Sayeeda Warsi rolls back in her chair and bursts out laughing. "I don't read her, actually. I call her Mad Mel," Lady Warsi says of Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, who has denounced her as "stupid".
Warsi, a proud Yorkshirewoman, rarely pulls her punches. As the first Muslim to sit as a full member of the British cabinet, she fell foul of Phillips in January after she declared in the Sternberg lecture that Islamophobia had "crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability".
Phillips' barbed response was to describe Warsi, the Tory co-chair, on her Spectator blog as "at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process".
Warsi had a mini falling-out with Downing Street after No 10 became alarmed that her lecture appeared to place her at odds with David Cameron on the highly sensitive subject of British Muslims and extremism.
A few weeks after Warsi's speech, Cameron laid the ground for a review of funding for Muslim groups when he asked whether it was right to support groups which "present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community" while doing little to combat extremism.
Cameron's speech to the Munich security conference in February was interpreted as an endorsement of Michael Gove, the education secretary, who called on the west to wake up to the threat posed by Islamist extremists in his book Celsius 7/7. » | Nicholas Watt | Thursday, June 23, 2011
