The letter bomber sending fireworks in padded envelopes seems less like the Red Brigades than the militant wing of the Green Ink Brigade.

Yet everybody is asking what “cause” could drive him to send seven (and counting) little letter bombs to science research firms, companies connected with traffic management and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency? Police experts on “domestic extremism” (which apparently does not mean people with a housework fetish) are asking whether it is an animal rights extremist, a “disgruntled motorist” (hardly narrows the field), or an unlikely alliance between an animal headcase and fanatical petrol head.

Who knows? Perhaps a disgruntled taxpayer sent one to that accountancy firm, or maybe Welshophobia led him to letter-bomb the DVLA in Swansea. Who cares? Whatever aims we may imagine they are pursuing, the only real “cause” such attacks are about is the effect — the panic they can cause and the publicity gained. The letter bomber’s fantasy-loaded ego has no doubt been blown up more spectacularly than any target.

This sort of attack by a uni-bomber with a fizzling grievance is probably more likely now, when there are no big movements fighting for big causes. Instead we are left with the personal statement of alienated individuals, whether staging a one-man protest outside Parliament, dressing up as Batman to scale the walls of Buck House, or sending a squib in the post.

Animal rights terrorists are the classic case of people looking for a pseudo-cause as an excuse to show off their own righteous anger. Even today’s more serious Islamic terrorists fit this pattern of me, me, me militancy, claiming to be doing it for Palestinians when they couldn’t point where on a map they live.

It is bad enough that our society and laws have to be reorganised in response to handfuls of narcissistic suicide bombers. It would be far worse if we allowed a pyrotechnic prig armed with an envelope full of hang-ups to succeed in causing sparks of chaos, as some brown ones did during the anthrax panic in Washington after 9/11.

So please, no more reports that government agencies are to stop sorting their mail, no more demands for even greater security at every office, no more repeated news pictures of armed police racing around Westminster. And no more motoring organisations telling the BBC that they feel “a bit guilty” that their failure to defend motorists against “bullying” means
“somebody’s had to resort to this”.

Nobody “has to” resort to this. But if someone chooses to, there is no sure way to stop a sad individual slipping a firework among 16 million daily pieces of mail. More sober experts note that these packets are meant not to kill, but to cause “disproportionate fear and disruption”. We should know by now that giving the infantile more attention for bad behaviour is no way to make them stop.

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