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The bomb tore through an examination hall in Kabul on Friday, where students – mostly minority Hazara, mostly young women – were sitting a practice test in preparation for university. Thirty-five were killed, dozens more injured. An unspeakable human tragedy. We don’t formally know who did it, but we can guess. Under the Taliban’s leadership, Afghanistan is a haven for terrorists. And the terrorists compete. The Taliban is, in my judgement, indistinguishable from al-Qaeda.

Britain is reviewing its cornerstone anti-terror programme. As the name implies, Prevent is a strategy designed to stop radicalisation before it metastasises into killer intent. But how well is it working? There have been accusations that Prevent is discriminatory. Groups such as Liberty and the Muslim Council of Britain have criticised the anti-terror strategy for targetting Muslims, arguing that it has caused hurt to Britain’s Islamic communities. But there are also criticisms that, even on its own terms, the Home Office programme isn’t working as well as it should. Dame Sara Khan, the social cohesion tsar, last week warned that efforts to tackle Islamist extremism are being hampered by ‘political correctness’.

It wasn’t so long ago that an official at London’s Heathrow airport, warned by the scanner through which my luggage was passing, uttered an Archimedean Eureka! (or words to that effect), pounced on my suitcase and abstracted an incriminating bottle of shampoo, which he confiscated. “Over the limit, Sir,” he exclaimed, as a colleague asked me to step aside and extend my hands to be tested for evidence of contact with explosive materials. It’s not only in England, of course, that functionaries subject the populace to their petty tyranny. It’s the same drill in the US. “Oh, but it’s to keep you safe, you know, that’s why we spend billions on our intelligence services and elite crime fighting units, equipping like armies so they can protect us from the bad guys.

I suppose this happens to all of us at different speeds, but I am getting a little fed up of this government. In particular, I am getting fed up of the gap between its rhetoric and its actions. Most of the time this is most noticeable with the Prime Minister, who gives his base the occasional morsel of right-wingery only to then force-feed them great dollops of lefty-greenery. On a trip to Washington, Priti Patel has demonstrated that she is also no stranger to this tactic. So far we have had Patel (the DC version) talk about ‘the mass migration crisis’, as though she is merely an observer of the crisis in the Channel rather than one of the only people actually able to solve it.

Whenever a killing is investigated as an act of terror, there is always a tendency to think that any changes made are a victory for terrorism. While a few MPs have called for changes to how constituency surgeries are held, many more want them to carry on as they were.  But as I say in the magazine this week, given the circumstances, the rethink of MPs' safety should be a practical exercise, not a philosophical one. In response to IRA bombing campaigns, Margaret Thatcher put a gate across Downing Street. Without it, an IRA mortar would have killed the war cabinet in 1991. That was not a ‘victory’ for the terrorists but a wise security measure. The same applies to the protective cars for US presidents: open-top vehicles were ditched after John F.

Every decent person was horrified by the senseless slaying of David Amess. And everyone will want to know what can be done to prevent similar atrocities from occurring in the future. But I fear that in the haze of anger and concern that has descended on the country following Amess’s death, we are coming to some questionable conclusions about the causes of such violence, and coming up with some iffy ideas for how to ensure that such a horrific attack on a public servant never happens again. Right now, the finger of blame is primarily pointed at the shouty, divisive nature of political discourse in the 21st century. The horror visited upon Amess is what happens, apparently, when political rhetoric is so heated and public life so polarised.

It's a stroke of good fortune for France that Salah Abdeslam is a coward. Had he not been he would have died with the other nine members of the Islamist terror cell (one of whom was his brother) when they attacked Paris on the evening of 13 November 2015. Instead of detonating his suicide vest, Abdeslam dumped it in a dustbin and then called a friend in Belgium and asked to be collected. He spent the next four months hiding in a suburb of Brussels before police tracked him down. It's rare for a potential suicide bomber to be taken alive. In most cases all we have to judge them by is a theatrical video message filmed shortly before their death. The capture of Abdeslam therefore has been a boon. The trial is now in its third week and is expected to last until May.

