If Norman Tebbit still wants to talk about "outstanding villains", the most outstanding were Douglas Hurd and his officials in the Foreign Office. At one point, a reporter asked Hurd, the minister charged with protecting a British citizen from state terrorism and all British citizens from that same state's attempts to dictate what they could read, "What was your most painful experience in government"?

"Reading The Satanic Verses," Hurd said with the philistinism the British upper class habitually mistakes for wit.

Egged on by Edward Heath and Conservative backbenchers, the wider Foreign Office regarded a global campaign of murder as a distraction from the task of "normalising relations" with Iran. To please the theocracy, diplomats suggested that Rushdie might plead for clemency for an alleged terrorist accused of bombing a bookshop that stocked The Satanic Verses. Rushdie protested, but the authorities allowed the suspect to return to Iran unpunished nevertheless. Just in case you run away with the idea that a concern for the tender feelings of Muslims motivated Hurd and his contemporaries, I should remind you that they went on to do everything possible to prevent a  robust Nato response to the slaughter of the Bosnian Muslims in the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. "Respect" for Muslim feeling did not concern them. In both instances, their chief desire was to strike illusory deals with arbitrary power, whether it was in its Iranian or Serbian form.

The world appears different now. If I were to show you an editorial urging us to "respect" regimes and movements that support the oppression of women, gays and Jews by biting our tongues and censoring our books, you would know without my prompting that it was from a leftish rather than a conservative newspaper. They were harder to spot, but the signs that the majority on the Left was prepared to outflank conservatives on the Right were there in 1989. Rushdie writes of how he was criticised from the Left by Germaine Greer, John Berger and John le Carré, whom I never thought of as left-wing, but I suppose is, if leftism is only anti-Americanism. Rushdie's sister Sameen understood how left-liberal thought was going wrong from the outset. "For a generation the politics of ethnic minorities in Britain had been secular and socialist," she said. "The fatwa was the mosques' way of destroying that project and getting religion back into the driving seat."