Worn down, and with Birmingham Council seemingly unwilling to confront the governors, Bains decided that continuing as head was impossible. To the apparent relief of the council he resigned. Paying off the victims of Trojan Horse tactics rather than confronting their perpetrators was the council's preferred option, said Clarke. "They're frightened of being called Islamophobic," one ex-senior teacher told me. "They're frightened of their own shadows." 

Was the council's close relationship with Alam also a factor? It had employed him to train governors and also urged other schools to partner with him. The schools refused, but after the head teacher of Golden Hillock secondary school resigned, having suffered similar treatment to Bains at the hands of the Park View Brotherhood, the council seized its chance, and pushed Golden Hillock into the arms of Alam's Park View Educational Trust. "Tahir and the authority had a love fest going on," says a former Golden Hillock governor.

Soon after Bains left Saltley, the chair of governors used school funds to launch "Operation Saltley", paying a private investigator to access Bains's emails. This was only stopped when a senior teacher who discovered what was going on pointed out that the governors and their gumshoe were about to commit a criminal offence, because Bains's emails contained highly sensitive and personal information about parents and pupils covered by the Data Protection Act. 

Why did the governors want to spy on Bains? They said it was to "protect the senior leadership team from accusations of racism" following the Twitter war. Bains believes they were fishing for evidence of racism so they could avoid paying him off.

For his part, Tahir Alam says his sole motivation has been to improve education for Muslims, having been moved to tears by a 1993 BBC Panorama programme called Underclass in Purdah which featured Park View, where he had been a pupil. "Park View was a poor, struggling school then," says a teacher familiar with the school at that time. "The atmosphere was just dreadful. Unsafe, unloved, shabby — kids out of control. There was definitely a job to be done. I remember Tahir ranting at staff — it was a tirade. Actually he was horrible to them."

Still, thanks largely to Alam's drive, over time Park View had an impressive improvement in GCSE results, albeit at the cost of a much-narrowed curriculum with its emphasis on maths and English, and also — according to Ofsted — at the cost of not preparing the children for life in modern multicultural Britain. Alam says he has merely responded to "the aspirations of parents and children . . . it's just a very basic courtesy that one must extend".

Clarke and Kershaw don't accept this explanation. Both conclude that most parents have not demanded a conservative religious ethos at school. As Clarke says, it would be "absurd and deeply offensive" to argue that Muslims in east Birmingham share the Brotherhood's intolerant views. Why then were only a few parental voices publicly raised in protest? 

Fear of the consequences is one possible answer. Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP for Perry Barr, dared to risk the highly personalised invective that challenging the Islamist narrative so often generates by saying that he believed the allegation of an Islamising plot was true. A Brotherhood-friendly blogger and retweet favourite of some of the accused governors hit back by calling Mahmood a "House Negro" — the pejorative description by the black American activist Malcolm X of a slave who worked in the master's house. "I swear that the speaker was talking about your good-self," sniped the anonymous blogger, who also posted: "Khalid Mahmood: The Brown Neocon Driver of the ‘Trojan Horse' Plot."