Tory press office failed to deal with allegations MP sexually assaulted teenage boy, court hears

Allegations a Conservative candidate had previously sexually assaulted a teenage boy were “not taken very seriously” by the party’s press office, a court has heard.

Imran Ahmad Khan, 48, is said to have forced the then-15-year-old to drink gin and tonic before dragging him upstairs and asking him to watch pornography before groping him in a bunk bed after a party in January 2008.

The alleged victim’s parents broke down in tears as they told Southwark Crown Court on Thursday how their son was left “inconsolable” and “shaking” after the incident at a house in Staffordshire.

A police report was made at the time but the boy did not want to make a formal complaint, the jury heard.

However, he said “it all came flooding back” after finding out Khan was standing to become the MP for Wakefield in West Yorkshire in the 2019 general election.

Days before the vote, the alleged victim said he contacted the Conservative Party press office to inform them of his claims against Khan.

“I wasn’t taken very seriously,” he said.

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“I explained that Imran Khan was running for MP and had just sort of been hurriedly put through.

“I explained this and said ‘He sexually assaulted me when I was a child, when I was 15’.”

He said the woman he spoke to sounded “shocked” and passed him on to someone else who sounded more “stern” and asked if he had any “proof”.

“I said ‘Yes, there’s a police report’ and she said ‘Well…’, and that was it.

“I said ‘I’m going to the police’, and she said ‘Well, you do that’.”

Days later, Khan was voted in as a Conservative MP in the so-called “red wall” that had been Labour’s heartlands in the Midlands and northern England.

Khan has been suspended from the Conservative Party but remains Wakefield’s MP.

The alleged victim, who said he voted Labour, insisted his complaint was “not motivated by political reasons”.

“If it was, I would’ve done it before the general election,” he added.

Khan, who was 34 at the time, denies a single count of sexual assault over the alleged incident. He is alleged to have touched the boy’s feet and legs and came within a “hair’s breadth” of his privates.

The complainant’s father cried in the witness box as he told how his son was “inconsolable” after the alleged attack.

“He went into shock, he was shaking, crying and it seemed like hours until I got the words out ‘I was molested’,” he said.

His mother said Khan had seemed like a “very charming man” who she believed was “foreign royalty”. She described her son as an “absolutely joyous boy” who she had tried to bring up in an “Enid Blyton existence”.

“He was a young child, he was a boy. He wasn’t a man, and I think that is what has upset me the most about all of this.

“He was a child when he went upstairs that night and he suddenly had to face what he had to face.”

Crying, she added: “I will never, for as long as I live, forget this: (My son) just shaking and shaking and shaking.

“I couldn’t get any sense out of him. I just grabbed him and tried to calm him and stop him shaking.

“He was speaking in hushed tones and was just saying ‘He was trying to feel me, he was trying to feel me’.”

Khan, who is gay and a Muslim, said he only touched the Catholic teen’s elbow when he “became extremely upset” after talking about his confused sexuality.

The MP’s barrister suggested the complainant had given three “contradictory” accounts to police in 2008, 2019 and 2021.

She accused the man, who has trained as an actor, of “literally making this up” and reliving a “drama you are convinced of in your own mind”.

But the man insists he is telling the truth, telling the court: “I am not a liar.”

The trial continues.

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