(Bloomberg) — The U.K. deputy prime minister said Conservative MP Nusrat Ghani hadn’t made a formal complaint about a claim she was told she’d been removed from a cabinet post because of her Muslim faith.
Such a filing would be needed to trigger a formal investigation into the incident, Dominic Raab, who’s also the U.K. justice minister, said Sunday.
“In the absence of doing so, there will be no specific investigation,” Raab said on Sky News’s “Trevor Phillips on Sunday,” adding that Ghani’s claims were “incredibly serious.”
The Times reported Saturday that Ghani was told by a fellow MP that she was fired as transport minister in 2020 because her Muslim faith made colleagues “uncomfortable.”
According to Ghani, 49, a government whip told her that party members at a Downing Street meeting discussed concerns that she “wasn’t loyal to the party” because she didn’t do enough defend it “against Islamophobia allegations.”
“It was like being punched in the stomach,” she told the newspaper. “I felt humiliated and powerless.”
The government’s chief whip, Mark Spencer, said on Twitter that he was the person to whom Ghani was referring, and called the claims “defamatory.”
“These accusations are completely false,” Spencer wrote. “I have never used those words attributed to me.”
Ghani she said she was told that if she continued to raise concerns about her firing, she would be ostracized by colleagues and her reputation left in tatters.
The lawmaker said she’s reconsidering her role as an Conservative MP. “I will not pretend that this hasn’t shaken my faith in the party,” she was quoted as saying.
Raab said on the BBC’s “Sunday Morning” that formal procedures can’t go ahead without the buy-in of the person making the claims.
“If she feels able to, she should put in a formal complaint,” he said, adding that “we all feel moral support for anyone who’s been subject to any kind of discrimination.”
It’s not the first time the Conservatives have been accused of Islamophobia. A review completed in 2018 found that while “institutional racism” wasn’t apparent, anti-Muslim sentiment was present on an individual level.
Derogatory comments last year by Prime Minister Boris Johnson about women wearing the Islamic burqa left the impression that his party is “insensitive to Muslim communities,” an independent review found.
Ghani’s allegations also come days after some Tory lawmakers accused Tory whips — the lawmakers responsible for maintaining party discipline — of attempting to intimidate them in an effort to stop challenges to Johnson’s leadership.
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