The public know how these attacks happen — unlike the politicians

Rod Liddle says that the car-bomb plot was the predictable consequence of multiculturalism, lax immigration, mad human rights laws and neocon aggression. Shame the government can’t see this

‘Al-Qa’eda brain surgeons fail to blow up large car full of petrol’ has an agreeable ring to it, as a sort of taunt at our enemies and as a comfort blanket while we’re standing in the mile-long queue at Heathrow with a sniffer-dog’s snout in our groins. There is a certain truth to it, too — and one not yet remarked upon, in public at least, perhaps for superstitious reasons: they’re pretty useless, aren’t they? And have been for some time, now. Useless either with cool, state-of-the-art plastic explosives on the Underground, cunning toothpaste tube bomblets at the airport or, the new cruder approach — cars full of petrol to which they apparently forget to apply a cigarette lighter. Almost nothing they do works, usually as a result of their own incompetence and stupidity. Imagine: you join al-Qa’eda, take your medical exams, get a job in a British provincial hospital and spend years patiently plotting, awaiting the right moment and painstakingly growing your beard. An enormous investment of time, money and effort. And then you fill the car full of gasoline and propane and succeed only in setting yourself alight and incurring a few parking fines. Suicide bombers are, by definition, an evolutionary anomaly, a strictly counter-Darwinian development. Maybe the good gene pool has already been blown to smithereens and only the thickoes remain. We may have been left with the jihadist equivalent of Norman Wisdom, squeaking ‘Allah u-Akhbar, Mr Grimshaw!’ shortly before being arrested near Sandbach.

Which I suppose is just as well, given our palpable confusion and double standards when faced with Islamist attacks on our soil. The perpetrators may not have been British born and bred (can anyone explain why this was seen as ‘good news’?) and the car bomb itself a new, imported strategy — but everything else about the events of last weekend was same ol’, same ol’ — including the substance of the Prime Minister’s response, even though he’s a brand new Prime Minister.