You would think that by now Allah’s message might be getting through. Time after time Muslim fanatics attempt to wreak devastation in Britain – and succeed only in blowing themselves up, or setting themselves on fire, or their explosives refuse to do the decent thing and explode – while we infidel cockroaches look on in bemusement, quite unharmed.

If you were a devout believer, you might put two and two together and begin to suspect that Allah doesn’t entirely approve of blowing British people to bits. He would much rather his jihadis stayed at home and watched the Eurovision Song Contest, or did a spot of gardening, or took the dog for a walk.

It is presumptuous of me to second-guess Allah’s thought processes, of course. But then quite a few incendiary Muslim clerics insisted that the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami was down to Allah being a bit peeved at the state of the world and unleashing his righteous watery vengeance upon it. To which you might reply that it was very odd of Him, then, to single out a devoutly Muslim country, Indonesia, for the brunt of the carnage. Maybe He just missed.

It seems that the chap who successfully maimed himself in Exeter had somehow been got at by extremists, according to the police. Nicky Reilly, 22, is very reclusive and apparently has a history of mental illness.

“We believe that he was preyed upon, radicalised and taken advantage of,” a copper said, surprisingly quickly after they had arrested him.

So it may well be that the fundamentalists have resorted to that brave and noble tactic of sending the mentally impaired or deeply troubled off to do their dirty work, lacking the resolve and commitment to do so themselves. Al-Qaeda, you may remember, strapped explosives to two women who’d suffered from mental illness and sent them to a market in downtown Baghdad where these walking bombs were detonated remotely, wiping them out together with 91 other people.

On the other hand, we should remember that this latest botched attack took place in Exeter, a city less accustomed to finding itself the target of Islamist fury than, say, Tel Aviv or New York. It may be simply that the Devon and Cornwall police are unfamiliar with the usual IQ levels of Muslim terrorists.

I suppose that many years hence the terrible destruction of the twin towers will still be lodged in our minds, the image of the buildings crumpling, the video of Osama Bin Laden sniggering in his cave. But a similarly iconic image would be of the moron Richard Reid trying desperately to set his training shoe on fire on a plane, having forgotten to bring a lighter. They are either extraordinarily useless or Allah has got it in for them.

*****

Under a new European Union directive, fortune tellers, astrologers and faith healers will henceforth be forced to display a sign saying that their services are “for entertainment only” and not “experimentally proven”. But they will have seen that coming, I suppose – just as, rather spookily, you will have seen that joke coming as soon as you started to read these words.

Normally one would support any attempt to get to grips with the purveyors of fraudulent new age bollocks, headscarf-wearing pikey charlatans and the likes of Russell Grant. But it is a slippery slope. Start legislating against things in which people are inclined to believe but which are not “experimentally proven” and the whole edifice of western civilisation might come crashing down: we would lose all female skin care products, the Pope, wind farms, all economists, the Kyoto protocol on climate change, sub-prime mortgages, Polly Toynbee, those beaded car seat covers taxi drivers use, the insurance industry, humidifiers, management consultants, all ethnic and gender monitoring organisations, “superfoods”, bottle recycling plants, continental yoghurt-based products which supposedly stop women from being constipated and the Conservative party.

Indiana Jones and the PC plague

The imperialist bigot Indiana Jones is back with another film – which has rightly been condemned by a leading archeologist as being unethical and a betrayal of proper modern archeological procedure. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has not met with the approval of Professor Claire Smith: Jones uses valuable archeological artefacts to swat people about the head, which is wrong, she complains. And she adds: “The native people who hinder Jones in Crystal Skull are in fact the descendants of the people who made the artefacts that Jones seeks – and the contemporary cultural custodians of the site.” Quite right: do you think we should picket the film?

I haven’t felt so politically energised since an article in The Guardian pointed out that in the last Harry Potter film there were no disabled access ramps to be seen in Hogwarts and none of the house elves was black or crippled. Anyway, thankfully Professor Smith is to be taken on as a consultant on the next film in the series, provisionally entitled Indiana Jones and the Non-Invasive Consensual Restoration of Artefacts to Those Communities Who, in a Very Real Sense, Have Ownership of Them.

Gordon reluctant to feel pain of Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama’s 11-day visit to Britain culminated in a meeting with Gordon Brown – who treated Tibet’s spiritual leader in much the same way you might treat some old slapper with whom you had a hasty liaison several years ago and is now on the phone demanding maintenance. At first Gordon wouldn’t return the Dalai Lama’s calls, refusing to confirm whether he’d meet the man at all. In the end, he scurried to Lambeth Palace for a quick tête-à-tête – not a political meeting as such, you understand, but a “spiritual” event.

We might imagine Gordon sitting there, shifting in his seat, checking his watch and fiddling with his tie, saying, “China, yes, yes, absolutely ghastly, I quite agree. I feel your pain, Lama.” Then getting the hell back to Downing Street as fast as his car would carry him, quickly ringing the Chinese to insist, “No, don’t be silly, it was nothing serious, just this bloke I met at the archbishop's gaff.”

Incidentally, the emetic or vaguely hilarious “I feel your pain” line is rapidly becoming Gordon’s “I’m a pretty straight kinda guy”.

*****

There was an interesting piece of research published from Newcastle University this week by a chap called Bruce Charlton. He states that attempts to let in more working-class kids to universities are misguided because, on average, the top social classes have a much higher IQ than those from the lower classes.

Few would dispute that, on average, lawyers tend to be cleverer than people who, say, hose the blood off the walls of an abattoir for a living. But this is not necessarily true of their respective wives and therefore still less likely to be true of their children. Charlton, I think, has measured the wrong thing. Perhaps he had thick, working-class parents himself . . .

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