David Cameron outraged Labour MPs at prime minister’s questions by saying Labour’s mayoral candidate Tooting MP Sadiq Khan had appeared on platforms with a London imam who “supports IS” (Islamic State). This was despite the imam in question, Suliman Gani, having already said on Twitter that he had attended a political event with Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith and had supported the local Tory challenger to Khan at the general election.

Now, in an interview with LBC Radio, Gani has repeated that he backed the party’s candidate Dan Watkins last May and even supplied canvassers for his campaign. He added that, following the election, the Tories had asked him to help them find potential local councillors. He said he felt he had been used by the Conservatives “as a scapegoat to discredit Sadiq Khan.”

Gani told LBC’s political editor Theo Usherwood that Watkins invited him to a Conservative Muslim Forum in Tooting last autumn to encourage Muslims to join Cameron’s party. Gani said he “didn’t have a problem with that,” and that when he’d raised a question at the meeting he’d been “introduced by Dan Watkins as, ‘this is imam Suliman’ - he knew that I did support him in the previous election.”

Gani said he spoke to Goldsmith, who by that time had become the Tory mayoral candidate, outside the meeting, shook his hand and requested a meeting with him to discuss giving further help. According to Gani, Goldsmith was very polite and said it was: “No problem, and I should send him an email.”

Gani also told Usherwood that his alleged support for Islamic State was based on a misconstrued remark made by some else at a meeting where the “historical context” of IS’s emergence was discussed. It is not clear if the meeting in question is the one advertised in the poster below, which has been reproduced on social media. The title of the Mitcham event held in January this year is, however, of interest in view of the prime minister’s Commons allegation about Gani.



Poster advertising meeting in Mitcham. Photograph: Publicity Image

Gani said he had “never promoted terrorism or violence,” and went on to say that he had fallen out with Khan over the MP’s support for same sex marriage. In Gani’s view this meant that Khan had put his political career before adherence to his Islamic faith. “We were very disappointed when that took place. The [Muslim] community actually felt let down; that we have voted for him, and when you are voting for someone you would expect that he would at least respect the views of his congregation...He is a Muslim himself and understands what marriage is about.”

Khan’s campaign says that “the prime minister’s desperate dog whistle has now totally backfired.”

