The UK’s bonkers way of distributing council housing, and the British state’s apparently limitless capacity to extend generosity to people who show it nothing but contempt, are two of the things that most wind me up. And so, naturally, I’ve had a lot to get me going in recent months.

The news in May that we had been accommodating the first lady of Sierra Leone in social housing was, I thought, the low point of this particular genre of state dysfunction. A BBC interview with Fatima Bio revealed in passing that she had been given a council flat in 2007, after seeking asylum in the UK in the late 1990s. She retained the tenancy, even after she returned to Sierra Leone. Her children lived there until Southwark Council finally repossessed it in June this year. Not content with the presidential lodge in Freetown, the first lady and her family retained their subsidised London home, even as 18,000 other applicants languished on Southwark’s waiting list.

Yet no matter what, the British state will always find ways to surprise you. The news that we are accommodating Abu Hamza’s wife in a council house in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, and have been since 1995, has just about pipped the first lady to the post for the most egregious display of Britain’s misplaced charity.

The home in question is a five-bedroom Edwardian property, valued at £1.7million. Najat Chaffe is the only person registered as living there. That’s right. While even those in well-paying London jobs are forced to cram into flat shares in the outer zones, Abu Hamza’s wife is luxuriating in a five-bedder in her little slice of leafy west London. And now the house is set for a £70,000 taxpayer-funded renovation to upgrade the windows and doors, and – of course – to install solar panels.

Lest we forget, Abu Hamza is the Islamist hate preacher who is serving a life sentence in the US. Formerly a cleric at Finsbury Park Mosque, in 2006 he was convicted in the UK of inciting racial hatred and soliciting murder. In 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison by a court in New York for supporting terrorism and kidnapping. Three of his sons have served jail terms for offences relating to drugs, money laundering and fraud.

How on Earth does this happen? How is it that a family like this can get accommodated in such a desirable taxpayer-subsidised home? To add insult to injury, Hammersmith and Fulham Council is unable to boot Chaffe out of the house or even force her to downsize. The tenancy-for-life arrangement she enjoys meant that, when calls were made for her to downsize in 2012, she was able to refuse. The council’s own policy states that a tenant has the right to a property for the rest of his or her life, provided no tenancy conditions are breached. Breaking the law is not one of these conditions. The council is also legally required to keep the home in tip-top condition.

Abu Hamza’s family is not a freak exception. There is Hani al-Sibai, an Egyptian Islamist preacher whom successive governments failed to deport. Last we heard, in 2015, he was living with his wife and five children in a large west London home and receiving around £50,000 a year in benefits. And then there is Mohammed Qasim Sawalha, reportedly a former Hamas commander in the West Bank, who became a council tenant in Colindale, east London, in 2003. In 2021, he and his wife bought their council house with a £112,300 taxpayer-funded discount. The British state may not be able to deport Islamists, but it can apparently help them with the mortgage.

I shall not bore you with other, equally egregious cases. The point is this: so much of what has gone wrong in this country is down to wrong’uns – to put it mildly – managing to extract all the benefits of our society and welfare state, and lord it over the plain old decent, hardworking people who increasingly feel it’s give, give, give, while getting very little in return.

All the while, the British state is hamstrung. Politicians and civil servants are utterly powerless – because through misguided domestic legislation, outdated international treaties and suicidal empathy – they have made themselves so. When asked about Najat Chaffe’s case by Sky News on Sunday morning, housing secretary Angela Rayner had absolutely nothing to say except seemingly to defend it, spouting inanities about how the ‘rules apply consistently across the board’.

These cases undermine people’s confidence in the state and are tearing up the social contract. Every person on a council-house waiting list reading this will surely feel nothing but utter disgust. Indeed, every taxpayer should feel like this – for it is all of us footing the bill. Until the government stops these people from abusing our hospitality, the British state will do nothing to recover its legitimacy.

Ameer Kotecha is a former diplomat and now the CEO of the Centre for Government Reform.