It’s a bad time to be a Tory whip. Facing briefings of incompetence and allegations of blackmail, backbencher Nus Ghani has overnight added fuel to the fire by claiming she was sacked from her ministerial post because her Muslim faith was ‘making colleagues uncomfortable’. A few hours after the Sunday Times reports surfaced, Chief Whip Mark Spencer stepped forward to reveal himself as the MP about whom such charges were levelled.
Ghani, of course, made history in January 2018 as the first female Muslim Minister to speak from the House of Commons dispatch box. A staunch Brexiteer and critic of China, she was surprisingly sacked from her transport brief in the February 2020 mini-reshuffle despite being generally well-regarded in the role. She has now come forth to say:
I was told that at the reshuffle meeting in Downing Street that ‘Muslimness’ was raised as an ‘issue’, that my ‘Muslim women minister’ status was making colleagues uncomfortable and that there were concerns that I wasn’t loyal to the party as I didn’t do enough to defend the party against Islamophobia allegations.
Ghani claims that when she challenged this, pointing out there was little she could do about her identity, she was subjected to a monologue about ‘how hard it was to define when people are being racist and that the party doesn’t have a problem and I needed to do more to defend it.’ She adds: ‘It was very clear to me that the whips and No 10 were holding me to a higher threshold of loyalty than others because of my background and faith.’ Ooft.
Naturally, such serious claims are not the kind of thing that Spencer, a former farmer, would take lying down. He has come forth ‘to ensure other Whips are not drawn into this matter’, labelling the accusations ‘completely false’ and ‘defamatory’ and asserting that ‘I have never used those words attributed to me.’
Spencer asks why Ghani didn’t previously refer the charges to the Conservative party or use the formal CCHQ complaints procedure – though Steerpike suspects that is hardly surprising, given the tendency for internal processes to protect their political parties’ image first and foremost.
Given the charges and the fact that Spencer appears to have fallen foul of an influential eco-lobby championed by the Prime Minister’s wife, Mr S wonders how long it’ll be before he joins Ghani on the backbenches too.
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