Is the Taliban-friendly Imran Khan really the best choice as Oxford’s next chancellor?

News that Jemima Khan’s ex-husband, Imran Khan, has applied to be chancellor of Oxford University will have caused consternation in some quarters, and not all of them, like Mr Khan’s, foreign prison cells.

Imagine if literally the only reason you’d decided not to apply to be elected Oxford’s chancellor was because, like Khan, you once refused to tolerate the presence of Salman Rushdie, and maybe also called him “a blasphemer”, as Khan did. You might have thought, well, in a place like Oxford there’s bound to be someone with a vote who’d hold that against you.

Especially if, like Khan, you’d called Osama bin Laden a “martyr”. And before that, refused to call him a terrorist.

Or maybe, like Khan, you’ve congratulated the Taliban – never considering the possible impact on a UK academic career – for “breaking the shackles of slavery”. And have excused, like him, the Taliban’s ban on women’s education. And still share Khan’s stated belief on rape, that women should remove “temptation”, because “not everyone has willpower”.

Opinions like these, though widely shared, have probably deprived Oxford’s contest of countless male applicants. Fans ambitious for Khan’s popular fellow sportsman, Andrew Tate, must be kicking themselves for worrying about, for example, his “if you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bare [sic] some responsibility”.

Because Khan, the cricketer turned prime minister of Pakistan, has not just applied, but is being talked up, extravagantly, as a heroically fitting replacement for Chris Patten, the outgoing chancellor. The Conservative peer, Lord Hannan, calls Khan “a towering figure”. “He would make a superb chancellor for the world’s foremost university.” If the election of Oxford chancellor can appear, including from within the potential voting pool, roughly as significant as crown choices at the state opening of parliament, unprecedented campaigning for a Taliban-friendly candidate suggests, however, that if the prize is worth exploiting, it must also be worth defending.

The appointment is for a decade. Khan is months into his latest, 14-year sentence (seemingly imposed, his allies say, for political reasons) and the Oxford job involves, along with administrative duties, presiding “over several key ceremonies”. Not onerous, but involving ceremonial robes, performance and speeches. “The chancellor must be readily accessible and available throughout the year.” I suppose attendant dons couldn’t hold aloft a photograph of Khan, or a symbolic cricket bat.

In the event of a successful outcome for Khan in the October online vote – for which registration has now closed – he would also represent Oxford’s values. Patten was an early contributor to, for instance, still unresolved arguments about free speech on campus. “Can you imagine a university where there is no platform?” he said in 2016. “It’s an absolutely terrible idea. If you want universities like that, you go to China where they are not allowed to talk about western values, which I regard as global values.”

In or out of prison, Khan is the same politician who told Pakistan’s Chinese benefactors, in 2021, how much he admired the achievements, including its horrifying treatment of Uyghurs, of the Chinese Communist party. The same body is known, of course, to be active in suppressing free speech in UK universities. “What the CPC has done is that it has brought this alternative model,” Khan enthused. “And they have actually beaten all western democracies in the way they have brought up merit in their society.” Hopes that this must count against Khan’s chancellorship should take into account intense male loyalties that seem immune, whether they’re explained by cricketing sentiment or some ineradicable longing for warrior outfits, to the accumulated evidence of Khan’s opportunism, religious intolerance and excuses for the Taliban.

A candidacy that could be designed to insult Oxford’s female students, past and present, strikes, for example, the journalist Peter Oborne as a chance “to send a powerful message to the world about UK values”.

As for Khan, he cherishes, the Daily Telegraph reports, a hitherto unsuspected interest in “diversity, equality and inclusion”. He wants, after being educated at Oxford, “to give something back”. He does? Then go ahead: withdraw. No decent man, by adding his name to a largely dispiriting list, with its obligatory peers and random timewasters, would wish, given a reasonable alternative, to extend Oxford’s eight centuries of male chancellorships by a further 10 years. Sadly, the current impression is most suggestive of an all-ages self-help group for male sufferers from Dunning-Kruger (the opposite of impostor syndrome), the kind of electoral lineup that kindles fond memories of Count Binface. Meet, for instance, Maxim, the Gen X tweeter: “If Elizabeth II could be Queen at 26, then I can be @UniofOxford Chancellor at 27.”

Mercifully for anyone voting in October, the one outstanding candidate, already an asset to the university, is also female, apolitical and respected. Lady Elish Angiolini, a lawyer, says her priority, if she became chancellor, would be to make Oxford more accessible to poorer students.

She was the first in her family to go to university, became Scotland’s first female procurator fiscal and its first female lord advocate, subsequently principal of St Hugh’s College, then a pro vice-chancellor of Oxford. Having headed official reviews on policing, rape and deaths in custody, she now chairs the Angiolini inquiry into the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard. The Guardian described her first report as “devastating”. Her career has owed much, she says, to her husband having given up his job to look after their children. There is good reason to think she might interest herself, as her rivals might not, in why, although the university has more female staff, the overwhelming majority of Oxford’s full professors are male.

In short, it is hard to conceive of a person whose chancellorship would be less pleasing to the Taliban and its apologists. If only his supporters could say the same for Mr Khan.

Written by Catherine Bennett

Courtesy The Guardian