The Conservative party chairman, Brandon Lewis, has been accused of ignoring repeated pleas by Tory members to investigate alleged racist and Islamophobic incidents, including a claim that a white senior party official referred to an Asian councillor as an orangutan.
Lewis, a key ally of Theresa May, wrote to party officers earlier this month to reassure them that he would “continue to take a zero-tolerance approach to any form of discrimination, intimidating behaviour or abuse”. It followed allegations from the Tory peer Lady Warsi that the party is institutionally Islamophobic.

But Conservative party members in the Portsmouth South constituency in Hampshire have told the Guardian that Lewis has failed to acknowledge repeated requests to investigate a dozen alleged racist and Islamophobic incidents. Registered letters of complaint sent to his office had been ignored, activists said.

Massoud Esmaili, a Tory activist for 10 years who stood to become a city councillor, has written to Lewis outlining a number of allegations of racism but says he has yet to receive a reply. Esmaili, 67, who came to the UK from Iran 40 years ago and whose daughter is a major in the British army, said he had faced prejudice sporadically from fellow Conservatives over the past decade – on one occasion, a councillor called him “a bloody foreigner” and told him to “go back to your own country” – but prejudice within the party was at its height, he said.

“It is as if the party has gone back to the 40s or 50s. People in the party feel able to be as racist as they wish now,” he said.