The baby-faced fanatic inspired by Jihadi John to unleash terror at a Justin ... trends now

Lloyd Gunton was not a typical Islamist terrorist. The 17-year-old farmer's son lived in the Welsh valleys with his Christian parents. 

His sole knowledge of fighting jihad – a holy war – had been gleaned from his computer.

Yet the freckle-faced teenager had a butcher's knife and a heavy claw hammer in his school rucksack, alongside a handwritten martyrdom letter proclaiming: 'I am a soldier of the Islamic State.'

Inspired by Isis terrorists, his motivation for violence was to wreak revenge for British air-strikes on the Middle East.

From the confines of his bedroom, Gunton had planned to launch a deadly attack on a Justin Bieber concert in Cardiff on a balmy June evening six years ago. But his plot was foiled in the nick of time.

Just hours before 40,000 Bieber fans arrived at Cardiff's Principality Stadium, armed police – acting on information from the security services – burst into Gunton's farmhouse near Llantrisant, South Wales, and arrested the would-be killer.

Gunton came to the attention of security services after boasting of his plan on Instagram. 

Using the name 'Alqaeds', he wrote: 'Cardiff, are you ready for our terror… May Allah bring terrorism to Cardiff.'

Posts also included a picture of the Welsh capital's castle, an image of a Jeep, a knife, a bomb and a fluttering Isis flag.

He had even posted instructions on launching vehicle attacks, copied from Isis's translated propaganda magazine.

The security services had already been working to counter the threat from around 900 British jihadis who had joined Isis in Syria and Iraq. 

But in Gunton, who had not converted to Islam, they had found a different sort of threat: a home-grown terrorist with no links to known extremists.

Evidence presented at his trial suggested he had radicalised himself by reading internet posts about Jihadi John, who featured in beheading videos by Islamic State, and the two Muslim converts who murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby. 

The conversion from innocent schoolboy to terrorist took little over a year.

Gunton is far from the only one. Some 43,000 people have been logged by MI5 for posing a potential threat to the UK, of whom 3,000 are deemed 'subjects of interest'.

Thanks to an estimated 800 priority investigations by intelligence services, around 40 terror attacks on British soil have been foiled in the past six years.

These would-be terrorists do not get the chance, as they see it, to die in a blaze of glory. Instead, like Gunton, they are arrested, their homes searched, their phones and laptops seized, and their friends and families interviewed. 

When Gunton was sentenced this month, he was given a life sentence with a minimum term of 11 years.

These thwarted plots reveal far more of the true picture of terrorism in the UK than the deadly attacks by terrorists whose secrets often die with them.

The first sign of this new threat came in March 2017, when a car was repeatedly driven into the crowds of pedestrians on the pavement on London's Westminster Bridge, killing four people and injuring many more.

The driver, Khalid Masood, then smashed the vehicle into the railings around the Houses of Parliament before jumping out and stabbing an unarmed police officer to death. 

Within minutes, Masood was shot dead by a Government Minister's bodyguard.

Security services had long feared a bloody 'spectacular' by militants who fought for Isis in Syria and Iraq before returning to the UK. 

Masood's attack showed there was a seething pool of disaffected extremists already here.

The Westminster attack was the first of a chain of 15 terrorist atrocities in the UK in the next five years, which have killed 42 and injured hundreds more – across London and Manchester and spreading out into smaller towns such as Reading and Leigh-on-Sea.

Masood, who had been born with the name Adrian Elms in Kent, had previously attracted MI5's interest but was deemed low-risk and his case had been closed.

So had the file on Salman Abedi, who murdered 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in May 2017.

Khuram Butt, the ringleader of the 2017 terror attack on London Bridge that killed eight people, had been under live investigation – but his plot was still missed.

Intelligence services had failed to move with the times – and were heavily criticised in the report into the Manchester Arena bombing, published earlier this month. Making the job of the security services harder was that the profile of a typical plotter had changed.

No longer were they part of terrorist networks. Instead, many were lone actors who 'self-radicalised' online and kept their plans to themselves – a phenomenon amplified by the forced isolation during the Covid pandemic. 

The intelligence services also failed to predict that terrorists were getting younger. Lloyd Gunton was one of 27 under-18s arrested for terror offences in 2017, of whom 13 were charged and ten convicted.

In the year to June 2022 the number of under-18s arrested in Britain for terror offences soared to 33 – meaning one in six people held for that reason was a child.

Haroon Syed, from Hounslow, was 16 when he was reported to the Prevent anti-radicalisation programme in 2014. Teachers had noticed a change in his behaviour when his brother was jailed for plotting a Remembrance Day terror attack.

Undercover officers from MI5 secretly engaged with Syed online and teased out his plan to obtain a machine gun and bomb to attack an Elton John concert in London's Hyde Park. He was 19 when convicted in court.

In another shifting trend, white people have made up the largest single ethnic group arrested for terror offences for four consecutive years. In the year to last June, three-quarters of suspects considered themselves

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