Livingstone comes from the far left and recruited nearly all his advisers from a minuscule Trotskyist faction which gathered around the Socialist Action newspaper. They were 'third worldists', as we used to say, activists who had despaired of the British working class ever obeying the orders of their Leninist betters and therefore supported any movement in the Third World, however barbaric, as long as it said it was socialist.

What is new is that since the death of socialism, they are prepared to indulge the extreme religious right as long at it is anti-American. The reflex is essentially the same, as is the delusion that these are in some way 'progressive' forces.

Now it seems the fantasy has spread to the Foreign Office. Documents obtained by this newspaper show that the mandarins have been preparing for an accommodation with radical Islam...

...The leaked papers show FO mandarins in a land of make-believe. Running through this thinking is an aching need to believe that Qaradawi is a liberal, a peculiar liberal, no doubt, but still a man with whom Britain can do business. The Foreign Secretary may remember the negative media storm when Livingstone last brought the priest to Britain, the civil servants tell Jack Straw. He should ignore it. The accusations came from tainted Jewish sources, 'the Board of [Jewish] Deputies' and the Israeli monitoring site Memri, which is 'regularly criticised for selective translation of Arabic reports'.

This simply isn't true. Qaradawi's extremist views haven't been spread by scheming Jews but are well documented on his very own website...