Yet Alam's claims of parental support is consistent with the fact that the school was oversubscribed and with the trend so visible today on the streets of east Birmingham and elsewhere: that Britain's more observant Muslims are becoming more socially and religiously conservative.

There are more burqas, jilbabs and hijabs, less alcohol at restaurants. Even some lifelong Muslim friends of non-Muslims have become conditional friends who insist that when their non-Muslim friends visit, husbands and wives who used to socialise in jolly foursomes now socialise separately: wife with wife in the kitchen, husband with husband in the lounge.

Girls in Alum Rock oscillate giddily from demure and devoted Muslims to feisty young women in figure-hugging jeans and lipstick, taking in their traditional salwar kameez skin-tight. 

But it is also these girls whom the brothers, fathers and uncles have in their sights: they want them educated but ultimately, as Tahir Alam's fellow Park View governor Shahid Akmal let slip, they also want them at home. Not for nothing has one school built in enclosed spaces so that boys and girls of different heritages can mix and study in freedom, just as teenagers do in every other part of Britain.

The government may hope to wind up the Park View Brotherhood with the removal of key teachers and governors. But if the authorities are to stop deeply committed Islamists from building more Trojan Horses, whether in Birmingham or elsewhere, there will need to be much better policing of the state school system. That system is increasingly fragmented by new academies and free schools no longer under local authority control. 

What Clarke and Kershaw found was that although Birmingham City Council, the DfE and Ofsted had each been separately warned that hardline Muslim governors were targeting schools, none of them were talking to each other or to the Education Funding Agency, whose job is to ensure that the new academies like Park View and free schools comply with funding rules. "There was absolutely no sharing of intelligence," said one official.

To Labour, this is evidence of the failure of Gove's education policy. The Trojan Horse breached the state's secular walls because of the speed with which he established new schools to disperse what he calls "The Blob": the bloated mass of vested interests stifling all efforts to reform education so as to ensure that children emerge from school better qualified to face the challenges of the modern world. In Gove's haste to establish the schools, he failed to protect them from unscrupulous elements.

Yet the roots of the Trojan Horse agenda predate Gove by at least a generation. They go back to the creation of the main umbrella for Muslim schools, the Association of Muslim Schools UK (AMS UK), the International Board of Educational Research and Resources (IBERR), and the MCB. Tahir Alam and some of the Park View Brothers have been associated with or held positions in these bodies, which have been inspired by a broad global Islamist movement that has morphed from the original Cairo-based Muslim Brotherhood. That movement sees no distinction between Islam as a spiritual faith, a way of life and a political ideology. Some say that following the collapse of Communism, Islamism is history's next big idea.