Westminster may, as ever, be full of talk about defections and backstabbing cabinet ministers, but aside from the gossip and drama, there is a much more sinister betrayal happening inside Britain.
This is a plot on a scale and ambition that outstrips who should be the leader of a political party. It is nothing less than a scheme to supplant all of our national political institutions and fundamentally change the way of life, customs, traditions and legal code of the country forever.
This plot, in case you hadn’t guessed, is the end goal of literally tens of thousands of Islamists in Britain. Islamism is decidedly not Islam, which is a set of ideas about how to live, what law should look like and who created the universe, as well as what role they have played in the story of the world.
Islamism takes those ideas and says that they should be implemented on a political, national, or even international level.
They are almost always the more austere interpretations of Islamic ideals, hence burqas, rules against music or art depicting living things, strict food requirements and much more.
This can elevate to what we call jihadism, which is the use of violence or even warfare in order to take over existing political structures to achieve Islamic ends.
Examples of this would be the terrorist network al Qaeda, or even ISIS, the Islamic State, that, through conquest, briefly established a sort of nation state.
But very often, Islamists are content to engage in the existing institutions and structures of the country in which they find themselves.
The end goal is the same; the strategy is mostly non-violent and more incremental. The most famous exponents of Islamism are the Muslim Brotherhood.
Britain must follow Donald Trump’s lead on the Muslim Brotherhood before it's too late - James Price | Getty Images
This is a diffuse network of Islamists across the world, diffuse in their structures but united in wanting to take over Governments and impose their ideas.
The Muslim Brotherhood is hard to tackle because, on the surface, they purport to work through legal means and channels, masking their true end goals in the back and forth of politics.
This hasn’t stopped those countries that know them best, the Middle Eastern Arab Muslim states, from banning them outright.
The MB is illegal in the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, the Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan, as well as Russia, and in recent months, Kenya.
And just this week alone, massive movements are happening to counter this group. The United States has proscribed several Muslim Brotherhood chapters; the United Arab Emirates has gone so far as to warn its own students away from UK universities over MB influence; and my former boss, Nadhim Zahawi, defected to Reform in large part, it seems, because it is the only political party committed to banning them.
Zahawi went so far as to describe Islamism as a “sinister fifth column in Britain" that is a “sickness in the heart of our country that for forty years we have let fester”.
This will not be easy to fix. Banning one group just allows them to reincorporate in other guises. We will have to be forensic in both the legislation used and the clever tracking of money and influence. Trickier still is the cultural attitude that allows this.
I have written for GB News before about the concept of ‘dawah’ - the Islamic call to convert others through inducement. Robert Jenrick, sacked in the last few hours from the Conservative Party, warned that this was rife in British prisons and beyond. We need to be robust in utterly destroying this ideology from our country.
It’s striking but no less surprising that one of our closest security partners, the UAE, has gone as far as it has. For years, the UAE has taken a hard line against Islamist extremism, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, based on a clear-eyed understanding of how it operates: not as a single organisation, but as a loose, resilient web of charities, student groups, community bodies and informal networks, bound together by ideology and money.
Fundamentally, these networks don’t stay overseas. That is why the UAE has taken the fight against Islamism from British campuses to the battlefields of Yemen.
While Saudi Arabia is escalating the conflict there, the UAE has been trying to contain and dismantle MB-aligned actors to achieve long-term stability. Despite what some say, that is what seems to be happening in Sudan, as well.
If we fail to act, Britain won’t just host Islamist ideology - it will export it. And that is the threat our security partners in the Islamic world are preparing themselves for.
So we should listen to those who know most about this issue, and we should follow Donald Trump’s administration and ban the Muslim Brotherhood.
Then we should go further and eradicate Islamism from Britain. Future generations of British Muslims, like the rest of us, will thank us.
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