I witnessed a vista of violence from my Big Ben office

TO see an unarmed police constable attacked – an assailant’s hand sawing at his flailing body – and to see his merciless attacker moments later shot dead, is an eerily unstartling experience. Perhaps we have seen it too often in the films. Or perhaps that is simply the way of this wicked world: expect the worst, witness it, then defy.

At about 2.45pm yesterday I looked out of my office window at the Palace of Westminster. There had been a bang – sounded like a crash. As we now know, a car had smashed into the side-railings of Parliament’s New Palace Yard and several innocents had been hurt. That I did not see. But the rest I did.

I work in an office under Big Ben. It offers a fine view normally – but yesterday a view of death, a vile vista of a violence we might wish to call medieval but is sadly all too 21st century. Normality can be snuffed out in seconds.

It had been a routine Wednesday: a lively enough prime minister’s questions. There had been tributes to a terrorist who reformed – Martin McGuinness of the IRA, who died this week. Jeremy Corbyn called him ‘Martin’, as though close friends. Corbyn, like Theresa May before him, was heard with stony silence.

Outside it was a lovely spring day. In the middle of New Palace Yard is a fountain. Its jetting water glittered in the sunlight. Tourists took Big Ben snapshots and posed by the statue of Winston Churchill.

After the bang, at first, came nothing but a few shouts. Then a sound of panicked screams – from pedestrians running, some looking backwards in alarm as they fled west towards the Abbey. A second later I saw him: a thick set man in dark clothes, possibly 40 or 50 years old, with something in his hand. Was it a sawn broom handle? A knife?

From my high vantage point, about 100 yards or so from the yard’s open gates, I saw the following unfold, as though in slow motion.

Two uniformed police in hi-viz jackets (they normally keep pedestrians safe from cars entering Parliament) challenged the man in black. There was a scuffle. One policeman disengaged himself. The other fell against a crash barrier and went to the ground. The attacker set about him, one arm plunging in and out.

Perhaps two seconds later the attacker loped further into the parliamentary estate, heading towards a cafe used by the public. I could see that other police had summoned help. Two plainclothes men with handguns – I think it was two – approached him. They adopted a shooting stance and I heard shouts. The attacker did not seem to heed those shouts. He kept moving towards him, his gait that of a weary marathon runner. Two. No, three crisp shots. That was all. The attacker fell instantly.

The police reaction had been fast. The men who fired the shots conducted themselves tidily, without melodrama, certainly without any triumph. One policeman was down. Almost at once, medical attention was given, both to the fallen policeman and the attacker. How charitable we are. How Christian we are.

A security officer came to tell us to move away from our windows. Being journalists, we ignored her. And so, though wary of voyeurism, I could see the desperate fight to save those two lives. Tobias Ellwood, MP and former Army officer, tried to give the gallant policeman mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The attempt failed.

AS I write this three hours later, hundreds of us – MPs, peers, parliamentary office and catering and cleaning staff – are stuck in the ancient Westminster Hall (built in 1087) while we wait for the police to debrief us. The Palace of Westminster has been sealed. Maybe it should have been better sealed beforehand, some will say. For just beyond the double doors leading outside, on the ground, lies the dead body of that police officer. A good man slain. A family left to grieve. He fell just yards from where Airey Neave was assassinated by Irish republicans in 1979.

A white sheet covers that brave man. He died defending us – our Parliament, our persons. Our own safety is but a sigh on the breeze. What matters to history – a history running back to Norman times, like this proud old hall with its oaken beams and flagstone floor – is the principle of parliamentary freedom. We buttress that not by caving in, nor by appeasing every terrorist who runs at us with bomb or knife. We stand solid. We stand proud. And our police and armed forces defend us, even with their own lives, as I saw happen yesterday.