The prime minister cares about damage limitation – not tackling Islamophobia

Editorial: On two occasions – at the time and on Sunday evening, when the Ghani allegations first publicly emerged – Mr Johnson made the same mistake of referring the matter to the wrong type of inquiry

(Brian Adcock)

It is becoming a wearily predictable pattern of behaviour. Some scandal blows up in the government, and the prime minister’s immediate reaction is to deny its existence. If that fails, as it tends to, then the instinct is to (try to) close down any questioning by establishing some sort of investigation and inquiry, to which all queries are referred.

The prayer is that the inquirer or investigator is sufficiently sympathetic, and takes so long about their work, that when their report is eventually published, in redacted and sanitised form, the public will have forgotten what it was so angry about, and the media caravan will have moved on to some other distraction, real or synthesised by the official machine.

So it has been, thus far, with Baroness Hallett’s inquiry into the response to the Covid-19 pandemic (disgracefully yet to begin), and the Sue Gray investigation into Partygate, and so it may well prove with the as yet leaderless official investigation into Nusrat Ghani’s allegations of Islamophobia, a form of racism. The omens are not encouraging.

The terms of reference were not made public at the announcement of the investigation, and neither was the chair. This suggests that the move was made in a hurry, if not in a panic, in response to a story that refused to go away.

The first response, when the story broke, was to dismiss Ms Ghani’s grievances and claim that she had turned down the opportunity to make a formal complaint – an offer made by Boris Johnson himself. But Ms Ghani, and other honourable colleagues, persevered. It was understood that it was no less a figure than the chief whip himself, Mark Spencer, who had reported an unknown colleague’s views about her “Muslimness”. Mr Spencer has denied the accusations and called them defamatory. Ms Ghani says she was told, by an unnamed person or persons, that her political career would be over if she pressed the case. So she did not, but finds herself emboldened now.

Mr Johnson has had to concede a different, more appropriate procedure, because the initial complaint should not have been referred to an internal party inquiry. It was made in relation to Ms Ghani’s former status as a minister, and referred to the behaviour of another minister, the chief whip, who is technically “parliamentary secretary to the Treasury”. Thus, it should have been referred at the time by the prime minister to Lord Geidt, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests.

This was, therefore, yet another error of judgement made at the time by Mr Johnson, who mistook a government matter for a party one. It has been compounded by his decision, now, to refer the Ghani affair not to Lord Geidt but to the cabinet office. Perhaps the prime minister thinks the cabinet office will come back with a more favourable verdict. Recent remarks by the voluble backbencher Michael Fabricant haven’t done anything to alter the impression that the Conservatives don’t quite “get” Islamophobia.

Already, then, the Ghani affair is an unwelcome reminder of the issue of widespread Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. Even the party accepts this, at least formally. The Singh Investigation, which reported last year, concluded: “Judging by the extent of complaints and findings of misconduct by the party itself that relate to anti-Muslim words and conduct, anti-Muslim sentiment remains a problem within the party.”

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Over the six years from 2015 to 2020 (inclusive), the party’s central database recorded 1,418 complaints concerning 727 incidents of alleged discrimination; and two-thirds related to allegations of anti-Muslim discrimination.

In its defence, the party points to the successful figures from a Muslim background in the highest reaches of government – Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid Javid, for example. Yet Mr Johnson only seems to have taken Ms Ghani’s allegations sufficiently seriously when Mr Zahawi and Mr Javid made their own misgivings clear and public. Otherwise the “gaslighting” might have continued. The simple existence of Mr Javid and Mr Zahawi evidently does not prove that Islamophobia has been rooted out of the Conservative Party.

The important point is that on two occasions – at the time and on Sunday evening, when the Ghani allegations first publicly emerged – Mr Johnson made the same mistake of referring the matter to the wrong type of inquiry. It looks like a typical bureaucratic effort at damage limitation rather than an honest attempt to extirpate racism from its Islamophobic redoubts within his party.