Today is the fifth anniversary of the brutal terrorist murder of my friend, Sir David Amess MP.

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What follows is what I wrote for the Telegraph the day after that terrible event.

Back in May 2021, I interviewed David for an hour for my All Talk podcast. You can download it as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts from, or watch it here. It’s David at his most entertaining best.

“I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to turning the tables on you,” he chuckled with that characteristic glint in his eye. Those were the last words Sir David Amess spoke to me at the Conservative Conference earlier this month (October 2021). He trotted off chuckling to himself. On Friday night (October 15, 2021) I had been due to be the guest speaker at a dinner organised by Southend West Conservatives, where David was going to quiz me about, well, anything he fancied. It wasn’t to be.

At 12.29 yesterday (October 15 2021) lunchtime I was on my way to Goudhurst in Kent to have lunch with Sian Williams, the broadcaster. I’d been looking forward to it for a while, but halfway there I received an email from the organiser of the Southend West Conservatives event, Judith Suttling. I quickly read the contents and exclaimed in horror: ‘Oh My God’. She had explained that David had been stabbed multiple times but she didn’t know his condition. She was adamant that David would want the event to go ahead. I thought she must have missed out the word ‘not’. She was right, though. He would. But as time passed, the fact that he was being tended to by medics on the scene rather than having been taken to hospital made me fear the worst. And so it came to be. It was a speaking engagement I would never fulfil.

In a very sad irony, David was supposed to be interviewing me on my book ‘Why Can’t We All Get Along’, all about the state of public discourse and the state of our politics. In a further twist, the last tweet David ‘liked’ was one of mine early on Friday morning in which I........

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