Inshallah

The Muslim Shahid Malik was the Labour MP for Dewsbury 2005-10. In 2007 he became Britain's first Muslim Minister as International Development Minister, and subsequently served as a Justice Minister, Home Office Minister and finally as Minister for Race, Faith and Community Cohesion at the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Malik lost his seat following boundary changes and in the wake of revelations about his financial arrangements by the Daily Telegraph, which devoted five front page stories to his expenses in May 2009. This led to Malik's very brief resignation as Minister for Race, Faith and Community Cohesion, reinstated after a perfunctory investigation by Gordon Brown's adviser on ministerial interests. He was subsequently investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, while the Legg panel cleared him of charges relating to the second home allowance. In the end, Malik was required to repay only £1,340, but the barrage of bad press must presumably have affected his re-election chances.

Lest one should think that the Daily Telegraph selected him for particular attention because of his race, consider this video (with a headline that overstates the case) and ask yourself how such a rabidly sectarian individual could ever have been appointed, let alone reinstated, in a ministerial post that included the term "Community Cohesion" in its title. Happily the new government has abolished the Prevent programme that Malik, backed by Jack Straw, perverted from its original purpose of encouraging Muslim integration.

But it says a lot about the society the previous regime was intent on creating that Malik could only be nailed through the trivia of expenses, rather than through the frank denunciation of his outrageous public utterances and his damaging support for seditious Islamist organizations.