In his Media Diary for the Independent on Monday, Matthew Norman mused the folowing:

With three-and-a-bit weeks to go, now seems the time to pose this vital question: when Mr Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and the gang decide to unleash the flammed-up terrorism scare, where will they place it? Those who saw last week’s Newsnight item featuring the American focus groupie Frank Luntz will have been struck by one finding. Mr Luntz went to marginal Milton Keynes to ask floaters for their thoughts, and the issue on which they gave the PM his best score was decisiveness in the face of a security crisis. Doubtless Labour’s internal polling shows the same thing, which strongly suggests that a little judicious scaremongering is on the cards. A message from Bin Laden along the lines of his US intervention would certainly help, but Ossie can hardly be relied upon to ride to the rescue. And while sending the tanks to Heathrow for no apparent reason would have visual impact, it lacks a certain freshness. What’s needed, then, is a front-page splash calculated to allow an ashen Mr Blair to remind us that, while the intelligence is “non-specific”, we live in the face of “a unique threat to our way of life”, and that he alone can be trusted to preserve it. But where to plant this potentially fruitful tree? The Times and The Observer are close allies, but at times of electoral emergency No 10 would look for maximum impact, which means a tabloid. The Mirror, recent home to a moving hand-written note from the PM, seems an obvious choice, but that paper already nestles snugly in his pocket. So the smart money is on The Sun, which is suffering an unaccustomed bout of indecision as to whom to support. A world exclusive carrying the byline of Trevor Kavanagh, and the headline: “PM: Don’t Panic, Don’t Panic … But Without Me You’re Dooooomed!”, packed with dark if nebulous hints at an imminent atrocity would shepherd credulous voters back into the fold. We look forward to reading it.

Is this what Norman was looking for…?

The Sun: HE WANTED YOU DEAD

COP killer Kamel Bourgass was yesterday unmasked as Osama Bin Laden’s master poisoner — with a mission to murder as many Britons as possible.

An Al-Qaeda poisoner? In London?* Who can save us? How about the Safety Elephant…

Manchester Evening News: Storm over the killer left at large

Mr Clarke said the case highlighted the need for identity cards, along with stronger borders to deal with migration issues.

How close did we come to armageddon? The newspapers speculate. Keep an eye on the Al-Qaeda connection…

The Mirror: THE TOXIC TERRORIST

Algerian Kamel Bourgass, 31 - a suspected al-Qaeda member - was “prime mover” of a cell which plotted to produce ricin, cyanide and botulinum for holy war. The poisons were to be smeared on car door handles, used in spray form or to contaminate supermarket products.

The Mail: Asylum ‘chaos’ allowed ricin plotter to kill

The Government’s “chaotic” asylum policy allowed an Al Qaeda terrorist to plot a deadly ricin campaign and murder Detective Constable Stephen Oake, the Conservatives have claimed.

ITV.com: Al-Qaeda terrorist jailed over deadly poison plot

An al-Qaeda terrorist, jailed for life for killing a Special Branch officer, has been found guilty of planning to unleash a deadly poison in the UK.

Blimey, we’ve quite clearly had a close shave. Can you picture the streets littered with bodies? The death and destruction? But wait, what’s this?

The Guardian: Duncan Campbell - The ricin ring that never was

Yesterday’s verdicts on five defendants and the dropping of charges against four others make clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the “ricin ring” make or have ricin. Not that the government shared that news with us. Until today, the public record for the past three fear-inducing years has been that ricin was found in the Wood Green flat occupied by some of yesterday’s acquitted defendants. It wasn’t.

…

The third plank of the al-Qaida-Iraq poison theory was the link between what Powell labelled the “UK poison cell” and training camps in Afghanistan. The evidence the government wanted to use to connect the defendants to Afghanistan and al-Qaida was never put to the jury. That was because last autumn a trial within a trial was secretly taking place. This was a private contest between a group of scientists from the Porton Down military research centre and myself. The issue was: where had the information on poisons and chemicals come from?

…

I was asked to look for the original source on the internet. This meant exploring Islamist websites that publish Bin Laden and his sympathisers, and plumbing the most prolific source of information on how to do harm: the writings of the American survivalist right and the gun lobby.

…

When, in October, I showed that the chemical lists found in London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto, California, the prosecution gave up on the Kabul and al-Qaida link claims. But it seems this information was not shared with the then home secretary, David Blunkett, who was still whipping up fear two weeks later. “Al-Qaida and the international network is seen to be, and will be demonstrated through the courts over months to come, actually on our doorstep and threatening our lives,” he said on November 14.

…

We have all been victims of this mass deception. I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an Al Qaida-trained superterrorist. An Asbo might be appropriate.

Bourgass was clearly a dangerous man capable, as his conviction shows, of murder. He was also described by the lawyer of three men, who had charges against them in the same case dropped, as “conceded by all to be a difficult, anti-social loner”. Charles Clarke described this one man as “an illustration of the fact that terrorist organisations exist and are seeking to damage our lives”.

Like the “45 Minutes From Doom” claim, the Government and now a bandwagon-jumping Michael Howard don’t see the need to correct an erroneous impression, one that an Al-Qaeda cell were foiled in the nick of time in their attempt to “poison thousands”. But it seems clear to me that this dangerous nonsense needs debunking far and wide.

It appears that if only the present asylum system were better staffed and more dilligent, Bourgass would have been scooped up and not gone on to kill. New Labour decry the Tories for using individual cases of failure to beat the NHS. The Tories are doing the same here. But with more talk of “plans for identity cards, stronger border controls and the new anti-terror laws”, so are New Labour.

* I mean Manchester. No, London. Er, Bournemouth?

UPDATE: More at Blood & Treasure.

John Lettice gives us another debunking at The Register.

Posted on April 14th, 2005 at 12:11 pm

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Filed under 2005 General Election, T.W.A.T., The home front, UK politics