The Foreign Office Ought to be Serving Britain, Not Radical Islam

On Tuesday, three days before the anniversary of the 7/7 atrocities, the Prime Minister spoke simply and well to the Commons: 'If we want to defeat extremism, we have got to defeat its ideas and we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West.'

As we are fighting a battle of ideas between democracy and totalitarian religion as much as a military campaign, this was an obvious truth, albeit one that could do with greater repetition.

'I am probably not the person to go into the Muslim community,' he continued with realistic modesty. 'It's better that we mobilise the Islamic community itself to do this.' And again, his belief that the majority of Britain's Muslims don't want Islamist terror was no more than a statement of the obvious. A poll in the Times last week included the alarming finding that one in 10 British Muslims regarded the murderers of 7 July as 'martyrs', but also reported that 56 per cent said the government has not done enough to combat extremism, compared with 49 per cent of the general population.

The prudent as well as the principled position is to prefer those who don't support 'martyrs' to those who do; to show solidarity with those who support democratic values rather than those who don't. How hard a choice is that for a British government?

An easy enough decision for Tony Blair to make, it turns out, but a surprisingly difficult one for his unmanageable Foreign Office. This week will generate a lot of publicity for the longest and most revealing series of leaks from a government department I've seen in my career. For months, Martin Bright, the political editor of the New Statesman, has been receiving confidential Foreign Office documents almost daily with his morning post.

On Friday at 7.30pm, Channel 4 will screen a documentary by Bright, Who Speaks for Muslims, which shows how the Foreign Office views the Islamist far right as potential allies.

To accompany the programme, the Policy Exchange think-tank will publish 'When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: the British State's Flirtation with Radical Islamism', a pamphlet stuffed with enough state secrets to induce coronary arrests in previously healthy MI5 officers.