Some commentators of both Left and Right have said that the rioters were somehow impelled by a sense of moral equivalence with expense-diddling MPs and bonus-toting bankers. I am not sure that will quite do, either. Yes, it was wrong of MPs to cheat the spirit (if usually not the letter) of the system, and yes, bankers’ bonuses are often nauseating. But I simply cannot agree that Gerald Kaufman’s expense-claim for a Bang and Olufsen television has somehow triggered or legitimated the torching of property in outer London. I am afraid the explanations will turn out to be more complex and more various. Some — quite a few – were acting out of greed. Some seem to have been actuated by a feeling of power, a desire to be “noticed”. Some, especially members of gangs, were perhaps doing it because other people were doing it in other parts of London, and they did not want to be left out. Some of them were doing it for “fun”, or excitement, or because they wanted to get one over on the “feds”. Some of them were certainly relatively affluent, and the media have rightly lingered on the millionaire’s daughter and the schoolteachers who have been accused of looting.

The overwhelming majority, of course, came from the lower socio-economic groups, from the ranks of those who have been left the furthest behind; and the most recent figures I have seen suggest that 69 per cent of those charged have previous convictions. It has been said of these young people — and they say it themselves — that the world holds nothing for them, that they have no jobs, no hope and no future. In so far as that is true, it is something we can try to tackle. We can invest, we can “create” jobs, we can boost our apprenticeship programme, already standing at 30,000. But it is just not true to say that there are no jobs available. The London service economy is substantially dependent on migrant labour, much of it from eastern Europe, and employers confirm that these migrants have skillsets and a work ethic they cannot find in many native- born Londoners. Yes, these young people have been betrayed; but they have been betrayed by an educational system and family background that failed to give them discipline, or hope, or ambition, or a simple ability to tell right from wrong. We still have one in four London 11-year-olds functionally illiterate. No wonder they are angry and alienated. They need more tough love; they need mentors; they need to be taught to read, and to see the point of it; they need their gangs broken up and replaced with better alternatives — and we in City Hall will back the next Met Commissioner to help us achieve just that; and if they so much as dream of doing this again, they need to know that they will be caught and punished.

Of all the explanations for the riots, the simplest is that the police lost control in the first few hours. I am sure that with 20-20 hindsight Tim Godwin, the acting commissioner, and his colleagues would agree that some things might have been done differently. But at the moment we politicians speak with forked tongue to the police. They are servants of the law, and the law provides very little protection for any police officer who may — in the heat of the moment — cause injury to a member of the public. Take the officer who allegedly pushed poor Ian Tomlinson during the G20 riots, a motion which may have been far less violent than some that have been recommended to the police over the past few days. He is facing a charge of manslaughter. That could mean life imprisonment. We need to decide at which end of the chain of events we want to be less squeamish.

We can give the police water cannon, or else we can reassure parents that they indeed have the right to discipline their children, and we can declare that teachers are to be unambiguous figures of authority in the classroom. We can issue the police with baton rounds, or we can insist that young people will be prosecuted for swearing at an officer. We can change the law to allow the police to administer sjambok drubbings, or we adults can collectively take charge and recognise that it is up to us to give young people hope, boundaries and a moral framework. We can be less squeamish about police violence, or we can be less squeamish about the realities of young people’s needs. Of course, we could do both — and I certainly believe that robust policing is essential — but I know which is the best long-term answer.

It is certainly true that on the face of it he has much in common with some recent Islamic suicide bombers. He is disturbed by female emancipation, and thinks women would be better off in the home. He seems to be pretty down on homosexuality. Above all – and in this he strongly resembles an Islamist – he believes that his own religious leaders are deeply decadent and have deviated from orthodoxy. He is repelled, like so many Muslim terrorists, by anything that resembles the mingling of cultures.

People will say that we are looking at the mirror image, in fact, of an Islamic terrorist – a man driven by an identical but opposite ideological mania. There is certainly a symmetry here, and yet in both cases, Breivik and the Muslim bomber, I don’t think that ideology is really at the heart of the problem. Yesterday the television reporters found an acquaintance of his from Norway, a fellow called Ulav Andersson, who said that he had known Breivik pretty well. He was surprised by all the Knights of Templar stuff, because he had never really been religious, and he wasn’t aware that he had been interested in politics.

“He didn’t seem opinionated at all,” he said. He just became chippy and irritable, said Ulav Andersson, when some girl he had a crush on jilted him in favour of a man of Pakistani origin.

