populi. We would feed that back.”
He denied they were essentially evidence-gathering. “We would absolutely not call it intelligence, but it’s, you know, the flavour on the streets,” said Ulster. He laughed when asked if Ahmad Khan was a spy – a persistent rumour in Wakefield. “No, he is not a spy,” he said. “I think I would know if he was a spy.”
But he said Ahmad Khan was “quite ballsy – he went to places I wouldn’t … He was quite committed, you know, to the cause.” The cause being? “Anti-terrorism. And, you know, trying to stop the Pakistanis and Afghans from blowing each other up.”
Constituents in Wakefield were less enamoured of their MP, with some complaining that when they went to ask for help they had to sit under a huge portrait of Margaret Thatcher. After his conviction this week, many were outraged when he initially refused calls to stand down.
But by Thursday evening the pressure had become too much and he quit, saying he would focus entirely on clearing his name.
“As I intend for this to be my only statement, I would like to apologise to my family and community for the humiliation this has caused them,” he wrote.
“Questions surrounding sexuality in my community are not trivial, and learning from the press about my orientation, drinking, and past behaviour before I became an MP has not been easy.”
