Constituency surgeries are an old British tradition. Once a week or so, MPs sit in a village hall or a community centre and listen to the people who voted for them - immigration cases, housing complaints, neighbours' disputes, the slow grind of ordinary life that policy abstracts and constituents do not. David Amess loved them. He had been MP for Basildon from 1983 to 1997, then for Southend West from 1997 onwards, and he was famously, almost relentlessly engaged with his community. He had campaigned for years to have Southend-on-Sea granted city status. He cared deeply about animal welfare. He was a devout Catholic. On the morning of 15 October he held a Zoom meeting with a colleague at noon, then walked into the church hall in Leigh-on-Sea, accompanied by two female members of his staff. People had arrived earlier and were waiting to speak with him. He entered the hall just after 12:05 pm.

Inside the church hall, Ali Harbi Ali - a British citizen of Somali heritage born in Southwark in 1996 - emerged from the group of constituents and stabbed Amess multiple times. Police and paramedics arrived within minutes. An air ambulance landed at Belfairs Sports Ground to fly Amess to hospital, but the medical team judged his condition too unstable to move, and continued working on him at the scene. His death was confirmed at 1:13 pm. A Catholic priest who came to administer the last rites was not allowed past the police cordon - a refusal that later led the Labour MP Mike Kane to propose an 'Amess amendment' to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, ensuring priests can attend crime scenes for last rites. Ali was arrested in the hall.

The Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command took over the case by the evening. In police interviews Ali admitted the attack at once and said his motive was religious - that he had been influenced by the propaganda of Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State spokesman who had called on supporters to attack people in their own countries. Ali had researched more than 250 sitting MPs, including the Labour leader Keir Starmer and the Conservative Mike Freer, whose constituency office Ali had visited in September 2021. As a teenager in 2014, Ali had been referred to Prevent, the UK's voluntary deradicalisation programme, but had not been considered a significant threat by MI5. His father had worked as a communications adviser to the Prime Minister of Somalia on anti-extremism campaigns. The contradictions sat together uneasily.

Ali was charged on 21 October 2021 with murder and the preparation of terrorist acts. His trial at the Old Bailey ended on 11 April 2022 with a guilty verdict on both counts. He refused to stand for the verdict, citing religious beliefs, and said he had no regrets. Two days later, Mr Justice Sweeney sentenced him to life imprisonment with a whole life order - meaning he will never be released - saying the murder 'struck at the heart of our democracy.' The judge called Ali cold, calculated and dangerous, and cowardly for putting Amess's family through a trial he could have spared them. Amess's family issued a brief statement: they felt 'no elation' at the verdict. 'We shall never get over this tragedy.'

Tributes came from across the political spectrum. The Conservative Party suspended campaigning. Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Speaker Lindsay Hoyle and Home Secretary Priti Patel laid wreaths at the church hall the next day. On 18 October the Commons held a minute's silence and a service of remembrance was held at St Margaret's, Westminster, with an address by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. Then Johnson stood in the Commons and announced that Queen Elizabeth II had consented to grant Southend the city status Amess had spent decades campaigning for. On 1 March 2022, Charles, Prince of Wales, presented the letters patent at a ceremony in Southend. The funeral procession had moved through Prittlewell on 22 November 2021 in a horse-drawn hearse, and a Catholic funeral Mass was held the following day at Westminster Cathedral, with a message from Pope Francis read by the papal nuncio. By-election rules followed the precedent set after Jo Cox's murder - no major party stood against the Conservative candidate. Anna Firth won the seat on 3 February 2022.

Belfairs Methodist Church still stands on Eastwood Road North in Leigh-on-Sea. It is a small twentieth-century building set among suburban semis, the sort of place where parish coffee mornings happen and toddlers learn to walk between folding chairs. It became, on a Friday lunchtime in October 2021, a place that British political life cannot forget. After Jo Cox's death, parliamentary spending on MPs' personal security had risen from under £200,000 to £4.5 million in two years. Surgeries continued, in halls like this, because the alternative was to admit that the great British tradition of an MP openly meeting the people who elected them had ended. Amess himself had written about the risk in his 2020 memoir. He kept holding the surgeries anyway.