It wasn’t about immigration, or Eurabia, or the hadith, or the Eurocrats’ plot against the people. It wasn’t really about ideology or religion. It was all about him, and his feeling of inadequacy in relation to the female sex. The same point can be made (and has been made) about so many of the young Muslim terrorists. The fundamental reasons for their callous behaviour lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause, that potentiates the poison in their bloodstream, that gives them an excuse to dramatise the resentment that they feel in the most powerful way – and to kill.

There is an important lesson, therefore, in the case of Anders Breivik. He killed in the name of Christianity – and yet of course we don’t blame Christians or “Christendom”. Nor, by the same token, should we blame “Islam” for all acts of terror committed by young Muslim males. Sometimes there come along pathetic young men who have a sense of powerlessness and rejection, and take a terrible revenge on the world. Sometimes there are people who feel so weak that they need to kill in order to feel strong. They don’t need an ideology to behave as they do.

Michael Ryan had no ideology in Hungerford; Thomas Hamilton had no ideology in Dunblane. To try to advance any other explanation for their actions – to try to advance complicated “social” factors, or to examine the impact of multiculturalism in Scandinavia – is simply to play their self-important game. Anders Breivik may have constructed a portentous 1,500 page manifesto, but like so many others of his type he was essentially a narcissist and egomaniac who could not cope with being snubbed. We should spend less time thinking about him, and much more on the victims and their families.

He didn’t even look old enough to pay the congestion charge. I have now retired to nurse my injuries in some Surrey gastropub, while the younger generation continue their happy mimesis of war.

As I wait for my lunch, I am thinking about the role of paintball in the UK economy, and the relative importance of services and manufacturing. Look at the dosh we are all pushing out this afternoon in this heaving Surrey gastropub: vast Sunday roasts washed down with knockout Chilean Cabernets. I swear: it is almost 3pm and some of them are still having their prosecco aperitifs. Where is it all coming from?

There in the car park are the sort of vehicles you would expect to see in this neck of the woods: big, burly 4x4s, their haunches and flanks gleaming in sinuous waves of metal. They come from Japan, they come from Germany, they come from France, they come from Korea. Just about the only place they don’t seem to come from is the UK.

If you were a pessimist, and you were worried about our manufacturing base, and the recent defeat of Bombardier at the hands of Siemens, you might be disposed to see a terrible lesson here: other countries have paintshops; we have paintball. Other countries still make things; we pay to run around in the woods. You might think that paintball was just another low-skills service-based industry that does nothing for this country’s competitiveness or exports. And you know what, I reckon you would be almost completely wrong.

Yes, of course we need to boost hi-tech manufacturing, which is one of the reasons I am pleased that all the new aircon tube trains will be made by Bombardier, and the new hop-on, hop-off bus for London will be made in Ballymena. But don’t sneer at paintball, because the difference between making a car and supplying a sylvan paint- based war game is not as big as you might think.

The paintball company I have just used is called Delta Force, and it not only employs 1,000 people already, with 24 sites across the UK. It is now expanding into New Zealand and Australia. It is one of the biggest paintball firms in Europe, and according to Alex and Russell, two paintball marshals, it has just had its best year ever in the UK market. The company is hiring staff in Crawley, Edinburgh, Broxbourne and Leicester. It is looking for a supervisor to run the camp in Auckland. And these are not mickey mouse jobs: they require leadership, charisma, and the ability to marshal 300 people and teach them the safe use of a CO2 gun.

Given the savage indiscipline I have just seen, I imagine that if you can run a paintball camp, you can run just about anything. The guns themselves are made in England by a firm based in Aldershot, so that every boost to paintballing has a knock-on benefit for old-fashioned manufacturing; and I can easily imagine that there will soon be paintball apps – enabling you to tell where your enemies are on your handheld – so that there is scope for a fusion between paintballing and the digital economy.

And if paintball is simply servicing a fantasy, then so are the great big shiny cars outside the gastropub. These butch 4x4s aren’t any more useful, really, than my clapped-out 16-year-old Toyota: they just allow their owners to have a certain conception of themselves, just as paintballing allows you to dream of being Rambo. The value is in the fantasy.

Paintballing, finally, is good for business. It builds esprit de corps. It helps you let off steam. It gives many thousands of young people the rush of adrenalin that is so often missing from their childhoods, and it teaches the rest of us a vital lesson: that there will come an evening or a morning or a noonday, when you least deserve or expect it, when someone will shoot you in the back.