At the Brighton hotel where Khalid Masood spent the early part of last week, staff liked the burly 52-year-old. The manager described him as “smiling and joking, very friendly” and said his receptionist called Masood a “lovely guest”, noting that he was “nice” on the hotel’s computer system.

On checking out, this “lovely” man drove up to London and mowed down men, women and schoolchildren on the pavements of Westminster Bridge before murdering a House of Commons police officer with two knives.

So, not such a lovely man after all. And it turns out that, when it came to criminal violence, Masood — born Adrian Elms — had form, jailed most recently for six months in 2003 for possession of a knife.

Yet that was