Miqdaad Versi is the UK’s one-man Islamophobia media monitor. And he has never had more monitoring to do than over the past week. We meet six days after the Christchurch terror attack, in which 50 Muslims at prayer were murdered by a gunman. Although the massacre happened on the other side of the world, its repercussions have been felt everywhere – not least in the UK, where the killer called for the death of London mayor Sadiq Khan in his “manifesto”. Versi has been concerned by the tone of much of the reporting in the UK.

Last Wednesday, the country’s counter-terrorism chief, Neil Basu, said that far-right terrorists were being radicalised by mainstream newspaper coverage. In an open letter, Basu appeared to criticise, without naming, outlets such as Mail Online, which had uploaded the “manifesto” of the Christchurch gunman, and sites including the Sun and the Daily Mirror, which had shown some of the gunman’s footage of his attack. The following night, five mosques were attacked in Birmingham. On Friday, it was revealed that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes reported across Britain increased by 593% (95 incidents, according to the monitoring group Tell Mama) in the week after the New Zealand massacre. Yesterday, Sadiq Khan challenged the Conservatives to adopt a new definition of Islamophobia, already accepted by Labour and the Lib Dems, that has been drawn up by the all-party parliamentary group for British Muslims. Barely an hour seems to pass without Versi being called upon to cast his well-trained eye on another inaccurate or inflammatory statement about Islam.

That’s without even mentioning Versi’s ongoing battle for an inquiry into Islamophobia in the Conservative party. If he didn’t have enough on his plate, today he and his family are moving out of their house. We meet at his brother’s home in north-west London, where Versi’s family are storing their stuff. As we talk, the removal firm unloads beds, a sofa and a child’s mini-slide in the front room. By rights, Versi should be frazzled. But somehow he seems to be keeping it all together – on the phone to his wife one second, paying removal men the next and discussing the most pernicious media falsehoods about Islam. Versi has two young children, and his role as head of media monitoring at the Muslim Council of Britain is voluntary. In his professional life, he helps to run a travel agency and is a management consultant. He admits that he’s a bit knackered.

The 33-year-old Versi is a privately educated Londoner who graduated in maths from Oxford university. He is handsome and smiley and could pass for a dishevelled Louis Theroux. He talks fast, constantly gesturing with his hands and nodding. But his arguments are always fair, balanced and evidence-based. Versi is famously polite and relentlessly reasonable. Over the past three years he has become a brilliantly effective media whisperer – cajoling rather than bullying newspapers and broadcasters into seeing the error of their ways.

He says he is not surprised about the mosque murders in Christchurch. “I was expecting something like this. There have been so many close calls. For years, I’ve been worried about this happening.” But he still sounds shocked – you can almost hear him palpitating as he talks.

Versi is quick to praise New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern. “The response of New Zealand is the benchmark of what you should be doing in a situation like this. The care, the empathy, the words.” And, being unwaveringly fair, he points out any British government minister he believes responded admirably. “James Brokenshire, the communities secretary, was very good. He visited a mosque the same day, used terms like Jumu’ah, Friday prayers – you don’t have to do that, but it’s nice. All of that was good.”

But he has been horrified by some of the reporting in the British press of Christchurch that showed photographs of a blond child and asked how an “angelic boy” could turn into a killer. “Why are you not calling him a terrorist, why are you calling the guy who did this angelic? The attempts to humanise somebody who had committed such an atrocity seemed very unusual.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Versi on Good Morning Britain, March 2017. Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock

He was equally appalled by a BBC News presenter suggesting to a Muslim commentator that anti-Muslim violence had become normalised because the mainstream Muslim community had not done enough to condemn Islamist extremism. “I looked at it and went: what! This was totally inappropriate. I was like, right now, how can you be doing this? There’s a justification element to it – because you’re bad, this is why it’s happening to you, and because you’re not apologising and recognising you’re different, that’s why it’s happening to you. I don’t think the presenter understood he had said anything wrong.”

Versi says he was not really aware of Islamophobia in his childhood. He talks lovingly about his Tanzanian-Indian parents, who worked all hours to give their two boys every opportunity. His father is an engineer, his mother a nursery school teacher. Versi was a star pupil at school. I ask if he passed all his GCSES with top grades. He looks sheepish. “I got nine A stars and one A. My A was in English language. I was one mark off by the way.” How did his brother do? “He got 10 A stars. “ Did that rankle? “Mmmm,” he pauses. “I was very proud of him.” You sense Versi was a competitive child and is now a competitive man.