Watching last night’s ITV report from inside two of Britain’s highest security jails was an odd experience for me. The focus on terrorist offenders at HMP Frankland gave us a unique (although much pixelated) glimpse inside the separation units I urged the government to create back in 2016. I’ve had virtually no formal contact with HM Prison Service since. I sense this is in no small part due to the embarrassment I caused my former senior colleagues by revealing their corporate approach to counter terror –mired at that time in a culture of complacency, arrogance, denial and ineptitude. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The inquest into the murder of Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt by Islamist terrorist Usman Khan has revealed a collision of arrogance, hubris, naïveté and incompetence from which the two graduates arguably paid with their lives. Saskia and Jack were attached to a prison education programme supported by Cambridge University called ‘Learning Together’. The scheme, which appears not to have been formally evaluated, inspected or risk assessed by its creators – and had no clear rehabilitation purpose – placed criminology students from the university alongside prisoners on a study programme. In late 2017, at High Security HMP Whitemoor, Khan – an active threat to prison staff – was allowed to join this group.

British-Mexican national Claudia Uruchurtu Cruz disappeared on the night of Friday 26 March in the town of Nochixtlan, Oaxaca State, Mexico. Claudia had been seen attending a rally protesting the beating of a local labourer, allegedly by security elements linked to the local municipal president. Unconfirmed witness statements claim she was grabbed and pushed into a red car. Claudia never arrived home and her family and friends have not heard from her since.  What is the right response for the British government? The most debated issue is whether to pay ransoms. Some governments refuse, others pay, or at least turn a blind eye to families that do. In Mali, where British troops are now operating, France has paid millions of dollars to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

As coronavirus swept the globe a year ago, Isis began issuing pronouncements. ‘God, by his will, sent a punishment to the tyrants of this time and their followers,’ said one such; ‘we are pleased about this punishment from God for you.’ With the world on lockdown, Isis followers were urged not to sit around at home but to ‘raid the places’ of the enemies of God. ‘Don’t let a single day pass without making their lives awful.’ The virus might have begun as God’s punishment to China for persecuting the Uighurs but, as one Isis video put it, the pandemic was a chance to attack Americans, Europeans, Australians and Canadians. For a moment, the jihadis toyed with the idea of sending infected volunteers to sicken the enemy.

Arrests for terrorist-related activity give a worrying insight into the rate at which young people are being targeted and radicalised. All age groups witnessed a fall in terror-related arrests for the year ending September 2020, except for one: those under eighteen, which doubled to account for eight (and subsequently 10) per cent of all such arrests. This is the highest proportion ever seen in any annual period to date. We also know that, all too often, the friends and relatives of those who are in danger of becoming radicalised are failing to act on their concerns. Referrals to Prevent, which aims to 'stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism', saw an overall increase of 10 per cent in the year to March 2020.

Isis supporter Sahayb Abu has been convicted of plotting a sword attack on the streets of Britain. But the 27-year-old isn't the only member of his family who has succumbed to extremist ideology. In 2015, two of Abu’s half-brothers joined Isis in Syria; both are believed to have died in the fighting. In 2018, another half-brother Ahmed Aweys and half-sister Asma Aweys and her partner were jailed for terror offences, including sharing Isis material in a family chat group The case of Abu is just one of a number in the UK in recent years which have seen multiple family members committing terrorist offences together, or who have committed separate terror offences over time. So what do these – and other recent cases involving family connections – tell us?

Far-right and Islamist extremism are both cause for concern in Britain today. But there's another threat which all too often slips under the radar.  Referrals to the UK government’s Prevent programme in 2019/20 presenting a ‘Mixed, Unstable or Unclear’ ideology accounted for 51 per cent of all referrals ‒ up from just 11 per cent in 2016/17. This represents a significant rise for the third consecutive year. Despite this, emerging ideologies – especially Inceldom – still aren’t receiving the attention they warrant.