UK: Former Tory Minister says she was sacked for being a Muslim

By Hamed Chapman and Ahmed J Versi

London, (The Muslim News): The first and only Muslim woman to become a Tory MP has revealed that she lost her junior ministerial job almost two years ago because of her religion

Nusrat Ghani, 49, says after she was sacked as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Aviation and Maritime in a mini reshuffle in February 2020, she was told by a party whip that her “Muslim woman minister status was making colleagues feel uncomfortable”.

At a meeting in Downing Street, she said her “Muslimness was raised as an issue” and claimed she was had kept quiet after being warned that if she continued to raise the matter she would be “ostracised by colleagues” and her “career and reputation would be destroyed”.

Her revelation, made in an interview published by the Sunday Times, comes amid a growing row over the behaviour of Government whips towards their party colleagues at Westminster, with William Wragg, Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, due to meet police to discuss allegations that Downing Street tried to blackmail MPs.

Wragg, who like Ghani, is a Vice-Chairman of the 1922 Committee, has been outspoken in alleging that a number of MPs have faced pressures and intimidation from members of the Government because of their support for a vote of confidence against Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Without being named, Chief Whip, Mark Spencer, broke cover to identify himself as the person Ghani made claims about but also to deny the accusations which he insisted were “completely false” and he had “never used those words attributed to me.”

Speaking on Sky’s Sunday political show, Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, described Ghani’s allegations as “incredibly serious” but said there would be “no investigation by the Conservative party unless she submitted a formal complaint.”

Ghani, who was first elected as an MP for Wealden, in East Sussex, in 2015, was given her ministerial post at the Department of Transport under Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May in January 2018. She became the first Muslim woman minister to also speak from the House of Commons Despatch Box.

“It was like being punched in the stomach. I felt humiliated and powerless,” she said about the reasons given for being sacked. She added that she had since considered whether she wanted to continue being an MP. “I will not pretend that this hasn’t shaken my faith in the party.”

At the reshuffle meeting in Downing Street, Ghani said 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.”

“I had to listen to a monologue on 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. It was very clear to me the whips and No 10 were holding me to a higher threshold of loyalty than others because of my background and faith,”

She claimed: “In this second meeting I was again told there was no Islamophobia in the party and, as if to add to the issue they had with me, I was told that I was in fact fired for apparently saying to the PM that we had a ‘women problem’ [attracting female voters]. In the following weeks I was informed that if I persisted in raising this I would be ostracised by colleagues and my career and reputation would be destroyed.

Commenting on the dismissal, Shadow Women and Equalities Secretary, Anneliese Dodds, said Johnson “must launch an urgent investigation into what happened and sanction anyone who targeted Islamophobic comments at a female Muslim MP.”

“More than six months since the Singh investigation into alleged discrimination in the Conservative Party, and with the party apparently still unwilling to even use the term ‘Islamophobia’, it seems the Tories still have a lot of work to do to root out this insidious hatred from the top to the bottom of their party,” Dodds said.

The watered down Singh inquiry claimed to have found no evidence of “institutional Islamophobia” despite analysis of 1,418 complaints relating to 727 separate incidents as recorded in the Conservatives’ complaints database between 2015 and 2020.

[Nusrat Ghani MP. Photo by UK Government/Creative Commons]

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