Ali Harbi Ali understood exactly what to say and how to behave when dealing with representatives from Britain's flagship deradicalisation programme.
'I just knew to nod my head and say yes — and they would leave me alone afterwards,' he said with a shrug last week at his trial for the cold-blooded murder of Conservative MP Sir David Amess.
'They' were the staff of Prevent, Britain's most important counter-terrorism programme, established in 2006 to combat extremists and fanatics of all stripes: Islamist and far-Right as well as those with 'mixed, unstable or unclear' ideologies.
Last year, after a series of damning failures by Prevent, the Government commissioned a review into the body led by former Charity Commission chief William Shawcross. That is understood to be nearing completion.
But the visceral horror provoked by Ali's case — coming as it does so soon after a litany of other atrocious errors by Prevent — seems to have spurred Home Secretary Priti Patel to overhaul the scheme whatever the review finds.
Yesterday, the Mail revealed new government plans to reform Prevent from top to bottom, with Patel saying: 'I can't prejudge [the Shawcross] review. But it is quite clear from my own observations that things need to change.'
Ali had been dismissed as a terrorist threat by Prevent just months before he bought a knife to hunt down MPs. But his is only the most recent such disaster.
Data this week showed that of 13 terror attacks in the past five years — which left 14 dead and 128 injured — no fewer than seven offenders (that is, more than half) were known to the Prevent scheme.
Among them was Ahmed Hassan, whose bomb partially exploded at London's Parsons Green Tube station in 2017, injuring 69, and Khairi Saadallah, who stabbed three men to death with a kitchen knife in Reading in 2020 while screaming 'Allahu Akbar' ('God is great').
Worried sources had told Prevent that Saadallah could carry out an attack but the body's officials concluded he had 'no fixed ideology'.
Let us now be blunt about this: of those 13 most recent terror attacks, every one of the perpetrators had jihadist sympathies. Not a single one was far-Right.
Yet time and again, Prevent has focused its work away from Islamist extremism and to the far-Right instead.
In the year to March 2020, less than a quarter (24 per cent) of all Prevent referrals — and 30 per cent of 'Channel cases' taken on for further assessment or extra support — related to potential Islamist extremism.
By comparison, 43 per cent of Channel cases were for far-Right extremism, even though these comprised just 22 per cent of referrals.
The bias seems clear — and that year was not an isolated case.
The same trend continued the next year: in 2021, 46 per cent of Channel cases were for far-Right individuals, while 22 per cent were for potential Islamists, even though the referral numbers were 25 and 22 per cent respectively.
Now, at last, there is hope that the problem will finally be dealt with.
I take no satisfaction in outlining these problems.
Last year, the think tank of which I am executive director published a detailed report explaining the issue. Authored by the respected academic Rakib Ehsan, our report highlighted what it called a 'fundamental mismatch' between the threat posed by Islamist terrorism and the attention Prevent gave the problem. As Dr Ehsan put it, there is an 'all-too-real prospect of Islamist extremists who present a significant security risk not being sufficiently monitored by the public authorities'.
He was absolutely right.
Of course, to say Islamist terrorism is the greater danger is not to deny the risk of other violent extremism.
This includes the danger of terrorism flaring up again in Northern Ireland and, indeed, of neo-Nazism.
Nonetheless, especially here in Britain, the facts have underlined time and again that it is jihadists who pose the greatest terror threat to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
The Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Jonathan Hall QC, has concluded that 'Islamist terrorism remains the principal threat in Great Britain' and his words are backed up by some chilling statistics.
Some 90 per cent of the 43,000 people on MI5's 'watch' list are radicalised Muslims.
In 2019, a clear majority of terrorism convictions related to Islamism.
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