He was 15 when 9/11 happened. That changed his world, he says. A few kids started to talk to him differently. Occasionally, he was even called a terrorist. “I didn’t see it as clearly racist in those days – I was like, whatever, it’s kids being bullying, or being kids. I was more tolerant of it. I think because I was confident, I let it go. That’s really not very smart.”

Another watershed moment happened a few years later, he says, when he was in his early 20s and out running with an Indian friend who was wearing a thobe. “Some random guy threw an egg and said some bad racist thing to him. That’s one of the first examples I’ve had of direct racism.”

Versi was becoming more interested in Islam, and how it was perceived in the world. After university, he spent nine months in Damascus learning Arabic and doing Islamic studies. Back then, he says, Syria was beautiful and peaceful. “This was pre-crisis, it’s very important to add.” When he returned to London, he worked as a financial consultant for banks and insurance companies, and started the travel agency. By now he was sensing a growing hostility towards Muslims in the UK.

He began to question the way Muslims were being written about in the press. It didn’t bear any relationship to the world he knew. There were so many stories about Muslims taking over Britain, introducing no-go areas for non-Muslims, refusing to use £5 notes because they were not halal, being apologists for terrorism. He would tell people the press was Islamophobic, and they would challenge him. “People would say: prove it’s Islamophobia. And sometimes I think that’s coming from a bad place, where they’re clearly wanting you to do the extra work to prove your equality. Sometimes standing up against that kind of bad faith argument is a real challenge.”

Four years ago, he chose to analyse media coverage for the Muslim Council of Britain. It was such a big task, he didn’t know where to start. So he put words such as Islam and Muslim and newspaper names into search engines and examined the results. He was astonished by the negativity of most of the stories. “The first example I found was the term Muslim gang used for no apparent reason in the Mail on Sunday. I remember thinking: crimes are committed all the time – since when is Muslim relevant to this crime? So I said: what can I do about it? I’m not someone who’s going to sit back and let things happen.”

He went to see the post-Leveson newspaper regulator Ipso, which put him in touch with the managing editor of the Mail on Sunday. “I’m like, why would the managing editor want to have a chat with me? So I went in, and for two hours he sat with me. And I was like, OK, this is interesting – people have been shouting about the problems with the media for a while, how many people have actually tried to change things directly?”

He decided he had to become more scientific and rigorous in his media monitoring. So he outsourced his research to a friend in Serbia, who would do a daily search, which resulted in Versi creating an Excel spreadsheet documenting headline, blurb, author, and whether the story was positive or negative. He was now using his mathematical know-how to prove his point. As his project rapidly grew, he realised he and his Serbian friend couldn’t do it all by themselves. So he hired four people to assist him. He knew that the more scientific and data-driven his research became, the more irrefutable it would be.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘If I wasn’t an optimist, it would be very difficult to do this’ … Versi. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

In the course of his investigations, he was surprised to discover how many of the stories he considered anti-Muslim concerned the Conservatives. The Muslim Council of Britain has long called for an inquiry into Islamophobia within the Conservative party. I ask him for the worst example. He immediately mentions Zac Goldsmith’s campaign against Sadiq Khan for mayor of London, in which letters were sent out from Tory party headquarters suggesting Khan was dangerous and not to be trusted. “That campaign was clearly racist and xenophobic and race baiting. It was dog whistle politics of the worst kind.” Versi was “staggered” to discover that even the then prime minister David Cameron was spreading the poison about Khan. Cameron said Khan had shared a platform with an imam who supported Islamic State. “What staggered me was how the prime minister of the country, David Cameron, publicly said imam Suliman Gani supported members of Islamic State. So he was basically willing to libel an imam for political purposes.” Gani had no Isis connections, and had in fact canvassed for the Conservative party.

When I ask Versi for other examples of Islamophobia within the Conservative party, he doesn’t know where to start: MP Bob Blackman tweeting support for rightwing campaigner Tommy Robinson; Boris Johnson saying women who wear the burka “look like letterboxes”; Nadine Dorries posting links to a 10-year-old story about Muslims claiming benefits for multiple wives and saying women wear niqabs “to hide their bruises”. Last week, it was reported that another 25 Conservative party members had been suspended for posting Islamophobic comments online, to add to the 14 suspended weeks earlier. Former Conservative party chair Baroness Sayeeda Warsi recently called the Tory approach to Islamophobia “revolving door racism”, because so many suspended members were quietly welcomed back a short time later. And yet there has still been no inquiry.

