What are the threats to MPs that Sir Lindsay Hoyle is referring to?

After the speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, evoked MPs’ safety in his explanation for the farcical display on Wednesday night, Sean O’Grady reflects on horrifying events that prove just how real that danger can be

MPs leave the House of Commons in anger as the motion on a Gaza ceasefire descends into chaos (Parliament TV)

Facing MPs to explain himself and to apologise for the chaos that resulted, the speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, elaborated on his previous references to MPs’ safety being a factor in his recent decisions. Once again visibly emotional, Sir Lindsay said that he never again wants to pick up the phone “to find a friend has been murdered”. He added: “I made a mistake – we do make mistakes, I own up to mine.”

His apparently sincere apology and expression of honourable intentions seems to have helped his case with some MPs, especially Conservatives, who’d been angry about the break with convention during the SNP’s Opposition Day debate on Gaza – the SNP now say they have no confidence in Sir Lindsay. The latest remarks by the leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, set the tone for many in her own party, though, by switching blame towards Labour and Sir Keir Starmer: “We have seen into the heart of Labour’s leadership. Nothing is more important than the interests of the Labour Party. The Labour Party before principle, the Labour Party before individual rights, the Labour Party before the reputation and honour of the decent man that sits in the speaker’s chair.”

For now, the “decent man” seems secure, but what is the nature of the violent threats to MPs’ safety he referred to – and are they being allowed to influence and distort democratic debate?

What are the violent threats?

He hinted to the House, and the wider public, that there are rather more threats than many may assume and that they are serious in nature. The phone calls he referred to must refer to David Amess, murdered by an Islamist extremist in 2021, and Jo Cox, who was assassinated by Thomas Mair, a white supremacist and nationalist in 2016, during the Brexit referendum. The speaker also reminded MPs that he’d been in the chair when parliament had to go into lockdown after the Westminster Bridge attack in 2017, when a terrorist killed four people and stabbed a police officer to death at the gates to parliament.

The pressure on MPs, their families and staff is more intense than ever and greatly amplified by social media, of course. Empty death threats can be casually chucked around by anonymous social media accounts, as well as by phone and post, but some are so real that they have resulted in police action and prosecutions. Rosie Duffield, MP for Canterbury, has received more than most, and has only recently been informed that there is a court date for the latest instance of abuse. She said she had the letter from the police in her pocket as the Commons was descending into chaos. A few years ago she was unable to attend Labour conference because of fears for her safety.

There are many other examples, public and private, with racist abuse figuring in many cases – Diane Abbott being the most prominent case. In 2017 and 2018 three neo-Nazis were jailed in connection with encouragement to murder and other offences aimed at the murder of the then MP for West Lancashire, Rosie Cooper.

In recent months we have seen the suspected firebombing of the offices of Mike Freer, MP for Finchley and Golders Green, who has since announced he will quit politics for the sake of his family. The home of Tobias Ellwood has also been besieged by protesters. Both of these incidents were linked to events in the Middle East. We cannot know how many attempts at violence or physical intimidation have been thwarted.

How do threats of violence distort democratic debate?

The speaker isn’t quite explicit about this but it seems his case runs as follows (or did before he conceded he’d been wrong). The fear, possibly also expressed by Sir Keir in a meeting with Sir Lindsay, is that if some Labour MPs found themselves unable to vote for the Labour amendment on Gaza, for procedural reasons, or the SNP motion for political reasons, then their enemies could twist things and claim that they had refused to vote for a ceasefire and that they’d betrayed the Palestinian people and, in effect, backed “Israeli genocide” and the like. This might lead some of their constituents to take matters into their own hands, with tragic consequences.

To Sir Lindsay, finding a way for the SNP, Labour and the Conservative government to present three “options” was a neat way of defusing that danger and being fair to all sides on such a sensitive and contentious matter. This multiple-choice approach thus had merit in its own right and, arguably, might have been done without the background of the possibility of violence against MPs. But Sir Lindsay did implicitly cite violence as a factor, and his move meant suspending the usual parliamentary convention. It certainly has led some to suggest that parliament has given in to violent threats.

How real are the threats?

The most recent ones have been mentioned above, but they are nothing new. History sadly shows that politicians virtually anywhere in the world, and those close to them as family or friends, have always lived with the possibility of attack. Indeed, well within living memory, there have been two almost successful attempts by the IRA to take out British premiers – Margaret Thatcher in the Brighton hotel bombing in 1984, when one MP, Anthony Berry, died and the wife of Norman Tebbit was permanently disabled; and a mortar attack on John Major and colleagues in Number 10 in 1991. Republican terrorists were also responsible for the death of Robert Bradford, a Unionist MP, in 1981, and Airey Neave, a Tory close to Mrs Thatcher, in 1979.

Constituency surgeries, supposedly open and welcoming to people, can be particularly vulnerable places. Andrew Pennington, a councillor for Gloucestershire was murdered in 2000 during an attempt on the life of the MP for Cheltenham, Nigel Jones. Stephen Timms, like Amess some years later, was stabbed by a visitor to his East Ham surgery in 2010. Surgery sessions and under-protected MPs’ homes remain areas of particular concern.