Crispin Blunt’s extraordinary intervention

Crispin Blunt has had quite the 24 hours. The Tory MP yesterday made an extraordinary intervention in the case of Imran Ahmad Khan, the Wakefield backbencher found guilty of the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy. Blunt decided to release a highly unusual and hyberbolic statement which lambasted the conviction as a ‘dreadful miscarriage of justice’ incited by ‘lazy tropes about LGBT+ people’ based in ‘Victorian era prejudice.’ He even claimed that Khan’s guilty verdict ‘is nothing short of an international scandal, with dreadful wider implications for millions of LGBT+ muslims around the world’, writing:

I am utterly appalled and distraught at the dreadful miscarriage of justice that has befallen my friend and colleague Imran Ahmad Khan, MP for Wakefield since December 2019. His conviction today is nothing short of an international scandal, with dreadful wider implications for millions of LGBT+ muslims around the world. I sat through some of the trial. The conduct of this case relied on lazy tropes about LGBT+ people that we might have thought we had put behind us decades ago.