Oxford University has put forward 38 candidates to be its next Chancellor. But it has not found space for Imran Khan, the former prime minister of a Commonwealth nation who is also a political prisoner suffering terrible human rights abuses at the hands of a military regime.

Some of the 38 candidates are distinguished public figures, including Lords Mandelson and Hague. Some are not. I don’t want to write that every Tom, Dick and Harry is on the list but — no, sod it, every Tanya, Dominic and Hasanat really does seem to be on the list.

Past Chancellors of Oxford have included Cromwell, Clarendon, Wellington and Salisbury. The last three holders have been Harold Macmillan, Roy Jenkins and Chris Patten. To exclude a global figure like Khan is extraordinary. 

Khan, who studied PPE at Keble College in the early 1970s might have become the first Chancellor from another country, the first Muslim and the first not to be white. Not a bad symbol of Oxford’s transformation into the world’s foremost university.

Most people know that, in 1992, Khan led a team of plucky underdogs to win the Cricket World Cup — Pakistan’s only victory in that contest. What is less well known is that he then devoted himself to public service, building a cancer hospital in 1994 and a university in 2005, both dedicated to serving people who could not afford to pay for private provision.

When he went into politics, he did something Pakistan had never known before, building a party that was not regional or clan-based, and that did not rely on deals with local powerbrokers, but was a genuinely popular movement. It took time to build up, and he lost his first elections badly, but he got there in the end without compromising his principles. Among his less widely broadcast achievements as prime minister was an ecological transformation of his country, which included planting a billion trees.

Why was such a man blocked? The rules ban current students and university employees from the contest (Khan is obviously in neither category) as well as elected legislators or candidates, and people who would be judged unfit to serve as charity trustees.

Maybe the authorities fretted that, the moment he was released, Khan would go back into politics. And every indication is that he would win with a landslide — which is precisely why the generals are too scared to let him out.

I can just about see that argument from Oxford’s point of view. While it might want to help a former alumnus who is suffering an injustice — the United Nations has declared that Khan’s incarceration “has no legal basis, and appears to have been intended to disqualify him from running for political office” — it will, quite properly, want someone who can devote the time and energy to being its Chancellor.

Still, that should have been a decision for the Oxonian electorate as a whole. My sense, talking to Khan through the lawyers who were still allowed to visit him until a couple of weeks ago, is that he would have done the job devotedly for three or four years until the next Pakistani election. He was, after all, a committed Chancellor of Bradford University for nine years, popular with undergraduates and with faculty.

The other possibility is that Oxford was browbeaten by the expensive lawyers who, acting indirectly for the Pakistani authorities, kept sending out aggressive opinions about Khan’s alleged criminality.

In fact, his only crime was to be too popular, and thus a threat to the military establishment. Pakistan, a nation of which I am very fond, has a tragic history of army coups going back to 1958. Sometimes, the country is under direct military rule. More often, the generals govern through civilian proxies. Pakistanis sometimes joke that their army has never won a war and never lost an election.

The charges were both childishly transparent and horribly sinister

The armed forces are major economic players, owning enterprises and factories. The military leaders are accordingly wary of any government that is not at least partly under their control. In 2022, alarmed by Khan’s anti-corruption rhetoric, the top brass (“the boys”, as middle-class Pakistanis call them) orchestrated his defeat in a parliamentary vote. When it became clear that he would sweep the country in any subsequent election, they arranged to have him first disqualified and then arrested.

The charges were both childishly transparent and horribly sinister. Khan was accused of leaking state secrets and then of marrying his wife too soon after her divorce, a supposed contravention of Islamic law which — after the ugly spectacle of state lawyers earnestly arguing in court about her menstrual cycle — saw him sentenced to seven years.

Not even the Pakistani authorities expected anyone to take these charges seriously. Indeed, their very absurdity was their way of flaunting their power and intimidating his supporters. That Oxford, for the sake of a quiet life, has gone along with this travesty, says nothing good.

The authorities in Pakistan had responded to Khan’s candidacy by denying him visits and phone calls and even, latterly, contact with his lawyers. Earlier this week, it was reported that they had cut the power and light in his cell. 

Oxford might have, as it were, put him in to get him out, but chose not to allow its alumni that option. I fear what may happen to him next.