Hamed Chapman

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s newly appointed ethics adviser has taken over the delayed investigation into the sacking of the first and only female Muslim Tory MP to be a minister, Nusrat Ghani, who has claimed she was sacked three years ago because of her “Muslimness” when Boris Johnson was in power.

After initially insisting that he did not want to get involved, Johnson ordered a formal inquiry to be conducted by his ethics adviser, Lord Geidt, before resigning months later, in June 2020, after admitting the then-Prime Minister himself may have broken the ministerial code in the so-called Partygate scandal.

No replacement was appointed before Johnson was finally forced out of office the following month in disgrace by his MPs over his integrity. There was also no selection made during Liz Truss’s 44 days in office. It took until December before Sunak got around to naming Laurie Magnus, who will now carry on the inquiry.

The Labour Party Chair, Anneliese Dodds, who has been pushing for the investigation, described the one-year delay as a “disgrace.” It “tells you everything you need to know about the Conservatives’ commitment to tackling Islamophobia,” she told the BBC.

Under PM Theresa May, Ghani was appointed to a post at the Department for Transport in 2018, and she became the first female Muslim Minister to speak at the Despatch Box in the Commons, but she lost her job during a mini-reshuffle of Boris Johnson’s government in February 2020.

“I was told that at the reshuffle meeting in Downing Street that ‘Muslimness’ was raised as an ‘issue’,” she said when she asked Conservative Party whips for an explanation.

“My ‘Muslim women minister’ status was making colleagues uncomfortable, and there were concerns ‘that I wasn’t loyal to the party as I didn’t do enough to defend the party against Islamophobia allegations’,” she said.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, the Tory MP revealed that she had dropped the matter after being told that if she “persisted,” she “would be ostracised and her career and reputation would be destroyed.”

“I raised it several more times through official party channels… I was extremely careful to follow procedure, and when the procedure ran out of [the] road, I had no choice but to get on with my career.”

In a later statement, she said: “Not a day has gone by without thinking about what I was told and wondering why I was in politics… those that have not had their identity and faith questioned cannot fully appreciate what it does to you.”

Mark Spencer, who at the time was the chief whip, identified himself as the person Ghani was referring to, saying he did not want others in the whip’s office to be “drawn into this matter.” He added that the accusations were “completely false, and I consider them to be defamatory”.

When the allegations were made, the EHRC said it would “consider any findings” from the government’s inquiry, adding: “If we are not satisfied with [the] progress, we will not rule out the use of our legal powers.”

Photo: Nusrat Ghani (Credit: Parliament Portrait)