PC Keith Palmer: MPs make moving tributes in Commons to policeman fatally stabbed in Westminster terror attack

The Serjeant-at-Arms arrived with the mace. There were the usual prayers, then a minute’s silence then the business of the house, albeit not quite as usual.

One by one they rose to say the same, noble thing. To speak of our “values”, to praise a man killed in the “service of his country”.

Killed “protecting parliament”, “protecting parliamentary democracy”. Many members sat with their faces set in masks of defiance, diligently nodding along with every repeated sentiment, of how our values will “long outlast theirs”, and quite right too.

But one man’s face was not defiant. James Cleverly stared straight ahead as if in a trance. His lower lip curled upward. His entire countenance pointed toward the floor. An army major, and an MP since 2015, he sat behind the Prime Minister as she praised PC Keith Palmer, a man she called “every inch a hero”.

But when he rose to speak, James Cleverly did not speak of a hero, but of a mate.

“With your indulgence sir, I’d like to turn to PC Keith Palmer,” he said. “Who I first met as Gunner Keith Palmer, twenty five years ago, at Headquarters Battery, 100 Regiment, Artillery. He was a strong, professional, public servant.”

It was then that his voice cracked.

“It was a delight to meet him again, a few months after being elected.”

There was an inescapable sense that he had more to say, but knew the words would not come. He asked the Prime Minister to consider a “posthumous recognition of the work he did”, and returned to his seat.

She said she would do so.

They queued up to call it business as usual. One read out a picture circulating online, a mockup of a London Underground sign “politely” telling terrorists that “this is London and we will drink tea and jolly well carry on as usual”.

But it’s not business as usual. Not really. Tobias Ellwood, the member for Bournemouth East, who spent yesterday afternoon on his knees beneath Big Ben seeking to revive PC Palmer, stood upright by the entrance way. Each time his “heroics” were praised he glanced at his feet.

A hero perhaps, and yes, he has arrived at work the next day to carry on as normal. But he knows the paramedics who worked with him, trying to save a life are off elsewhere this morning, trying to save someone else’s.

Where they worked there is a blue tent. Workers in white forensic suits are gathering evidence. But that is not to doubt the defiance.

When the Serjeant-at-Arms arrives at the end of the day to take the mace away again, the final item on the order paper, the last subject to have been discussed in the oldest parliament in the world? The Ratty’s Lane Incinerator at Hoddesdon. As fitting a tribute as any.