Anyone who walks into the House of Commons passes a grisly reminder of just how dangerous the job of being an MP can be.
It is a brass plaque to mark the exact spot where on May 11, 1812, Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was gunned down by a man with a grudge. His fatally wounded body was placed on a table where he bled to death within minutes.
That table resides in Speaker’s House. The stain of Perceval’s blood is still visible and brings home the daunting responsibility that every Speaker has – to protect Members of Parliament.
Every death threat, every assault, and every murder from Airey Neave, Ian Gow, Jo Cox, Sir David Amess and the bludgeoning of Ann Widdecombe is an attack on our democracy.
MPs must be protected. But there has to be a balance. They must never be isolated from the people. They must be allowed to walk free and not separated by a ring of steel or cowering in bullet-proof cars. They must not be seen to have special privileges that the rest of the public don’t have. Let the professionals decide the threats and the measures.
For a long time, as a Conservative politician in the 1980s and ’90s, I had armed security at my home. I will never forget when the head of Commons security asked me in for a chat. He told me that they had found my name on an IRA death list, no doubt because I had publicly praised the SAS for shooting three IRA bombers in Gibraltar in 1988.
‘Nothing to worry about, it’s unlikely that they’ll shoot you, but they may try to blow up your car,’ the head of security explained. He gave me a mirror on a stick and a leaflet.
Some months later, as we returned from a family holiday and landed at Stansted airport, we were asked to go to the front of the plane, met by armed officers and escorted to a place of safety. Tory MP Ian Gow had been murdered. They had blown up his car.
Barrister and former Tory MP for Harlow Jerry Hayes pictured outside Parliament
From then on our lives changed. Heavily armed men were dug in round our house – two with Heckler and Koch machine guns on the cricket field opposite.
The garage was bomb-proof, windows shatter-proof, and the dining room bristled with automatic weapons. Trust me, there is no more effective contraception than a man with a Beretta standing outside the bedroom door.
If I ever doubted the need for this intense level of protection, even years after I finished my role as a political aide in the Northern Ireland Office, unsettling incidents reminded me of the danger I faced.
On one occasion when I was walking through my Essex constituency of Harlow, someone dropped a bag of flour from a tower block. It missed me by a foot but if it had hit me, it would have stoved my head in.
Then one night I was thrown to the floor by officers as a car screeched to a halt outside. The driver’s door was ripped open and five red dots appeared on the occupant. The poor fellow was terrified and could only gibber that he was sorry he’d just run over a cat.
On another occasion, I received a note from the prisons minister Angela Rumbold explaining that a lag had confessed that he wanted to kill me. When I bumped into her in a Commons bar, I expressed relief that the man was behind bars. ‘Didn’t they tell you that he was released a couple of weeks ago?’ I hope that things are a little better organised today.
They need to be, for I fear that we are returning to those dark days of the Troubles when political violence was a depressing feature of MPs’ lives.
Indeed, members are in more danger now than ever before. They face a feral social media-scape, dripping with bile and laced with menace, where anything goes. Vile unfounded rumours turn into truths in the warped minds of the radicalised.
Jerry Hayes, pictured in 1994, argues MPs must be protected but hopes that it can be done without the need for a man with a Beretta to stand outside one’s bedroom door
Everyone is a journalist. The ‘mainstream media’ is the enemy. Worst of all it is fashionable to attack our institutions – saying that the police are corrupt, that the judiciary produces two-tier justice. That everyone is against the truth, as conspiracists see it.
One needn’t look any further than the disgusting way in which some on the Left celebrated the brutal murder of Ann Widdecombe, a person of strong views, but a principled, kind and compassionate woman of 78.
Who will want to go into politics if they are threatened, abused and vilified? Some might argue so what? People have the right to be offensive. And they would be right, for censorship is the midwife of totalitarianism. But let’s not forget what an affront to democracy it is if our elected representatives are cowed into silence by vitriol and violence.
In the wake of Jo Cox’s murder in 2016 at the hands of a deranged white supremacist, MPs have had access to extra security through Operation Bridger, a nationwide police protection programme.
Then after Sir David Amess was stabbed to death by an Islamist terrorist in 2021, it became beholden on Chief Constables to review their local MPs’ security.
And it now feels like we have reached another rung on the ladder to a police state, where our elected tribunes are severed from their voters by a praetorian guard of Ray-Ban-wearing minders.
It would be a sad day when MPs decide their weekly surgeries with the public have become too dangerous. These advice bureaux have always held the potential for violence. MPs are advising their constituents, some of whom are troubled, on matters that are deeply personal. Anything can happen and sometimes it does. I was assaulted twice.
But even before I had armed security, Essex Police would provide a uniformed bobby as a deterrent. That, today, is surely a minimum requirement for MPs to feel safe.
As is a greater understanding between politicians and the public of what level of abuse meets a criminal threshold, as the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle urged in his 2025 committee report on MPs’ security. I would go further and designate any assault on an MP as a graver offence that warrants a tougher sentence, as is meted out to those who attack police officers.
But as right as Reform leader Nigel Farage is in his calls for greater personal protection – and I think that less centrist politicians should be given greater consideration – there needs to be common sense and balance.
The right to offend others is fundamental to free speech, and that goes for politicians offending the public as much as vice versa.
It is perfectly proper to have a debate about wokery within the police. It is important that we discuss immigration freely. It is vital that the dispossessed, the ignored, the patronised have a voice.
My only hope is that it can be done without the need for a man with a Beretta to stand outside one’s bedroom door.
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