I spend a lot of my working life talking to people whose job is to think about the worst things that could happen to this country.

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Military contacts, intelligence specialists, people who worry about what happens when the electricity fails and help doesn’t arrive. Increasingly, those conversations come back to the same uncomfortable point. We’re used to living in a country where things broadly work, and we’re dangerously attached to the idea that someone else will sort it out when they don’t.

That’s what I took from MI5 boss Sir Ken McCallum’s warning today. After months of reporting on the threats facing Britain, very little of it surprised me. What worries me is the distance between what the people dealing with these threats are saying and how seriously the rest of us are taking them. We still talk about national security as though it happens somewhere else, to someone else, behind a fence guarded by soldiers.

But think about your own morning. You turn on the light, put the kettle on, check your phone and pay for something on the way to work. Now imagine none of those things works. Your children are somewhere else, you can’t get through to them, and you don’t know whether the problem........

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