The widow of a suicide bomber brands her late husband “naive”. Um, sorry to ask, but what does that make Mrs Jermaine Lindsay — an astute judge of character?

She also says her husband was “brainwashed”. But a pretty amazing cognitive process must have fizzed through the brain of the girl from County Down to turn her into a fundamentalist Muslim shrouded in black.

For Samantha Lewthwaite was the daughter of a British squaddie and was a student at London University. After e-mailing Lindsay a few times she decided to marry a man who perhaps even then was an aspiring bomber, never having clapped eyes on him.

Isn’t her transformation, though innocent, almost as remarkable as Lindsay’s? In an age when women can have it all, she decided to leave it all for second-class subservience.

Young devout Muslim women spoke at the National Film Theatre last week, explaining their stance. Alas, they seemed dazed and confused. Some saw their rejection of sluttish western ways as a feminist crusade. They didn’t twig that feminism is all about choice. In fundamentalist Arab states that they idealise from afar, if a woman decides black is too last year and prances around in something a bit jazzier, a thong say, she could be stoned — to death.

I used to wonder how angry teenagers could shock oldsters post-punk. Gangsta rap was predictable, but burqa chic cracks it: Lewthwaite’s folks must have been so stunned when she came home early, sober and serious.

Dull old Kate gets high on coke, Samantha gets higher on Allah. Sniffing coke is going along with the crowd; but snorting at everything in the society that has nurtured you is really radical.

All good teenage rebellion rejects rational thought but needs an excuse for that rage. For the Sex Pistols it was a “fascist regime”. For fundamentalist Muslim kids it is Iraq. Our teenagers just have Jordan and Peter Andre.

Lewthwaite has no truck with terrorism and sees the evil doltishness in hubbie’s last hours: stealing in to kiss his sleeping boy good night, then sneaking off to slaughter so many other parents. But even if he had turned out to be her “kindred spirit”, what was she choosing? Our older Muslims tend to realise the West is often fatuous, but also free: they don’t wear burqas, rather they think. It is the converts who take it too seriously. Lindsay was a knave, but it was wifey who was naive.

Wolfe joins the gimmick pack

These are not edifying times for authors who can actually write. Tom Wolfe, who wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, is enticing folk to buy the paperback edition of his novel about drunken campus life, I Am Charlotte Simmons, by offering them the chance to win a beach holiday. When Ian McEwan tried to give away a stack of his excess books in a park everyone backed off like he was offering The Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witness mag.

How would earlier stylists have embraced the keen demands of Wolfe’s marketing department? Sales of Romeo and Juliet might have bulged with free packs of Durex; complimentary DIY manuals would have been a sweetener for Bleak House; free copies of Mr Norris Changes Trains or Strangers on a Train could have provided part compensation for all those forced to travel by British Rail. Or how about The Odyssey for voyagers on Swan Hellenic cruises? But if easyJet tickets were given with Gulliver’s Travels, which one would be seen as the free giveaway?

Getting a rebellious feeling off your chest

A woman at a game fair has been manhandled by police and arrested — for sporting a T-shirt declaring “Bollocks to Blair”. With Charles Clarke as home secretary she should be grateful the rozzers didn’t do something to her anatomy — with electrodes. Perhaps Labourites should ditch their “Make Poverty History” wristbands for ones saying “Make Liberty History”.

Yet I feel only limited sympathy for the protester; her T-shirt merely demonstrates how inarticulate the opposition to Blair is.

The best news lately was that FCUK is, um, FCUKed. Well, sales are down. And it is mighty tricky extolling the beauties of British civilisation, wearing an FCUK T-shirt.

Still, garments that swear are adult choices. What has stretched the liberalism of many parents to a tipping point is being pestered by girls aged six to buy T-shirts that seem to sigh “So many boys, so little time”. Then you just wonder: might the mullahs be right?

Unwittingly Price shows just why Blair has been instinctively taken by the middle classes to be one of their own. He quotes him admitting private schools are better. So when Tony tries to reform the bog standard comprehensive middle Britain gives him the benefit of the doubt even when progress is poor. They guess his reforms are being undermined by his blinkered Labour education ministers and bureaucrats.

If the Queen can smile her way through incidents that pungent, she can survive a snub by Cherie Blair. The latest? The Blairs’ nanny was, it is alleged, ordered not to stand for the Queen. Her Maj should respond by curtsying to Cherie, but would Mrs B see the irony?