When Keir Starmer this week bizarrely welcomed the hardline Egyptian radical Alaa Abd El-Fattah to Britain with open arms, he made the classic mistake of a naive and unworldly man – he assumed that the enemy of his enemy must be his friend.

For the Prime Minister and the rest of the Labour Party’s increasingly out-of-touch front bench, the arrival in this country of a man who was imprisoned in Cairo for opposing Egypt’s authoritarian president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was a welcome opportunity to signal their liberal credentials to the disgruntled Left of the party.

So they rolled out the red carpet for a writer and activist who had risen to prominence during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 and paid a high personal price in the military clampdown that followed.

What they didn’t do was, to their eternal shame, take a good look at Mr El-Fattah’s revolting personal views.

Pro-democracy, hardline Egyptian radical Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who was in prison for almost 12 years

Despite his mealy-mouthed attempts since arriving on these shores to suggest his words had been twisted or taken out of context, the Egyptian’s public pronouncements – as have been widely reported – quite clearly show he is no friend of Britain, or of liberal, tolerant societies in general.

It has emerged that, in the hours following his purported ‘apology’, the oh-so contrite Mr El-Fattah liked and endorsed a Facebook post claiming the political storm surrounding his arrival in Britain is a ‘Zionist campaign’.

Why on earth, then, should we believe he regrets the 2010 tweet in which he wrote: ‘I consider killing any colonialists and especially Zionists heroic, we need to kill more of them,’ adding, ‘There was no genocide against Jews by the Nazis – after all, many Jews are left.’

Not content with that, he cheerfully described himself as ‘a violent person who advocated the killing of all Zionists including civilians’ and wrote: ‘Police are not human, they don’t have rights, we should just kill them all.’ The British, who have since so warmly welcomed him are, he added, ‘dogs and monkeys’.

It should be stressed, of course, that the Tories are responsible for awarding Mr El-Fattah citizenship in 2021 while still in jail in Egypt.

Nevertheless, how strange it is that given the scale of problems Britain currently faces, Starmer’s government said securing the release of Mr El-Fattah from the Egyptian prison where he was on hunger strike had been one of its ‘top priorities’.

Despite Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper’s launching last night of an inquiry into ‘serious information failures’ surrounding the case, our Prime Minister’s priorities are twisted – and hypocritical. His praise for Mr El-Fattah comes just a fortnight after a British 36-year-old, Luke Yarwood, was jailed for 18 months for ‘inciting racial hatred’ in two social media posts that were viewed just 33 times.