Spectator/YouGov poll

When it came to fighting terrorists, Count Alexandre de Marenches, the legendary former head of France’s intelligence services, knew what he was talking about. In a prescient book published just after the end of the Cold War, he was the first to warn that a fourth world war had already begun — a war waged by ‘small, highly deadly units of terrorists’ with ‘the very real prospect of ending civilisation, at least Western civilisation, as we know it’. A lone voice, Marenches was ignored in Britain and America; it was far easier to believe in reassuring theories about the ‘end of history’ and the supposedly inevitable victory of liberal democracy in the great ideological conflicts of the 20th century.

But times have changed, and so has the state of public opinion. The dramatic extent of this shift is revealed in an exclusive new Spectator/YouGov poll which demolishes much of the received wisdom about the public’s perception of the struggle against terrorism, and shows surprisingly high levels of hawkishness. Almost three quarters of the British public are now convinced that we are fighting a new world war against extremist Islamic terrorists — and although they may not recognise the names, on this issue at least, most are in the same camp as leading US conservatives such as Eliot Cohen, Norman Podhoretz and Newt Gingrich. The public is also deeply concerned at how this new conflict is developing, with four out of five judging the West to be losing and the terrorists to be winning. Almost nobody believes that last week’s foiled plot to blow up a large number of transatlantic flights will be the last such attempt, or that the police and security services will be as effective next time; 86 per cent of respondents believe that Britain is likely to suffer a major terrorist attack within the next year.