WHOSE JUDGMENT would you sooner trust on national security? Liberty, the law lords, the Liberal Democrats and the worst of the hard Left — Chris Mullin, Alan Simpson and Clare Short? Or the Metropolitan Police, the Association of Chief Police Officers, MI5 and the independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation?

It should be a “no-brainer” — but not for the modern Conservative Party. The most unedifying aspect of the passage of the Terrorism Bill through the Commons has been the pleasure with which the Tory home affairs team, led by David Davis, has entered into a kind of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the do-gooding classes and Campaign Group crusties to dilute key elements of the Government’s response to the 7/7 suicide attacks.

Of greatest significance is the proposal to increase the maximum amount of time that terrorist suspects can be detained, from 14 to 90 days (though the exact figure is now to be negotiated). The most compelling case has come not from ministers but from those who requested the change in the first place — the police. As Andy Hayman, the Met’s Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations, observes, the suicide bombers are a far more complex beast than the IRA units that bombed London during the Troubles. There are far more “players”, who come from all over the world. For example, the inquiry into the “ricin plot” to attack the Heathrow Express took the police to 26 other countries: there is no such thing as a domestic investigation any more. The suspects frequently adopt multiple identities that take a long time to uncover.

Yet despite a briefing from the Met on Privy Council terms, Mr Davis breezily waved aside such points at the second reading — asserting that government should not simply go along with what the police want. Instead, like some anguished Islingtonian from Matrix Chambers, he frets about draconian measures creating more “martyrs”. Why?

Partly, it is because Mr Davis himself is a fairly crude beast who likes opposition for opposition’s sake. In his opportunistic way, he no doubt thinks he is pulling a brilliant stunt by citing such ultra-liberal judges as Lord Steyn — the retired law lord who has taken over as chairman of the civil liberties group, Justice.

But there is a broader intellectual failure, too. Much of the Conservative Party has not fully grasped — as did the Prime Minister — the changed nature of the world after 9/11. Not even the murder of more than 50 Londoners has shaken it out of its torpor. The party does favour some “hardline” measures such as the creation of a national border patrol but that is not where its emotional energy is directed.

To many Tories, Islamist terrorism is a bit like the tsunami — terrible but something that they can’t do much about. They don’t like Osama bin Laden, but they like Tony Blair even less. After all, it was Mr Blair, not bin Laden, who “swindled” them out of their ministerial cars. Certainly, al-Qaeda seems to excite little of the rage that Conservative MPs once felt about Irish republican terrorism.

Instead, some of them quietly dismiss the Prime Minister’s warnings about the Islamist threat as another manifestation of spin: a less egregious whopper maybe than the dodgy dossier on Iraq, but still over-egged. Meanwhile, many of the libertarian contingent wax indignant about “authoritarianism” — the subtext being that new anti-terror legislation is further evidence of a centralising power grab by a control-freak administration.

Significantly, this is not one of those alliances of convenience that grows up between polar opposites — such as Michael Foot’s and Enoch Powell’s successful sabotage of Lords reform in the late 1960s. For Foot, the Bill did not go far enough; for Powell, it went too far. This time round, it is hard to see where the Tory critics of the Bill differ in substance from their hard-left chums and the Lib Dems.

The position adopted by Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Attorney-General, is especially damaging and confused: not only did his attempt to “explain” Islamist terrorist outrages after 7/7 come perilously close to giving the crazies comfort, but he is also a fanatical supporter of the Human Rights Act.

It forms a dramatic contrast with the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 — passed after the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings — when the Tory Opposition helped the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, to repulse the hard Left’s amendments. But in those days, the Tory party instinctively spoke for key institutions of State such as the Armed Forces, the intelligence services and police.

The defence of the realm ought to be one of the Tories’ strongest suits. Yet according to a Populus poll for The Times just before the general election, Labour enjoyed a 14-point lead on terrorism issues. It is a measure of Mr Blair’s achievement — and the failure of Mr Davis et al — that Labour has become the party of national security.

The Conservatives should be making mincemeat of Labour — not because Labour is too tough, but because its rhetorical robustness is a veneer that conceals multiple private compromises with the civil liberties lobby and the Muslim Council of Britain. Why has the Government been so slow in dealing with Islamist hate preachers? Why can’t the police use sniffer dogs in mosques? These are the kind of questions the Tories should ask — rather than playing a short-term game of “me too” with the likes of Shami Chakrabarti at Liberty.

Dean Godson is author of Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism

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