Sunak struggles to contain mounting row over alleged Islamophobia

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Sadiq Khan, London’s Labour mayor, has accused the Conservatives of trying to “weaponise anti-Muslim prejudice for electoral gain”, as a row over alleged Islamophobia in Rishi Sunak’s party intensified.

The prime minister on Monday urged MPs to stop using words that “inflame” community tensions, denouncing comments last week by former Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson as “wrong”.

Anderson had the Tory whip withdrawn at the weekend after claiming that Islamists had “got control” of London and its mayor. But Sunak repeatedly refused on Monday to condemn Anderson’s comments as “Islamophobic”.

The row has alarmed moderate Conservative MPs, who fear that discipline is breaking down and that increasingly strident language from Tory rightwingers will harm the party’s electoral prospects.

“People want to see a coming together of our country, not an exacerbation of tensions,” said former cabinet minister Sir Robert Buckland. “A noisy minority get a platform. I’ve absolutely had enough of it.”

Khan, writing in the London Evening Standard, said Anderson’s remarks were “vile, racist, anti-Muslim and Islamophobic”, but that Sunak had yet to denounce them in those terms.

“It shouldn’t be hard to call out comments that are so unambiguously ignorant, prejudiced and racist,” he said, adding: “It’s a deliberate, dangerous political strategy — a strategy to weaponise anti-Muslim prejudice for electoral gain.”

Anderson was suspended from the party over the weekend after causing outrage for telling television channel GB News on Friday that Khan had “given our capital city away to his mates”.

During a series of interviews on Monday, Sunak said Anderson’s comments were “wrong and unacceptable”, telling the BBC: “It’s incumbent on all of us, especially those elected to parliament not to inflame our…