Let me tell you how confident we can be in the hands of our police and security services. The suspect or suspects for the Westminster atrocity today was originally thought to be a bald-headed white man and/or a bearded black man. It has emerged that, although the white/black/bald/bearded suspect was later identified as Abu, who had long-standing links with terrorist organisations going back several years (and although this identification resulted in hastily scrambled profiles of his career on various news channels, accompanied by sighs of “there you are, I told you so, now we’ve got him”), it now turns out it can’t be him after all. Abu is at this very moment (and was especially this afternoon at 2.43 pm) serving a prison sentence in one of Her Majesty’s prisons.    Now, an optimist would say that’s good – now they can search for the real culprit. What I say is that they will search their files, pick a name at random, double-check he’s not in jail or dead, and arrest him. They’re not interested in getting the culprit, just getting somebody – anybody. They’ll rough him up, apply the thumbscrews, get a confession, and claim another success. They will also, of course, have radicalised his brother, or his cousin Ali, in the process. But that’s OK – it’ll keep them all in business for years. After all, that’s why Islamophobia was put firmly in place after the Cold War. “Without the Russians”, they said, “what are we going to do with our spies and spooks, our agents and double agents? We need to construct an enemy so here’s what we’ll do: we’ll send them after the Muslims.” And here we are today, with the prospect that we will have a blowback of unintended consequences not imagined in our worst nightmares.

What was the name of that play that ran so long in London in, I think, the 1980s? “Stop the world …”