ELEVEN days ago, Whitehall’s top mandarins gathered around a table in the Cabinet Office to plan a secret project to thwart Al-Qaeda in Britain.

Sir Andrew Turnbull, the cabinet secretary and one of Tony Blair’s closest aides, was in the chair. With him were the heads of some of the most important departments in government.

The Wednesday morning meeting of permanent secretaries had been convened to discuss Contest, one of the most ambitious government social engineering projects in recent years.

Its agenda, set out in more than 100 pages of confidential documents leaked to The Sunday Times, followed growing evidence that fanatics linked to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda group might be planning a terrorist “spectacular” in Britain.

Prompted by the massacre of 191 people in the Madrid bombings on March 11 and the discovery of more than half a ton of explosives and bomb-making equipment in west London a fortnight later, the cabinet had ordered Turnbull to draft a plan to tackle the roots of Islamic terrorism in Britain.

He outlined the task several days later in a letter on “Relations with the Muslim Community” to John Gieve, the permanent secretary at the Home Office.

The first item in that letter was what Turnbull candidly called “The Problem”. “There is a feeling that parts of the Muslim community, particularly younger men, are disaffected,” the cabinet secretary wrote.

“This includes some that are well-educated with good economic prospects. Al-Qaeda and its offshoots provide a dramatic pole of attraction for the most disaffected.”

Turnbull told Gieve he wanted a “strategic response” to the issues raised by ministers. “The aim is to prevent terrorism by tackling its underlying causes,” he wrote. In short, the cabinet secretary wanted nothing less than a blueprint to win the “hearts and minds” of Muslim youth.

The meeting that morning on May 19 aimed to consider Gieve’s reply and to draw up an “action plan”. In his written note, he had remarked that Islamic extremism might be a “symptom of disaffection”. The same disaffection previously surfaced during the riots that shook Oldham and Bradford in 2001.

“We need policies to handle the symptoms and limit their impact,” he added. “But the broader task is to address the roots of the problem, which include discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion suffered by many Muslim communities.”

Gieve presented the meeting with a paper jointly written by Home Office and Foreign Office civil servants and entitled Young Muslims and Extremism.

Written for Blair and drawing on a confidential Downing Street strategy unit “audit” of the 1.6m-strong Muslim community, it painted a devastating picture of how discontent among Muslims could be providing the seedbed of terrorism in Britain.

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