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And again in 2003, Brick Lane by Monica Ali was published. In her novel, Nazneen, an innocent Bangladeshi girl, arrives in London as the bride of another Bangladeshi immigrant. Pretty soon she acquires a lover, Karim, a British Muslim, and the two men’s attitudes could not be more different. When her husband gets an extremist leaflet through the door trying to raise money for the families of suicide bombers in Palestine, he is furious. He came to Britain to succeed on Western terms, to fit in, and he fears this kind of agit-prop will turn the natives against him.

“What is all this mumbo-jumbos? Are they mad? Poking these mad letters through white people’s doors. Do they want to set flame to the whole place?”

By contrast, Karim has all the natural-born confidence of a handsome Londoner. He is not grateful for what he has got and wants what he thinks he has not got — equality. Karim is made militant by what he sees as British prejudice and persecution of Muslims. At one point Nazneen tells him that Allah forbids suicide bombing. Karim replies: “It’s not suicide, yeah. It’s war.”

When the Prime Minister was asked at his press conference whether the threat to Britain was “home-grown”, he came to the conclusion that “obviously the inspiration for it, as it were, comes from outside this country”.

I disagree. I think these writers — all black or Asian, all either born or brought up in Britain — are trying to tell us differently. Their work reveals exactly why this terrorism was home-grown. Less escapism than reportage, these books show that the rage of the second-generation immigrant is greater than the first. The fictional men who turn against their fellow Britons draw their ire from their experience of Western society, not from their isolation from it.

When Millat travels to Central London determined to kill someone, he steels himself by dwelling on how humiliated he is by his father’s lowly job in a land of plenty.

“He liked to think he had a different attitude, a second-generation attitude,” writes Smith. “That’s the long history of us and them, that’s how it was, but no more. Because Millat was here to finish it, to revenge it.”

Now I think Mr Blair — and anyone else in search of some insight into this phenomenon — should try their hardest to get round to these books this summer. Is it impossible to imagine that these works of fiction, so celebrated in the literary world, could have spurred us to take more notice in the real world? Perhaps we did not because the authors’ touch was too subtle for that, too comic, too . . . British?

• THIS WEEK the Committee of Advertising Practice banned drinks manufacturers from using handsome men in their advertising, fearing that this forged a dangerous link between alcohol and sex. Instead posters should display “overweight, middle-aged, balding” male models. Don't they realise that they are exactly the kind of dates that force a woman to buy herself a drink or two?

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