If Begum has fallen off your radar, allow me to jog your memory. This is the woman who “wasn’t fazed” by the sight of severed heads in bins, nor suffered any pangs of remorse when interviewed four years on. She claimed the Manchester Arena bombing was “justified,” and that she was not aware ISIS was a death cult. She claims she never did anything “dangerous” in Syria, although witnesses confirm she was a cruel enforcer for the morality police, who also sewed men into suicide vests. 

It is of course impossible to gauge what proportion of the BBC’s diversity quota is allocated for returning jihadis, but what is clear is that the current thinking at Broadcasting House is that it’s “best to be ahead of the game.” 

While BBC Sounds has quite understandably drawn widespread public condemnation for handing Begum a platform, on a personal note I consider her story to be unquestionably of public interest. A gritty, unadorned exposé of precisely who her contacts were, how she found them, and most crucially, why she decided to join ISIS in the first place, would go a long way to connecting the dots our politicians seem incapable of. It could also serve to ensure such tragedies are less likely in future. Indeed, the BBC alludes to this in response to such criticism: “This is not a platform for Shamima Begum to give her unchallenged story. This is a robust, public interest investigation into who she really is and what she really did.”