Why I now fear another MP could be killed

There was something horribly predictable about the shameful scenes outside Parliament, in which a group of men drowned out MP anna Soubry with taunts of ‘liar’, ‘traitor’ and even ‘nazi’ during a tV interview.

they then harassed her all the way back to the Palace of Westminster, keeping up the barrage of insults while crowding her with intimidating body language.

Questions have rightly been raised about whether the police should have intervened rather than let the group pursue its victim. But there’s something far more worrying going on, something that reaches deeper into our culture and poses a greater threat to society than a few inept cops.

It is a fundamental shift in the norms of civil behaviour, a sense that a line has been crossed.

It was like seeing a twitter hate mob leap out of a computer screen in front of our eyes. Certainly, their behaviour mirrored the unbridled vitriol often displayed on twitter.

But this was worse. these were men fuelled not only by fanatical selfbelief, but by the notion that Soubry — a staunch remainer — was not deserving of any kind of respect as a human being. Such was their fury that in their eyes she had become, as the nazis used to say, untermensch — subhuman, inferior — and therefore a legitimate target.

that is what makes this kind of behaviour — on the rise across the board, from anarchists targeting Jacob reesMogg’s children, to the intimidation of journalists such as the BBC’s laura Kuenssberg by the hard left — so deeply terrifying. the fact that it’s so open, so brazen.

those men hurling abuse at Soubry genuinely don’t think they are doing anything wrong.

It’s when you see that look on someone’s face, when you realise that in their eyes you are a human piñata to be beaten with a stick until the insides spill out. It’s when you realise nothing you could say, no logical argument, no compromise could ever make them see you otherwise — that’s when you feel most hopeless.

I know on the occasions when a similar thing has happened to me (I’m not an MP but I am married to a Conservative and I write for the Daily Mail, which in some people’s minds is just as bad) it has shaken me to the core.

I’m lucky, though. neither I nor my family have been in any real danger, or at least I’ve never felt we were — unlike the MP Jo Cox, murdered in her constituency by a farright fantasist just days before the referendum vote.

her death profoundly shocked us all, and it is no less a tragedy almost three years on. But if a similar thing were to happen again, would we be as surprised?

I fear not. For this is the reality of politics in Britain today. the political landscape has become so intensely polarised it’s hard to see how normal service can ever be resumed. and it’s not just the fanatics of leave vs remain; it’s the way the opposing left and right see each other, not in terms of differences of policy or opinion, but as good vs evil.

nor is it just at the margins, either. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell famously said last year that he wants ‘a situation where no tory MP…can travel anywhere in the country, can show their face anywhere without being challenged by direct action’. Well, it seems he got his wish.

Where will this growing hysteria lead? to a hollowing out of democracy, in which the only people who can survive in politics are the brutes and the boors, the ones who can stomach the abuse. the thinkers, dreamers, gentler, more vulnerable souls, will all be hounded out.

and thus the electorate will be represented only by those with the skin of a rhino and the emotional sensitivity of a grizzly bear.

of course MPs have a duty to engage with voters. But what they cannot be expected to do is endure a level of abuse that, in any other context, would be deemed wholly unacceptable.

Freedom of speech is a right that should not be abused in the name of prejudice and hatred.