We stared at the inscrutable Adams, trying to gauge his response. Cuddly, in his little glasses, beard and woolly brown jumper, he threw his hands up and chuckled in a what-a-naughty-boy-you-are kind of way. His mission, to win and not worry the audience, was a success. He seemed about as dangerous as a quietly spoken, small-town teacher.OK, I'll confess.

It's not really the thought of spending less time with Peter Mandelson that makes me sad at the thought of this year's proceedings at Brighton being scaled down. For me – and for liberal politicos like me – the Labour Party Conference is far more than just a networking opportunity; it's our very own Edinburgh Festival, a left-of-centre jamboree complete with loony fringe acts, flowing booze and wannabe comedians (one posing as PM) testing dreadful material It's also, potentially, a celebration of democracy. Until the terrorists launched their murderous attacks on the United States, there was a real chance that, this year, the virtual disappearance of the threat of a "Tory win" would have allowed some old-fashioned, bloody-minded, hard-core political dissent. That prospect seems to have receded somewhat now; but even a scaled-down, low-profile Conference 2001 is an occasion to be relished.

Cynics may dismiss the event as the selfish posturing and champagne-swilling of the liberal ?te, but they should remember that this is the human face of democracy. It may not always be an edifying spectacle, but we are lucky to have it. (I cannot imagine, for example, that the Taliban have any such annual festival of political exuberance ) And I, for one, intend to enjoy it.. When MI5 recently stepped up their investigations into the whereabouts of Islamic terrorists in London, news leaked out of some startling intelligence about Osama bin Laden's alleged trusted lieutenant, Khalid al-Fawwaz.It was suggested, first, that he had been living in Britain for years with his family; second, that he had a day job as a civil servant in Neasden; third, that he allegedly directed operations for what The Sun called "the UK arm of the Islamic war lord's terror group" from a semi-detached house in Dollis Hill; fourth, that when bin Laden needed a satellite telephone, al-Fawwaz allegedly bought one for him in a shop off the North Circular Road, posted it to America and arranged to get it into his alleged boss's hands via Pakistan; fifth, that when the terror group he is alleged to have run received tens of thousands of pounds from bin Laden, they sensibly opened a savings account at Barclays, Notting Hill; and, sixth, that when the al-Qa'ida group claimed responsibility for the 1998 bomb attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, al-Fawwaz's alleged cell chose the local fax shop, the Grapevine in Kilburn High Road ("Call the world for less"), to do it from. Terrorism is no laughing matter, but there's something about this putative combination of fundamentalism and fax machines, mullahs and memoranda, that's gratifyingly absurd. British humour is uniquely place-sensitive and politically conservative. The central premise of the TV sitcom Citizen Smith was the patent absurdity of a south-east London Marxist cell (led by "Wolfie" Smith) called the Tooting Popular Front.

Peter Sellers made a record inviting listeners to marvel at "Bal-ham – Gateway to the South". And readers of Private Eye will know how engrained on the British consciousness are the suburbs of Neasden and Dollis Hill, those twin monuments to glum, unexcitable mediocrity.It leaves one startled even to imagine that such places could be crucibles of terrorism. But, of course, their very mediocrity and facelessness is what makes the flyblown satellite districts of London the perfect settings for desperate men plotting unimaginable acts of destruction. Did we imagine that, when bin Laden and his henchmen plotted how to make two jets crash into the Twin Towers, they sat around a boardroom table in Peshawar with an entourage of mad-eyed suicide bombers and a committee of Taliban zealots? Did it never occur to us that the terrorists' operating centre might be a front room in a London side-street, with the rattle and whine of motorway traffic in the distance and the clank of English trains forming the soundtrack for their soft, utterly determined negotiations? Well, perhaps it did; but only now has the thought sunk in.The past fortnight has seen a whole series of arrests from respectable urban and suburban homes, in Europe and in America, several of which are pictured here.

Some will no doubt turn out to have been arrests of innocents, just as it may well turn out that some of the the homes in our photographs have never housed any but the most upright, innocuous residents. There have certainly been many confident statements from investigators about various suspects that have turned out to be quite wrong But that is not the point. The point is that the seeds of doubt have been sown.In the reasonable modern mind-set, the suburbs can no longer be seen as comfortable, slightly absurd places for the semi-retired and the unadventurous. In a war where the biggest threat is not from an expansionist nation but from a secret alignment of invisible enemies in the arid hills of Asia Minor, Western suburbia has become the new front line. No longer will Slough or Bexleyheath, Richmond or Theydon Bois be considered beyond the pale of world events. It is from just such modest surroundings that terrorists may now be expected to emerge, like rats from the basement; and it is from precisely such modest, unassuming backyards that the battle – a chemical battle, a random strike, a stray bomb, a 747 falling out of the sky – will be directed.Charles McGrath, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, recognised this on the fateful day as he stood on his New Jersey porch watching Manhattan smoulder.