On a crisp, sunlit morning in March, I ceased to feel at home in London. It dawned on me that the city where I had been born 58 years ago was no longer safe.


(Illustration by Michael Daley)


I was walking past two men at a stall outside my local Underground station. Their beards and dress revealed them as Salafists; they were proselytising for their fundamentalist form of Islam. My face must have betrayed my anxiety, because they started pointing and talking while I entered the station. As I looked round, both men were grinning at me.

Why did I find their presence disquieting? A couple of hours earlier in Brussels, three suicide bombers had detonated nail bombs in the airport and on the Metro, killing 32 passengers outright and inflicting horrific wounds on another 312 people, of whom 62 were critically injured — all in the name of the Islamic State. It was hard to believe that the two jovial gentlemen outside the station could have been unaware of what had just taken place less than 200 miles away. That was presumably why they were there.

As I descended into the Tube, my thoughts went back to a similar morning, July 7, 2005, when four suicide bombers struck the London transport system. I was going to work on one of the Tube lines that was attacked, having just delivered my two youngest children to their school. Like thousands of others, I was lucky to be on a different train and to have escaped injury, but 52 died and 700 were maimed in the name of al-Qaeda. At the time, Londoners assumed that this terrorist threat would eventually pass, just as the IRA threat with which we had grown up had passed. Though Madrid had already been attacked, killing 192 and injuring more than 2,000, nothing on the scale of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington had then seemed likely. But over the past decade the threat has grown steadily worse. Above all, last year there had been the attacks on Paris, since which the French capital had yet to return to normality.  After Paris and Brussels, I looked back on the horror of London 11 years ago with a sickening feeling of dread. Was there any reason to suppose that such attacks would not be repeated, now that jihadis loyal to IS had multiplied across Europe and notably in London? We now know that Mohamed Abrini, the “man in the hat” bomber who survived the Brussels airport attacks, was not only also involved in the Paris massacre, but visited Britain last July and allegedly met more than a dozen Islamists here. At the time of writing, five Britons have been arrested.

As if on cue, on the day after the Brussels bombs, two West London students were convicted of plotting a “drive-by” attack on the police station that I had passed every day on my journey to school or work for the past 21 years. A gun and silencer had been supplied by two others, plans had been made to shoot police and army recruits, links with IS had emerged in court. The ringleader, a medic called Tarik Hassane, had attended the same West London mosque as Mohammed Emwazi, known as “Jihadi John”, the notorious IS executioner. His fellow jihadi, King’s College physicist Suhaib Majeed, had invited a notorious extremist preacher to address the Islamic Society there in March 2014. Uthman Lateef urged students at King’s to go to Syria. At least 800 have fought for jihadist groups, including IS, and hundreds of these — including about 100 “high-risk” terrorists — have returned to London to join about 2,000 IS supporters who have been prevented from going to Syria, plus thousands of other extremists monitored by police and MI5.