Instead, there is plenty of evidence that the AK party sees Islam as part and parcel of what its politics stand for. Mr Cameron's Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, described the Conservatives' new allies in Europe as "nutters, anti-Semites and homophobes" and Professor Rafal Pankowski of Warsaw University, Poland's expert on nationalist, religious politics confirms that anti-Semitism and homophobia are core mobilising beliefs of this ugly politics in Eastern Europe.

Thus Mr Cameron cannot make the political case for Turkey joining the European Union as he no longer sits down in the same political family as the main decision-makers in the EU.

Both President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel have declared themselves against Turkey obtaining full EU membership and Mr Cameron himself has promised a plebiscite on any new EU Treaty which would allow Turkey to join. He knows that under current conditions the chances of Britain voting in a plebiscite to allow 80 million Turkish Muslims to live and work in Britain and the EU are not high.

This may explain why Mr Cameron sought to please his Turkish hosts with his attack on Israel. It is fashionable to blame Israel for the state of Gaza even though Israel dismantled all its settlements there nearly half a decade ago. But Mr Cameron might have mentioned Gaza's other border which is just as firmly closed, namely the land border with Egypt. He might have mentioned the 8,000 rockets fired by Hamas and other Islamist Jew-killers from Gaza. When V1 drones packed with explosives fell on London in 1944, Winston Churchill did not seek to negotiate with Nazis. Yet when just as many rockets are sent from Gaza to kill Jews, it is the Jews who are to blame and Hamas to be understood, coddled and encouraged.

Mr Cameron might have mentioned the PKK, the Kurdish terrorist group which, like Hamas, seeks to gets its way by force of arms. Mr Erdogan demands — rightly — the support and solidarity of the world as he deals robustly, at times ruthlessly, with the PKK. Its leader, Abdullah Ocalan sits on an Alcatraz in the Sea of Marmora. Its political front outfits are dissolved.