PETER HITCHENS: We can't defend people in their own homes, so how can we posture as a great power?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

The most idyllic years of my dreamy, untroubled childhood were spent in a Portsmouth suburb called Alverstoke, a place of peace, calm and order, tree-shaded and secluded far from the raucous clangour and bomb-scorched rough edges of Pompey itself.

It never crossed our mind that violence could happen there.

My brother and I roamed freely around the village and down to the nearby sea.

So I have never quite got over the moment when I read, in 1992,...