All this airport security is utterly useless

Here we go again: another summer of airport fun. This year it’s been announced that due to a ‘heightened’ security threat, any Brit attempting a holiday abroad will be subject to an even grimmer ordeal than usual: body searching, shoe removing, laptop searching and endless grinding queueing. Expect it to take twice as long to get through security, an official from the Department of Transport said.

Superficially there are some excellent reasons for all the extra precautions and checks. ‘New intelligence’ from America’s security agencies suggests al-Qa’eda has developed clever explosives that can be soaked into clothing or concealed in human ‘body cavities’, and plastic explosives that masquerade as briefcases and iPads.

But though the threat is genuine, I wonder how effective any of these tedious security checks will actually be; or if anyone in the know really expects them to help save us from attack.

The real enemy of terrorism is not endless and undiscriminating checking, but intelligence, gathered on the ground. A look at past plots thwarted tells you all you need to know. Consider the two cargo bombs sent from Yemen in 2010. One of those packages was examined at East Midlands Airport using specialist officers, sniffer dogs, explosives detectors and multiple X-rays. None of them detected the bomb — but because security services had reliable intelligence that a bomb was being placed on board, they insisted on removing packages and searching them thoroughly, and so the bombs were found.

Even if checking every passenger exhaustively was the right way to thwart terror, why would any serious government issue a press release about it, informing the terrorists that you were on their case and keeping them up to speed on the things you’re looking for? They didn’t do that with Bletchley Park and the Enigma codes. Leaving aside the possibility that our leaders are just plain dim, we must assume their statements are a clever decoy.