Tory donor stripped of CBE weeks after party whip reinstated in House of Lords

A top Conservative donor and peer has been stripped of his CBE after a string of controversies, including harassing a journalist and making derogatory comments about Pakistanis.

Rami Ranger, who has given £1.5m to the Tory party over his lifetime, lost the honour on Fridayafter months of revelations about his personal behaviour.

The announcement comes weeks after the Conservatives reinstated his party affiliation in the Lords, having removed it for just over a year.

Ranger becomes one of a small group of people to have lost their honours, including Paula Vennells, the former Post Office boss, who lost her CBE this year after the Horizon scandal.

Ranger lost his award along with five others, according to the official announcement in the London Gazette.

The committee did not detail the reasons for Ranger’s forfeiture, but they are understood to include his treatment of Poonam Joshi, a freelance journalist, as well as comments he has previously made about both the Pakistani and Sikh communities.

Ranger has been contacted for comment.

Ranger, who owns a consumer goods company called Sun Mark International, was given his CBE in 2016 for services to business and community cohesion. Three years later, he was given a peerage by Theresa May, one of the politicians he has most prominently backed.

In 2022, however, the Guardian revealed Ranger was under investigation by the Lords authorities after Joshi accused him of bullying and harassing her.

In a series of tweets, Ranger made an unfounded allegation that Joshi’s husband was a domestic abuser, called her “such an evil woman”, a “total disgrace”and “the epitome of filth and garbage”, and threatened to take her to court, warning: “I will teach you a lesson.”

The Lords commissioner for standards ruled he had abused his power by “persistently undermining, humiliating and denigrating Ms Joshi”. The commissioner decided not to suspend Ranger from parliament after he promised to undertake social media training and re-attend a seminar on the parliamentary behaviour code.

While that investigation was taking place, however, Ranger again caused controversy by writing a letter to the BBC in protest against a documentary that was critical of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi.

In his letter, Ranger demanded to know “if your Pakistani-origin staff were behind this nonsense”. He later apologised and withdrew the comments, saying they were “by no means a reflection of how I see the British Pakistani community”.

In September 2023, the Conservatives quietly removed the whip from Ranger, but failed to tell the Lords authorities they had done so until a year later.

Parliamentary records show he was reinstated as a Conservative peer last month, although party officials refused to answer questions about why they had removed the whip, why they had not promptly informed the Lords authorities and why they had reinstated it.