While England sleeps

This week an unusual piece of junk mail joined the forest of pizza delivery leaflets and minicab cards on my doormat. It was a white envelope marked with six chunky coloured circles under which was written: ‘Inside: Important Information from HM Government’. I assumed the ‘important information’ would be that I had been specially selected to win a prize draw and almost threw it away. In fact it turned out to be a leaflet from something called the National Steering Committee on Warning and Informing the Public telling me ‘What to do in an Emergency’. This mysterious Committee obviously didn’t want to alarm anyone by telling them what the ‘emergency’ might be — although I guessed from the rather severe picture of Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director general of MI5, that it wasn’t about what to do when the babysitter fails to turn up. There were references to chemical, biological and radiological ‘incidents’ and ‘serious terrorist crimes’. The advice seemed to boil down to this: fit a smoke alarm, get some spare batteries for your torch and, if an ‘emergency’ does happen, to ‘Go In, Stay In, Tune In’ — some clever PR person on the Steering Committee had obviously misspent their youth tuning in and dropping out with Dr Timothy Leary.

If the leaflet wasn’t so banal it would be terrifying. It is yet another reminder of the enormity of the threat we all now face: a Madrid-style bomb that kills many hundreds of people, or a chemical, biological or nuclear attack that kills many thousands. It is not as though we needed a reminder. In the last week alone a suspected terrorist carrying detailed plans of Heathrow airport has been arrested in Britain, while a threat from al-Qa’eda has sent Italy into a state of panic in the run-up to this Sunday’s Ferragosto public holiday.