Due to unfortunate family circumstances, I have been flying up to Glasgow and back almost every week. Thus, I have spent more time than any sane person should in London’s many lovely airports, and approximately 24 hours of my already wine-shortened life in security queues. After a while, I became institutionalised, shuffling along shoeless in roped pens, exhibiting unquestioning obedience to the security staff, revealing all in my toiletries bag, just like everyone else. Until I saw Boden Man drinking breast milk. He was alone with a baby in a buggy, and all the nappy paraphernalia which never fits in hand luggage. The baby was blissfully sleeping as an ominous stranger approached to search the buggy.

“You need to drink some of this,” said the security man, handing Boden Man an Avent bottle with 4oz of yellowy breast milk. Boden Man was rather posh, possibly raised by nannies, and he reddened and whispered something. The security guard folded his arms: “It still has to be tested.” He gave an evil smile. “Or you can leave it here.” Boden Man, fearing ear-popping screams, needed that bottle. He screwed up his nose, took a tiny sip of Mrs Boden’s breast milk, and made a face as if he’d just slugged the venom of a deadly black mamba. Simultaneously, the sleeping baby, surrounded by huge, menacing, uniformed strangers, started roaring. Boden Man, his shoes and belt in one hand and the screaming baby over his shoulder, stormed off. I later saw him, flights delayed, trying to get a much-needed merlot and a steak, which he would have to eat with a plastic knife. “Oh no, you can’t park that buggy there,” a waitress was saying to him.

If things are this bad at airports for Boden Man – a pillar of British society – how much worse is it if you have committed those international crimes of Being Vaguely Foreign-Looking, Having Shifty Eyes or Walking in a Suspicious Manner? We are all terrorists now in the eyes of the law, but the minute you think logically about it, you feel that a) the liquid explosive thing is old hat and surely the malevolent masterminds have moved on, and b) that our money might be better spent stopping terrorism at the planning stages, with more police investigations, Googling passengers’ names, and infiltrating terror cells, rather than tearing the free glue sticks off kids’ Art Attack comics and making them cry.

And what about all the dangerous stuff they confiscate – Innocent smoothies, Evian, camomile shampoo? It doesn’t go off to the bomb-disposal squad, does it? No, they just chuck it all in a big bin bag. (I like to think there’s a sort of tombola at the end of every day to cheer up the airport staff, at which they share out the confiscated spoils. “Tweezers?” “Nah, got ten pairs already.” “Large bottle of Chanel No. 5?” “Ooh, yes; nice present for the wife.”) Meanwhile, all the gents toddle through security, heavily armed with their Gillette razors in their Ziploc bags. Of course, everything is a weapon. One of my favourite bits in 24 is when a prisoner on a plane gets hold of a broken credit card and cuts someone’s throat with it. What do we do next? Fly penniless and naked in paper hospital gowns?

Nearly seven years after 9/11, we are still suffering from a mass delusion that disaster will be averted by eating with plastic Sporks in the departure lounge and being shouted at by guards in sweaty two-hour queues. Why do we put up with it so unquestioningly? I think that we, the passengers, have become cowed and submissive, and that a few – not all – of the airport security guards are relishing their new powers. They don’t get paid well, but at least they can vent their frustrations on Boden Man.

I was looking back at the infamous Stanford University prison experiment, in which psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo took 24 nice, middle-class students, divided them into guards and prisoners, and left them to act out their roles. Within days, Zimbardo wrote, “the warders became increasingly aggressive and the prisoners increasingly submissive”. It was stopped after six days, when the warders had sprayed naked prisoners with fire extinguishers, denied them food, and made them clean toilets with their bare hands. Power-crazed, the warders wrote their own rules, humiliating and harassing. The prisoners, their classmates, showed signs of depression and extreme stress.

Scary, isn’t it? But surely every time a terrorist walks through one of our airports, he or she must be glorying in the sight of a nation cowed, playing out the roles of prisoners and guards, albeit politely. It’s up to you, Boden Man, to resist.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

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