Afzal Amin’s fall from grace threatens to end a political career that saw him rise from humble beginnings to be a Tory poster boy.
That he was selected to fight Dudley North, the Conservatives’ ninth target seat, which Labour held by just 649 votes at the last election, indicates the esteem in which he was held.
Amin helped to bolster the number of ethnic minority candidates in the party’s ranks and also those who had worked in the “real world” in an age when many despaired of the glut of career politicians.
It is easy to understand how Amin might have appeared to be a dream candidate to the Conservatives: a Muslim, who, according to his own website, attended Sandhurst and served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Amin grew up in the Black Country and on leaving college worked as a waiter, porter and finance clerk before deciding to go to university as a mature student. He subsequently went to Sandhurst, where he is said to have trained Prince William and Prince Harry. Amin was an officer in the army for 11 years and was chairman of the Armed Forces Muslim Association.
After the murder of Lee Rigby, he featured heavily in the media, emphasising that the vast majority of British Muslims rejected the ideology of Rigby’s killers and issuing a defiant message to extremists of all kinds who would seek to divide society.
In an interview in the Independent on Sunday, referring to both the English Defence League and al-Muhajiroun, Amin said: “Give less airtime to extremists, marginalise them and they will wither. Put them on TV and they thrive on the oxygen of publicity.”
Those kind of sentiments won him admiration but the revelations in the Mail on Sunday suggest someone either in a deep state of confusion or prepared to say whatever it took to get fulfil his ambitions.
Not only did he promise to further the EDL’s cause if they agreed to help him get elected – “95% of what you want to campaign against, we’re with you”, he is said to have told them – but he also boasted to the far-right group’s former leader, Tommy Robinson, about his dislike of spicy food, by assuring him: “I’m not a Paki, am I?”
By playing politics with a bitter dispute over a mosque in an area where the BNP won 10% of the vote at the 2005 general election, far from unifying Dudley, Amin stands accused of potentially fostering divisiveness for personal gain. On top of that, he is also accused of wanting EDL members to be paid to canvass on his behalf, which would be against election law.
Amin has suggested that his conversations with Robinson have been taken out of context, being part of a much larger conversation.
Unfortunately for him, his claim that he “recognised that there was an opportunity to promote better community cohesion between various communities” is not borne out by what was published, which suggests that he was involved in activities that might have done the exact opposite of that.
When asked by Robinson where he thought he was headed, Amin seemed to imply that he was after David Cameron’s job. “I think I can get to the top,” Amin replied. But the very discussions designed to help him take the first step on that path would appear to have permanently dashed any such hopes.
