The massive fire which shut down Heathrow Airport, causing widespread chaos for almost 300,000 travellers, is a sobering illustration of the UK’s “vulnerability” in an increasingly volatile world, a defence expert and former Tory MP has warned. Tobias Ellwood is pushing for an urgent review to gauge the nation’s readiness to cope with similar events in the future.

The blaze erupted at the North Hyde electrical substation in Hayes overnight on Thursday, leading to a complete power outage. As a result, Heathrow was forced to shut down operations, causing massive disruption to global air travel. ​Counterterrorism authorities have initiated an investigation into the fire’s origin and while no evidence currently points to foul play, officials are exercising caution, given the incident’s scale and impact on national infrastructure. ​

Mr Ellwood, an ex-British Amy officer who lost his Bournemouth East seat at the last election, is the former chairman of Parliament’s defence committee.

Now a consultant for think tanks, including the Atlantic Council and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), he told the Daily Express: “The threat picture is deteriorating rapidly. This has exposed just how vulnerable we are.

“Through a single acute event, a massive aspect of Britain’s operation can come to a complete halt.

“I strongly believe we need an urgent review, a national review across every single Government department, on resilience, on our ability to deal with events that could close down part of our critical national infrastructure.”

Mr Ellwood stressed it was not about preventing an attack but rather about assuming that one would take place and being ready to respond.

He explained: “Terrorists and adversaries will be looking carefully at how vulnerable we are. They will be learning lessons about how simple it is to cause economic harm and societal discord through a single event such as this.

“This isn’t about, let’s say, by accident or by design, a particular aspect of that infrastructure breaking down, it’s the absence of ability to get it working, to switch it back on, to use alternative systems that are clearly currently not in place.

“If you take today, for example, the airport claims that it has backup generators and so forth in readiness for such an event, and they now realise that they can’t generate the power they need to run an airport.

“Secondly, where is the ability to divert flights? Bournemouth airport, I know very well was an emergency landing for Concorde.”

It was, therefore, imperative that to be able to compensate for rapid changes in circumstances, Mr Ellwood continued.

He said: “Rather than having to divert flights back, for example, to India halfway through, we should be able to subsume and handle a major shock such as this.

“The easy, deniable method of causing harm to your adversary, which is why Russia does this across Ukraine, is to interfere with the critical national infrastructure, and cause political tensions.

“Because clearly, huge questions are now being asked as people’s lives and our economy is disrupted.”

Friday’s events would already have cost the nation a percentage of its GDP as a result of business lost, Mr Ellwood pointed out.

He added: “My concern is that there will be some stations, electrical substations, similar to this in other parts of the country that keep other industries critical industries going.

“Who is checking these out? Who is making sure that that they are safe? Because regardless of if it’s not an accident not, then where are the contingencies?

“And if it is terrorist related, where are the security measures being put in place to protect other vulnerable assets that we have dotted around the country?

“This is the new art of war, to cause mayhem from afar by not choosing to fight battles on either side of an iron curtain or on borders, but hitting society directly.

“This is far easier way of causing economic harm, of sowing political discord by understanding and recognising a simple interruption, such as to or even a cyber attack on computer systems, how it can abruptly bring a part of our national infrastructure to a grinding halt with all the misery and mayhem it causes.”

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said: “The counter terrorism command has specific capabilities and capacities that mean that they are used to conducting investigations at pace, and it’s really important that we identify the cause of this quickly.

“There are no suggestions at the moment of foul play, but you will appreciate the investigation, keeps an open mind, and our priority is identifying the cause as soon as possible.”

Meanwhile Heathrow has revealed that its “back-up systems” are not designed to allow the airport to run a full operation.

Chief Executive Thomas Woldbye said: “We have three of these substations, each of them has a backup transformer.

“The backup transformer in this case also went and then we had to restructure the supply. So we’re not out of power but we have to restructure our power supply.

“To do that we have to close down systems – that is safety procedure, we will not go around that.

He added: “Two substations can run the airport but we need to re-engineer the structure of the power supply for all the terminals and that’s what we were doing during the day, and then we have to restart all the systems and that’s what we’ve done, and we now see operation coming back.”