4 days ago
ANDREW PIERCE: Was Afzal Khan's visit to Cyprus a bid to save his seat as he faces battle against Corbyn's new party?
Not for nothing has Labour 's Afzal Khan been dubbed the 'Honourable Member for Islamabad'.
Born in Pakistan, where he lived until he was 11, the bearded MP has become perhaps the Commons' most vocal cheerleader for his ancestral homeland.
On Thursday, he was in his element, helping raise Pakistan's national flag at the country's consulate, found – where else? – in his Manchester Rusholme constituency, at an event to mark the anniversary of partition from India in 1947.
The first Muslim Lord Mayor of Manchester, who speaks Urdu as a first language, Khan also finds time to chair the all-party parliamentary group on 'Britain-Pakistan trade and tourism' and was, until he was dramatically sacked on Friday night, a trade envoy to Turkey.
He is, meanwhile, a former parliamentary chair for the Labour Muslim Network, an ex-assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain and vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on British Muslims.
Yet in the past week, this distinguished if perhaps narrowly focused politician became famous for all the wrong reasons – having triggered an ugly international spat by embarking on a bizarre all-expenses-paid trip to northern Cyprus.
This Turkish-controlled territory is an international pariah, unrecognised by the British or any other government except Istanbul. In 1974, after an attempted coup by Greek Cypriots, Turkish troops invaded Cyprus, raping women, abusing children, displacing perhaps 160,000 people and slaughtering an estimated 4,000 Greek Cypriots.
The United Nations, Great Britain and the international community have never accepted the rogue state of 'northern Cyprus', which amounts to about 36 per cent of the island.
Predictably, then, Khan's squalid little jaunt has triggered outrage in Cyprus, which boasts two British military bases, and indeed beyond.
The National Federation of Cypriots in the UK denounced the trip as a 'flagrant breach' of both international law and British policy. Khan even agreed to be photographed grinning alongside Turkish Cypriot 'leader' Ersin Tatar at the latter's 'official residence', while accepting an honorary doctorate. Further reports suggest they exchanged 'gifts'.
Khan was in fact a guest of Tatar who had issued a 'formal invitation' – and who was no doubt delighted at the propaganda coup of having lured a senior British MP from the governing party to lend legitimacy to his Potemkin statelet.
While there, Khan – who neither sought nor received permission from the Labour leadership for the visit, nor discussed it with the Foreign Office – also saw nothing wrong in attending a series of 'official meetings', according to reports.
Khan did not respond to my requests for comment.
So what was the 67-year-old thinking? He calculated that the only way he can survive as an MP is by courting the Muslim bloc vote in his constituency – who sympathise with their co-religionists on the island.
Islam is the largest religion in Manchester Rusholme, amounting to some 37 per cent of the electorate, while in northern Cyprus, 97 per cent of locals are Sunni Muslims.
Khan virtually admitted there might be votes in his trip when he said he had been encouraged to visit by his Turkish Cypriot friends in Manchester, adding: 'That is why I am happy to be here.'
And no wonder, given his shaky majority. While many Labour MPs were re-elected with increased majorities at the last election, Khan's slipped to just over 8,000.
I can disclose he is now facing a major challenge from Jeremy Corbyn's nascent ultra-Left-wing, pro-Gaza political party, co- led by Zarah Sultana MP (who is herself of Pakistani Muslim ancestry).
Already massing under the banner of the so-far-unnamed outfit – nicknamed 'Jezbollah' – are four 'independent' Muslim MPs who captured their seats from Labour at the last election.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting, seen as a future Labour leader, squeaked home in Ilford North by just 528 votes, narrowly beating a 24-year-old whose campaign was endorsed by the increasingly powerful Muslim Vote pressure group. Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood saw her majority in Birmingham slashed from 28,500 to 3,400.
Corbyn and his chums, then, represent a serious threat to the Labour order. And on Friday night, a source close to Corbyn told me that Manchester Rusholme is top of their hit list. 'Afzal Khan is a long-time supporter of Starmer's regime,' said the source.
'We will flood Khan's constituency with supporters and resources.
'We intend to win it big. Afzal Khan may think he can curry favour with the Muslims in his constituency by embracing northern Cyprus – but they will see straight through it.'
Khan has enraged the pro-Gaza lobby for having abstained in a Commons vote proscribing the pressure group Palestine Action.
Another black mark against him, as they see it, was his abstention on a 2023 vote to make it illegal for councils to boycott Israeli goods. My Corbynista source adds: 'His actions speak louder than his freebie to northern Cyprus.'
Khan left school without any qualifications before working as a bus driver and ultimately training as a solicitor.
In 2014, as an MEP, he thought it appropriate to tweet: 'The Israeli government are acting like Nazi's [sic] in Gaza.'
After he was selected as a Labour parliamentary candidate, he claimed: 'I was new to Twitter and made a mistake, which I apologised for.' But this was untrue: he had sent the tweet four years after he first started using Twitter.
Khan apologised again the following year after sharing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about an 'Israel-British- Swiss-Rothschilds crime syndicate'. He later said he was 'mortified'.
He apologised yet again two years ago after posing in front of a stall accusing Israel of 'apartheid', just two days after Hamas's October 7 attacks.
On Friday night, a senior Labour figure told me: 'Khan said it was a personal visit. But he was the official trade envoy for the UK visiting a territory no other country recognises – so it's not a personal visit.
