The treatment of the former off-spinner shows how those with status bend the world to their whim without real consequences
In 2016 Azeem Rafiq returned to Yorkshire, the club and the county where – as we now know – he had encountered racist abuse and ritual humiliation since he was a child. On Tuesday morning in parliament the Conservative MP Damian Green, who was sacked from the government in 2017 for lying about the discovery of pornography on his office computer in 2008, wanted to know why.
Green was by no means the first person to pose this question. Since Rafiq first went public with his experiences last autumn he has been hounded on social media by members of the public demanding to know why he willingly returned to Yorkshire if the culture was as bad as he claimed, with the implication that it clearly couldn’t have been.
