Rehman Chishti

Formerly a Labour party member, Rehman Chishti is the Conservative MP for Gillingham and Rainham. Remarkably, he served as political advisor to the late Benazir Bhutto for eight years until her assassination in 2007, during which time he also ran as a Labour candidate for his current constituency. Following his defection to the Conservatives in 2006 and subsequent election to parliament in 2010, Chishti was widely acclaimed for his championing of road safety and was named by New Statesman as a rising star among the crop of rookie MPs. Since then, Chishti’s trajectory has been non-linear. In 2018 he resigned his post as vice-chairman of the Conservative party in opposition to both the government’s failure to grant asylum to Asia Bibi, a Pakistani woman sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan, and to Theresa May’s EU withdrawal agreement. Reconciled in September 2019 as the prime minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief, Chishti stood down from this role a year later in protest of the Internal Market Bill. Most recently, he introduced a Bill to parliament aiming to recognise humanist marriages in England and Wales.