Sadiq Khan was grilled by ITV’s Paul Brand at the Pride hustings last night on his top aide Shueb Salar, who resigned in disgrace two weeks ago:

Brand: “You employed this guy. You worked closely with him. We all work with colleagues, you kind of get a sense of what someone is like. How could you not realise that someone you were working with day in day out held this kind of view?”

Khan: “Sure. I mean, throughout the time he was employed with me there was no hint or evidence at all of any of these sorts of comments. In my parliamentary office we had five members of staff, four women and him. At no time during the course of his employment did he exhibit any of the sort of things that his comments allude to.”

This is demonstrably untrue – the video of Salar brandishing a gun was posted in autumn last year, while he was working for Khan. Salar favourited a tweet about physically attacking Tory voters last May, again while he was working for Khan. He wrote that the Lee Rigby murder was “probably fake“, as well as posting a string of tweets about “faggots“. And who knows which of Sadiq’s staffers was responsible for following ISIS supporters on Twitter. Salar was up to no good during his employment with Sadiq, a fact he is now conveniently brushing over…

Sadiq Khan’s speechwriter Shueb Salar has been exposed as a very dodgy character. His tweeted references to “hoes”, “bitches” and “faggots“ are the least of Guido’s concerns, more worrying is his belief that the terrorist killing of Lee Rigby was faked.

This is on the conveyor belt to a belief system of the kind that thinks Israel was behind 9/11 as an excuse for the War on Terror / Muslims. Sadiq is always slippery in these situations, he hasn’t seen his radical Jihad supporting in-laws for years, he was shocked that former associates ended up in Guantanamo. He has no idea why he follows ISIS supporters on Twitter – blaming staff, (we now know that is more plausible than we thought previously). He claims he will keep London secure and he has a tough anti-radicalisation strategy. Presumably hiring them on to his staff isn’t a component of that strategy?

If Sadiq can’t even hire aides who are not a potential security risk, can he really keep London secure? This is not some historical mistake, some loose association, it is someone on his personal staff – who was still being paid by him until this morning. At the very least it brings into question Sadiq’s judgement…