‘Oh my God, we’re being attacked! Do we run or stay put?’
Journalists in the House of Commons feared a Mumbai-style attack as chaos reigned outside
IT WAS a bang, followed by a scream, that alerted me to the horror of what was happening outside.
In The Daily Telegraph’s office on the top floor of the Houses of Parliament, my colleagues and I darted to our window overlooking Parliament Square to see what was going on.
It was 2.40pm, and to our right, opposite Westminster Underground station, there was a scene of commotion around a grey car that appeared to have crashed into the railings surrounding New Palace Yard.
“Oh God, there’s been a car crash,” one of my colleagues said. “That’s terrible – you can see the car on the pavement.”
But something was wrong with the picture in front of us. People were running away from the car in every direction, clearly in a state of terror. Even when they were a safe distance, they kept on running, some shouting and screaming, and a group of around a dozen people dashed around the corner into Parliament Square.
When they reached the iron double gates used as the vehicle entrance to New Palace Yard – through which Theresa May had driven hours earlier when she arrived for Prime Minister’s Questions – they appeared to rush the gates, which are always manned by two uniformed policemen.
From my vantage point opposite the gates, I was, at first, unsure whether the gates had been forced open or the policemen had allowed people in to give them sanctuary.
A second later though, it was clear that Parliament was under attack.
Police officers in yellow highvisibility jackets appeared to be making a grab for some of the intruders. People who had been about to leave through the pedestrian exit next to the vehicle gate turned around and ran for their lives towards Westminster Hall. Journalists in the press corridor began shouting to each other. “Oh my God, we’re being attacked!” shouted one.
Outside, a moment of confusion: those who had run in through the gates were mixed up with parliamentary workers as they all ran towards us. Policemen darted in different directions, clearly struggling to make sense of what was going on. Still I was clinging to the hope that this was a rowdy protest, rather than something worse, but my worst fear was suddenly confirmed: a man who appeared to be carrying a knife, who had got around 25 yards inside the gates, was rushing towards a plain-clothes policeman, wearing a dark raincoat, who pulled a pistol and fired three shots into his chest from around six feet away. Knocked off his feet by the impact of the bullets, he fell backwards on to the cobbles. Inside the building, struggling to process what they had just seen, journalists feared for their own lives, terrified that this might be a marauding attack and that accomplices might be trying to enter the building. “It’s a terrorist attack! What do we do? Do we run?” my colleagues asked. I told them to stay, and within a minute a female uniformed police officer appeared at the door of our office telling us to stay where we were, to shut the door and stay put.
Hearts racing, we were drawn back to the window, despite knowing that the advice is to stay away from windows in the event of a terrorist attack. Outside, two people were lying on the cobbles in New Palace Yard – the man who had been shot, and another person who we later found out was a policeman.
In the blur of activity that had just unfolded over a matter of seconds I hadn’t seen the policeman being attacked, but his colleagues and a man in a suit were frantically giving him CPR.
Around 15 yards from him, a man in a high-vis jacket was pumping the chest of the man who had been shot.
We still had no idea whether we were safe, but watching what was happening provided a distraction from our own fears.
Armed officers filed into the Parliament buildings and images of the Mumbai terrorist attack flashed through my mind as I wondered whether a gunman had managed to get into the building.
I was not alone in that train of thought, as my colleagues’ comments confirmed. Across the patch of grass in the centre of New Palace Yard, I looked at the ramp to the underground car park and remembered black and white images of the last terrorist attack on the Parliamentary estate, when the Conservative MP Airey Neave was killed by an Irish Republican car bomb on that spot in 1979.
Trying to stay calm, I made brief phone calls to the newsdesk to alert them to what was going on, to my family to reassure them I was safe, and began tweeting my first reports of what I had seen. Only then did I see others tweeting about the car ploughing into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge.
An air ambulance landed in the middle of Parliament Square. Moments later two ambulances arrived and paramedics took over from the police officers attending to the two people on the ground.
The man in the suit who had been helping administer first aid to the injured police officer peeled away and we could see that it was Tobias Ellwood, the Foreign Office minister and former soldier whose brother died in the Bali terrorist attack. He had blood on his hands. A woman hugged him and he was led away, out of sight. In our office, we finally drew breath, beginning to believe that it was over.
‘Images of the Mumbai terrorist attack flashed through my mind. I was not alone in those thoughts’