Writing in the Daily Mail, former Conservative MP Jerry Hayes reflects on the physical security given to MPs, drawing on his own experience of armed protection in the 1980s and 1990s after his name appeared on an IRA death list. He argues that while MPs must be protected following attacks and murders including those of Airey Neave, Ian Gow, Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, and the assault on Ann Widdecombe, security measures must be balanced so politicians remain accessible to the public rather than isolated behind "a ring of steel".

Hayes recalls being told by Commons security that his public praise of the SAS shooting of IRA bombers in Gibraltar in 1988 had placed him on a death list, after which armed guards, including men with Heckler and Koch machine guns, were stationed around his home. He describes several unsettling incidents from that period, such as being evacuated from a plane after Ian Gow's assassination, narrowly avoiding a bag of flour dropped from a tower block in his Harlow constituency, and an armed response to a car that turned out to belong to a man who had merely run over a cat.