Yet again, Britain shudders in collective shock as a Member of Parliament is slaughtered while doing their job.
I do not know the full details as I write these words except that Sir David Amess has died in a stabbing. So this time it is a Tory. Last time it was Labour. But their politics do not matter now.
Sir David could not have been more different from Jo Cox, who was shot and stabbed five years ago.
He was a 69-year-old married father of five, firmly on the Tory right and Eurosceptic, a political veteran who had represented Essex constituencies (first Basildon, later Southend West) in parliament for almost four decades.
She was 41, Labour and a proud Remainer, a wife and adoring mother of two, filled with idealism after her election to a Yorkshire seat, Batley and Spen, in 2015.
But while so very different in life, this pair of politicians are united in the terrible manner of their deaths. Both were devoted democrats who died carrying out their work in a land that boasts of being the mother of parliaments. And both were murdered while attending the weekly surgeries with constituents that are one of the pillars of our political system.
Conservative MP Sir David Amess was stabbed at his constituency surgery in Essex on Friday
Labour MP Jo Cox was also murdered in a similar attack in her constituency in 2016
So have no doubt this latest stabbing drives a chilling stake through the core of our democracy.
Inevitably there will be understandable demands for more security, more protection of our politicians, more distance from the people they represent.
Bear in mind that Cox may have been the first killing of an MP since 1990 (when Ian Gow became the fourth Westminster victim of the Irish Troubles). Yet two more had suffered savage attacks in their constituency offices and been fortunate to survive: the Liberal Democrat MP Nigel Jones (whose aide Andy Pennington died as he tried to protect him from a sword-wielding attacker in Cheltenham) in 2000, and Labour MP for East Ham Stephen Timms who was stabbed in 2010 by a woman protesting at his support for the Iraq War.
Politics is a tough job at the best of times given the intense demands, hours and pressures. MPs have less power than many voters think – yet at those crucial surgeries they must try to
