Tory press office 'did not take sexual assault claim against candidate seriously'

Imran Ahmad Khan, 48, allegedly forced the youngster to drink gin and tonic, dragged him upstairs and asked him to watch pornography before groping him in a bunk bed following a party in Staffordshire in January 2008.

Giving evidence at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, the alleged victim's parents both broke down in tears as they told how their son was left "inconsolable" and "shaking" after the incident at a house in Staffordshire.

A police report was made at the time, but the teenager did not want to make a formal complaint, a jury has heard.

But he said "it all came flooding back" when he was told Khan was standing to become the MP for Wakefield in West Yorkshire in the December 2019 general election.

Days before the poll, the complainant said he contacted the Conservative Party press office to tell them what he claims Khan had done to him.

"I wasn't taken very seriously," he said.

"I explained that Imran Khan was running for MP and had just sort of been hurriedly put through.

"I explained this and said 'He sexually assaulted me when I was a child, when I was 15'."

He said the woman he spoke to sounded "shocked" and passed him on to someone else who sounded more "stern" and asked if he had any "proof".

"I said 'Yes, there's a police report' and she said 'Well...', and that was it.

"I said 'I'm going to the police', and she said 'Well, you do that'."

He went to police days after Khan helped Prime Minister Boris Johnson win a large Commons majority by taking the constituency in the so-called "red wall" that had formed Labour's heartlands in the Midlands and northern England.

The alleged victim, who voted Labour, insisted his complaint was "not motivated by political reasons".

He added: "If it was, I would've done it before the general election."

Khan, who was 34 at the time, denies a single count of sexual assault over the alleged incident, in which he is alleged to have touched the boy's feet and legs, coming within "a hair's breadth" of his privates.

The complainant's father broke down in tears in the witness box as he told how his son was "inconsolable" after the alleged attack.

"He went into shock, he was shaking, crying and it seemed like hours until I got the words out 'I was molested'," he said.

The alleged victim's mother said Khan had seemed like a "very charming man" who she believed was "foreign royalty", while she described her son as an "absolutely joyous boy" who she had tried to bring up in an "Enid Blyton existence".

She said: "He was a young child, he was a boy. He wasn't a man, and I think that is what has upset me the most about all of this.

"He was a child when he went upstairs that night and he suddenly had to face what he had to face."

She wept as she added: "I will never, for as long as I live, forget this: (My son) just shaking and shaking and shaking.

"I couldn't get any sense out of him. I just grabbed him and tried to calm him and stop him shaking.

"He was speaking in hushed tones and was just saying 'He was trying to feel me, he was trying to feel me'."

The MP, who is gay and a Muslim, claims he only touched the Catholic teenager's elbow when he "became extremely upset" after a conversation about his confused sexuality.

Khan's barrister, Gudrun Young QC, suggested in cross-examination that the complainant has given three "contradictory" accounts - a police report in 2008, and police interviews in 2019 and 2021.

She suggested the man, who has trained as an actor, is "literally making this up" and reliving a "drama you are convinced of in your own mind".

But the alleged victim insisted he is telling the truth, telling the court: "I am not a liar."

The trial continues.