Blame game

had attacked him with a knife at a constituency surgery.

In another MP’s office I worked in a colleague had to be physically scrubbed down by a team in hazmat suits after opening a letter containing what looked like anthrax.

It later turned out to be talcum powder and was part of a series sent to various MP’s offices, but it certainly wasn’t a good day for my colleague.

In recent years, Jo Cox and David Amess haven’t been as lucky in the threats against their lives.

The repeated, almost casual, reminders of violence against politicians I came across even in my short time in Parliament is a reminder that this isn’t always quite the cushy career we often consider it.

We all criticise politicians. We all think we can do better. Sometimes (even often) we’re right.

But when we start to look at them as a whole different breed of human beings from us, and consider behaviour we would normally never engage in as being acceptable, like Tarjanyi, we start the descent down an extremely slippery slope that ends in tragedy more often than we’re perhaps aware of.