The attempt on Donald Trump’s life proves one thing: the ballot must always come before the bullet

There is only one lesson to be learned from yesterday’s despicable attempt on the life of former US president Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania: killing politicians is always wrong. Whatever you may think of their politics, their party, or their temperament, a brutal act of violence is no substitute for civilised democracy.

In my 50 years of politics, those decades have been smattered with the sudden and dramatic news of assassination. I remember sitting in school assembly as a 12-year-old, when our teacher told us that Robert F Kennedy had been assassinated during the course of his 1968 presidential campaign. This was the first time I became aware that something like that could happen. A few years later in 1981, Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded while he was president.

There have been far too many such incidents, and far too many deaths: Anwar Sadat, prime minister of Egypt, in 1981; Indira Gandhi, former prime minister of India, in 1984; Yitzhak Rabin, of Israel, in 1995; and my close friend Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, in 2007 – all lost their lives in service to their respective countries, murdered in a cynical subversion of the democratic process.

We here in the UK are not immune either – in the past decade we have seen two MPs murdered on our own shores: Labour’s Jo Cox in 2016, and Conservative Party politician David Amess in 2021. The phenomenon is not limited to any one country, or party, or ideology, or outlook – it is as senseless and chaotic as the individual who carries out the deed.

Last night, in Pennsylvania, it was a close-run thing. If that bullet had veered just an inch to the right, a former president, and current presidential candidate, would likely be dead, and the world would look very