Two and a half years ago, a member of Britain’s parliament was murdered in a church in southeast England where he was meeting his constituents. Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old who called himself a soldier of the Islamic State, said “Sorry” to David Amess before pulling a knife from his pocket and stabbing the Conservative lawmaker repeatedly in the stomach. When two constituents heard Amess’s screams and rushed into the room, Ali said simply, “I’ve killed him.”

In an interview with police after his arrest, Ali said that a month before the attack, he had visited the constituency of Mike Freer, another Conservative MP, armed with the intent to harm. 

“That’s when I bought the stab vest,” Freer tells me over the phone from his home in his constituency of Finchley and Golders Green, a leafy corner of northwest London once represented by Margaret Thatcher and home to one of the UK’s largest Jewish communities. 

Last week, Freer, 63 and a justice minister in the British government, took an even more dramatic measure to protect his safety. He announced that he will be stepping down at the next election because of the “intolerable stress” on his husband and extended family from the “several serious threats to my personal safety.”