On the (admittedly unlikely) off-chance you tuned into Piers Morgan a few weeks ago, you might have happened upon a half hour interview with the former prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan.

The 70-year-old cricketing legend, ousted from office following a vote of no confidence in his leadership in April, had been in the middle of a march on the capital Islamabad to demand new elections. Khan has continued his cavalcade on the capital even whilst recovering from gunshot wounds to his leg after an assassination attempt during a rally in the city of Wazirabad in early November.

The Piers Morgan interview was the second time the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party has appeared on the show since his ousting — two more appearances than Morgan has afforded to, say, a British prime minister since the firebrand anchor returned to the airwaves with TalkTV. Even Donald Trump — a long-term associate of Morgan’s, linked by their shared love of self-publicity — has only had one slot on his show.

Morgan skipped over Khan’s turn from London playboy to Islamist pinup

In volume II, Khan was more than happy to discuss the assassination attempt at length, repeatedly label Pakistan’s other political parties “mafias”, quote the Qur’an, refer to the relationship between his country and the US as “master/slave”, opine on “the purpose of existence” and add that the whole episode had made him realise “that the Almighty had saved me”.

Morgan nodded, and then nodded some more. He touched, only momentarily, on whether Khan could prove the allegations he made about the assassination plot. He refused to prod too hard on Khan’s refusal to discuss the attempt made on the life of Salman Rushdie. There were no questions about allegations of corruption, nor about his claims that his party would sweep forthcoming elections. Morgan skipped over Khan’s turn from London playboy to Islamist pinup, his desire for close ties with Russia and China, and his claims of CIA involvement in his downfall.

He didn’t ask about Khan’s record in office and didn’t touch upon Pakistan’s precarious economic state. There wasn’t even a peep on the country’s recovery from its devastating floods this year, by far the biggest story to sweep South Asia. He didn’t even question him about issues affecting the sizeable Pakistani diaspora in the UK — such as the ongoing revelations about the decades-long scandal of the sexual exploitation of young girls across many English towns by gangs of predominantly Pakistani men.

Instead, there was plenty about his “swashbuckling” and “phlegmatic” cricketing career, his “audacity and courage” and a bit more nodding. “Only you, Imran, could be slightly smiling as you tell this story,” Morgan, ever the hard-hitter, fawned. Khan is probably best-known in Britain from his playboy cricketing days, where he toured the London nightlife circuit and was noted in the newspapers for meeting with “mystery blondes”. His transition into a major political force should bring with it a new approach from the British media. Morgan’s interview did not deliver. It was bizarre: of little use to the average British viewer, but not even particularly useful to the average Pakistani, either. 

Khan has been on a bit of a media round of late, and few of those he has encountered have been much tougher than Morgan. He was interviewed by The Times last week at home in Lahore, in which he was described as “eager to return to the campaign trail, frustrated at being cooped up”. He repeated his allegations, unchallenged, of powerful forces arrayed against him — including a claim that a helicopter he rode in had been sabotaged. Three weeks ago he addressed the Oxford Union via video link, where he claimed a “reign of terrorism” has taken place in Pakistan since he was removed. 

He risked setting a flammable situation alight in a bid for power

Where he has appeared, he has been treated effectively as a curious mixture of celebrity and foreign emissary — free to act with impunity, when he should be seen as a vastly powerful politician needing to be examined and challenged, not a famous face with something to sell. 

Khan, certainly, has gripes to air. Having bullets extracted from your leg does afford you some degree of grievance. Though he claims to have come into politics in a bid to cure his country’s ills, he has risked setting a flammable situation alight in a bid to win, keep and regain power. Few seem prepared to touch that topic.

In one of the more impressive political u-turns, he has leaned heavily into Islamism as a populist ideology, at the exact moment that the country has edged to the very brink of economic collapse. Under Khan, the “madrassification” of public schools and universities, according to Lahore-based educator Rubina Saigol, “is likely to create students with an Islamic conservative global outlook”.

It has certainly helped Khan win wild popularity, but it has not made for an especially auspicious future for a country already fighting a vicious insurgency from the Pakistani Taliban and with Hindu nationalism in neighbouring India — the dominant, uncompromising power.

It doesn’t take much to envisage just how his constant claims that dark forces are at play to oppose him and the people, that his political opponents are all crooks, and his march on Islamabad to effectively demand power, could create an explosive situation. 

In recent days, Khan too seems to have recognised it, calling off the march because “I know there will be havoc, and the loss will be to the country” and rowing back on claims of the CIA’s involvement in his losing office. That hasn’t stopped his party from saying it will withdraw from provincial legislatures in the country, on the grounds that it will not participate in a “corrupt” political system.

It remains to be seen how Imran Khan’s political journey will end. There are many twists and turns in that saga to come. At the very least, when telling the British public the story of what is happening in its former colony, the media should have the backbone to address religious extremism, economic collapse and the world’s third-biggest military enduring a grave political power struggle, rather than spin it as a juiced-up celebrity tell-all.