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Ostensibly he was releasing a report by “leading academics and experts on Islam” on Islamophobia. He had a poll which showed that Muslim Londoners weren’t very different from other Londoners, which was fair enough, and descriptions of the prejudices Muslim journalists face. However, these revelations were merely a build up to the shocking news that “leading academics and experts” had found that 91 per cent of articles on Islam “were negative in their associations”.

Ninety one per cent! Imagine. I knew there was bigotry, but not the “torrent of Islamophobic demonistaion,” Livingstone described. Where could we get further particulars?

We couldn’t, initially. Although Livingstone had sat on the report for weeks no copies were available to study before the conference – “problems with couriers,” apparently. It arrived while Livingstone was speaking and as we skim read we learned that it was giving Islam “negative associations” to report that the Iranian regime was holding a conference of Holocaust deniers. Muslim democrats in Iran opposed it. Livingstone and his “leading academics” could not. Meanwhile, Journalists – including me – conveyed “negative associations” when we wrote that Jack Straw was standing up for the rights of women when he criticised the full veil. Muslim feminists oppose the veil. Mr Livingstone and his “leading academics and experts” cannot.

The worst of it was that a large chunk of the report was a devious attack on a Panorama expose of the Muslim Council of Britain by John Ware of the BBC. As luck would have it, Ware was at the press conference and able to point out that all the criticisms of the MCB he broadcast came from liberal-minded British Muslims. Were they like Iranian democrats and Arab feminists Islamophobes as well?

Then Ware looked at the press release and noticed that one of Livingstone’s nine “leading academics and experts” wasn’t an academic or expert at all but Inayat Bungawala of the MCB. Later I found out that the two other Muslims on the panel were from the MCB as well. At a cost of £30,000 to the taxpayer, Livingstone was allowing the MCB and its friends to rubbish a well-sourced and balanced documentary and dressing up the results as an impartial study.

In the latest issue of Private Eye, the Labour Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has a letter defending Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the religious teacher who also promotes the ideology of suicide bombing and terrorist attacks on our forces in Iraq. Qaradawi believes, in his own words (not quoted by Mr Livingstone), that "Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror", but that such conquest "need not necessarily be by the sword".

Ken and others are promoting a sort of Muslim Sinn Fein - men who encourage violence in various contexts, men who attack the Western way of life, but who hope to win support here by taking a "not in my back-yard attitude" to terror. You Westerners won't get killed, is the message, so long as you have the foreign policy we want and let us control the Muslims - teaching, preaching, politics, Islamic banking - in your midst.