I couldn’t help wondering about the reaction had PC Keith Palmer (above) been a firearms officer who shot dead a knifeman on the streets of London

The glowing tributes paid to protection officer PC Keith Palmer were thoroughly deserved. He was the best of British, a man with a selfless sense of duty who served in the Royal Artillery before joining the police.

Constable Palmer, who was unarmed, was stabbed to death fending off a crazed jihadist attacker attempting to enter the Houses of Parliament.

In the Commons, MPs queued up to honour his bravery and sacrifice. Politicians love to associate themselves with the courage of our men and women in uniform.

But, at risk of being accused of cynicism, I couldn’t help wondering about the reaction had PC Palmer been a firearms officer who shot dead a knifeman on the streets of London. On past form, he’d have been lucky not to end up in the dock at the Old Bailey, charged with murder.

Worse, if during his Army days he’d been falsely accused by some crooked solicitor such as Phil Shyster of committing ‘war crimes’ in Afghanistan, Iraq or Northern Ireland, his life would have been turned upside down by the historic investigations team and he could now be rotting in a military jail.

In either event, the same politicians singing his posthumous praises this week would have washed their hands of him.

Although this attack has been painted, with justification, as an assault on the Mother of Parliaments, there was never any danger to a single MP inside its walls

Sorry if all this sounds a tad sour, but I found some of the self-congratulatory posturing in the Commons yesterday faintly nauseating. While paying lip-service to the emergency services and their parliamentary staff, it struck me that what many MPs — with a few honourable exceptions — were really celebrating was their own perceived heroism.

The real heroes were on Westminster Bridge and in New Palace Yard, trying to save lives. They weren’t cowering in the secure confines of the Commons chamber, tweeting.

Although this attack has been painted, with justification, as an assault on the Mother of Parliaments, there was never any danger to a single MP inside its walls.

PC Palmer and the plain clothes officer who shot dead the attacker made sure of that.

The real heroes were on Westminster Bridge and in New Palace Yard, trying to save lives. They weren’t cowering in the secure confines of the Commons chamber, tweeting

Just to be on the safe side, though, the first thing the parliamentary authorities did yesterday was to order up another lorryload of concrete barriers to add to the already formidable security measures surrounding the Palace of Westminster.

Not that they’d have been any good to those innocents who were murdered or catastrophically injured on the bridge. But at least ‘democracy’ will be safe.

Every time there is a terrorist atrocity, either here or abroad, the politicians go through the same old motions, mouthing platitudes about never surrendering to evil. But by their actions they betray their hollow rhetoric and the rest of us have to live with the consequences.

It is the political class who have fostered the conditions which allow Islamist fundamentalism to flourish in Britain.

They encouraged the pernicious doctrine of ‘multiculturalism’ — which is just a fancy word for apartheid and has created vast, monocultural Muslim ghettoes in our great cities.

One-tenth of all convicted jihadis come from a single, small area of Birmingham.

The politicians have opened the floodgates to mass immigration without insisting on integration.

They pretend every culture, no matter how medieval and barbaric, is worthy of equal respect. They permitted foreign hate preachers from cruel theocracies to set up shop here, peddling their doctrine of violence and division.

In pursuit of votes, they are in thrall to self-appointed ‘community leaders’ who take our money but reject our freedoms. As a result, it is possible to spend your entire life here without ever subscribing to one of our traditional values, such as tolerance of those with different religious beliefs. Many young Muslims grow up hating the country that gave them everything.

Over the past couple of decades, politicians have turned Britain into a safe haven for terrorists from all over the world, thanks to Tony Blair’s disastrous yuman rites act, which he once described as his proudest achievement in politics.

They lavish welfare benefits on the scum of the earth and refuse to deport them even when they are convicted of serious offences or are quite clearly hell-bent of doing us harm.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men and women born and bred in this country have travelled to Syria to join Izal.

But rather than strip them of their UK citizenship and their passports, they are allowed to slip back into Britain, where all the evidence points to many of them planning acts of terror on our streets.

Whatever happened to the concept of treason? As a result, it’s no longer safe to walk over a bridge in our capital city without running the risk of being mown down by an Islamist terrorist in a rented Hyundai.

Security ‘sources’ regularly say there are some 3,000 active would-be jihadists living here. Of course, we accept that it is absurd to paint all Muslims as terrorists.

But those terrorists who want to carry out mass slaughter on the streets of Britain all subscribe to an extreme form of Islam, which has no place here but is commonplace in some parts of the world.

Shamefully, some politicians on the Left attempted to link the Westminster attack to the tragic murder of Labour MP Jo Cox last summer and draw some kind of moral equivalence

The authorities, however, want to pretend terrorism is nothing to do with Islam, in any shape or form. Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioner Mark Rowley couldn’t even bring himself to use the word, saying only that the Westminster attacker was inspired by ‘international’ terrorism.

Who would that be then — the Baader-Meinhof gang? Colombia’s FARC guerillas?

This kind of pusillanimous approach is one of the reasons Donald Trump triumphed in America. He says you won’t defeat the enemy if you refuse to call it what it is — Radical Islamist Terrorism.

Shamefully, some politicians on the Left attempted to link the Westminster attack to the tragic murder of Labour MP Jo Cox last summer and draw some kind of moral equivalence.

She was killed by a deranged Right-wing fantasist, acting alone. The difference is that he set out specifically to murder Miss Cox. Islamist jihadis want to randomly kill anyone. As many as possible. Believers or non-believers. They’re not fussy.

The Westminster killer may have been flying solo, but he is part of a global terror movement which aims to destroy the West and anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their particular strain of Islam.

You may have noticed I haven’t wasted too much ink thus far on the murderer himself. That’s because I don’t want to glorify him. He was born in Britain, lived in Birmingham and was aged 52.

So that gives the lie to the ‘impressionable young man radicalised over the internet’ myth.

Almost inevitably, he had been on the radar, according to the Prime Minister. He had a long criminal record, had been investigated ‘historically’ but was now considered to be on the ‘periphery’.

Maybe if the Old Bill had spent less time chasing ‘historic’ sex offenders, they might have been able to discover that he wasn’t that peripheral after all.

Not that I blame the anti-terror services. They’re overstretched, trying to clean up the mess created by politicians. They’re doing a fantastic job in the circumstances and have foiled an impressive number of plots.

Just as well. Given that the latest perpetrator was well into his sixth decade, it suggests we are now looking at two, maybe even three, generations of home-grown jihadis.

Before the internet took off, terrorists were recruited through mosques. Scotland Yard even closed roads around Finsbury Park mosque so that Captain Hook could peddle his poison.

In the Nineties, the political class took the view that provided the Islamists didn’t commit any acts of terror on British soil, they were welcome to operate with impunity. All that achieved was to allow the merchants of death to establish deep roots here, with utterly predictable consequences.

Smug, craven politicians, in thrall to notions of ‘diversity’ and multiculturalism, sowed the seeds of the terrorism we are now reaping.

This week, innocent bystanders and tourists on Westminster Bridge, along with brave PC Keith Palmer, paid the ultimate price, while heavily protected MPs — fresh from their glowing tributes to another evil terrorist, Martin McGuinness — congratulated themselves on their own bravery and resolve.

Makes you proud to be British.