Sports Calendar

And instead, for the purposes of argument, accept what has been implicit in commentary about the ricin find: that it is al-Qaeda’s plan to employ its agents to kill innocent people through the use of home-grown skills and low-technology devices.

Well, if so, what can stop them? Do you know a way to prevent castor oil plants germinating? Can we halt the sale of arsenic for mole poison or warfarin for exterminating rats? Can we guard every yard of water mains pipe in the country? Can food be delivered in Securicor vans? Can every supermarket shelf be kept under surveillance? Have you a design for a lead-acid car battery which does not use acid? Can you stop any car passenger in the fast lane firing with an airgun at the front tyres of a speeding coach? Can you prevent the sale of petrol, bottles, and rags, or stop a saboteur getting near a railway track, or a suicide bomber boarding a Tube train?

Of course not. What part, then, could the police and counter-terrorist intelligence organisations play in reducing these dangers?

The answer is a very substantial part. So long as insurrectionists are unable to recruit widely or deeply within the host population, so long as their agents cannot enjoy sympathy and cover from any part of it, so long as there is no street in Britain where the badge of al-Qaeda can be worn with pride, then, though individual lunatics and self-styled loose-cannon terrorists may carry on causing all kinds of nuisance and the occasional atrocity, our Security Service will never be too far from the scruffs of the necks of those whose purpose would be to weld and command them. In this way, though it may prove impossible to eradicate Islamicist terrorism, it will gain no firm root here.

There is as yet little indigenous membership of al-Qaeda in Britain.

Its terrorists are mostly aliens. I see a danger that as he strides the globe with a deeply unpopular ally’s arm around his shoulder, our Prime Minister is helping to design a designer-label for a worldwide coalition of the aggrieved and the dispossessed whose appeal will reach — may already be beginning to reach — some of our own people.

With our overheated babble about mass-poisoners, masterminds and secret cells, we are glamorising al-Qaeda. With our still unexplained lashing out at Iraq we are making citizens of immigrant stock who had thought themselves unquestionably loyal to the British state ask themselves for the first time whom they might cheer for in a war.

Among young and disadvantaged Muslims in Britain there must soon be some stirring of interest in that mysterious, anonymous and deadly global gang of Islamic avengers whom the press seem determined to turn into dark-side celebrities.

That is why, at just this moment when a national leader might think himself under a duty to override public opinion about Iraq, democracy — real democracy — becomes so desperately important. Tony Blair must keep the people with him. And, no, I do not mean explain better what he’s doing. I mean stop doing it.

Contribute to Debate via
comment@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• Britain doesn’t need a dose of shock therapy
• Why the sea eagle has no right to land here
• Let older women have a voice at the BBC