Following last week's alleged foiling of a 'terror plot' (is no modern news story complete without the 'T' word?), it's difficult to escape the feeling that the general public is simply very very sceptical about this kind of story in the light of the public relations disasters that have been the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and Forest Gate.

Scotland Yard and the Government need to be as transparent as possible about how this situation came about, without compromising the security services. People have been misled, ignored and simply lied to for so long that their first thought when a story like this breaks is no longer 'how terrible, we are prepared to put up with any inconvenience to protect our safety and support the police' but 'what are they trying to achieve by staging this?' Is it to convince us of the need for ID cards or other security measures that compromise our hard-fought liberties, or to try to shore up support for their wars in the Middle East by insisting that there are hundreds of cells full of Western-hating Islamists ready to unleash their fury on us?

And that's a dangerous game. Scotland Yard may find that, by crying wolf once too often, they're not taken seriously if and when the apocalypse really does arrive.....