Last week Labour accepted the following definition of Islamophobia, which the all-party parliamentary group decided on after a six-month consultation: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” Versi does not understand why the Conservative government is yet to endorse this, especially if it wants to be seen to be tackling Islamophobia. “It is deeply disappointing that the governing party of the country has dismissed the views of mainstream Muslim communities by refusing to endorse the Muslim-led definition of Islamophobia. The Conservative party is already mired in scandal after scandal on Islamophobia and appears to be going down a well-trodden path of denial and dismissal rather than acknowledgement and engagement. We can only hope this will change.”

I ask Versi why he thinks antisemitism in the Labour party is so often headline news, while relatively little is heard about Islamophobia in the Tory party. He thinks about it, and answers from the heart. “Because the Muslim community is not strong enough. Muslim communities are not as well respected or engaged in different spaces. Just look at the Muslim Council of Britain. The government chooses not to talk to us. Fine, it doesn’t have to talk to the largest Muslim organisation … so who does it want to talk to? Individuals who happen to parrot its view.”

Can Britain’s Muslim communities learn from its Jewish communities? “I think the Jewish community has done a very good job in being able to be listened to on this issue. We need to learn from the Jewish communities in terms of how to more effectively engage. Muslim communities don’t fund our organisations as effectively as we could and should do.” The most recent population survey showed there were 10 times as many Muslims in the UK (3,372,966) as Jews (336,965).

Versi notes that while the government funds security for Jewish schools and synagogues to the tune of £14m a year, all other faith institutions combined get less than £2m. He says he is delighted that Jewish communities are being listened to on antisemitism and that they are getting decent funding for security; he simply wants to see all communities being treated equally. “I think it’s very positive that racism is tackled wherever it is. There’s this idea of competition. I don’t think it’s one or the other. We need to tackle racism wherever it is, and for Muslim communities that means equality – fairness, not favours, is a very simple motto. We don’t want to be treated as special, we just don’t want to be treated unfairly. And I think that’s the driver for this.”

Driver is the word Versi comes back to again and again – what motivates behaviour? With Islamophobia, is it ignorance or overt hostility? Sometimes he thinks it is just ignorance. But he has become increasingly concerned that with the Conservative party it is deliberate – a calculated risk that Islamophobia plays well with traditional Tory voters, and might win back Ukip supporters. “I don’t know if you saw the latest survey from Hope Not Hate that showed 49% of Conservative voters think Islam is a threat to the British way of life. Half of Conservative voters.” He pauses. “And 47% of Conservative party voters believe there are sharia no-go areas that non-Muslims can’t enter.” He repeats the figure, flabbergasted. “Forty-seven per cent. And 42% believe Tommy Robinson does a good job in holding things to light that the British media doesn’t. All I’m saying is that these are views that form a big portion of the voter base of the Conservative party. There is an institutional problem of Islamophobia in the Conservative party.”

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But he is convinced it is a strategy that has worked against them. As always, it comes down to figures. “Look at the numbers,” he says. “The number of Muslims who voted for the Conservative party in the last election fell to 11%, from 15% in 2015. Losing that number might have cost them their majority.”

I ask him if he thinks he is winning. He smiles – another complicated question. “Are the Conservative party getting away with it? They think they can get away with it, and they are getting away with it at the moment.” But he’s not convinced it will stay that way. “There has to be an inquiry. It is vital that there is an inquiry.”

But, he says, he has always been an optimist, and despite the shocking recent events, he remains one. “There will be some people I can never change; the approach then has to be pressure from the outside rather than persuasion. But my view is, a lot of people are persuadable. If I wasn’t an optimist, it would be very difficult to do the work I’m doing.” What he dreams of is the day there is no need for a media monitor at the Muslim Council of Britain. Yes, he says, it’s a long way off, but he reckons there has been considerable progress.

He apologises for bigging himself up, but he tells me a story involving the Sun’s former political editor Trevor Kavanagh (now its associate editor). “Trevor Kavanagh wrote this article saying: ‘I now have to tread on eggshells because of the eagle-eyed Miqdaad Versi.’ Yes!” And he pumps his fist. “Yes! I really smiled at that. I really smiled.”