Ignorant people have equated McGuinness with Nelson Mandela: but President Mandela, because he was a black man, was denied the right to participate in democracy. Growing up, McGuinness certainly witnessed anti-Catholic bigotry, but all his adult life he had the vote, and laws against sectarian discrimination changed Ulster. His idea of a Marxist united Ireland could not prevail democratically, so he chose murder instead – just like Ajao.

Speaking in the Commons on Thursday, the Prime Minister intoned that “our resolve will never waver in the face of terrorism”. What resolve, other than that to appease? A few hundred yards from where Mrs May spoke, some of McGuinness’s friends had, 38 years earlier almost to the day, murdered Airey Neave. That, in turn, was but a few steps from where Ajao murdered the heroic Pc Keith Palmer, having just slaughtered three other innocent people and injured many more. Those of us who remember Airey Neave’s murder recall solemn expressions by politicians of how, to coin a phrase, our resolve would never waver in the face of terrorism. Yet we have lived long enough to see McGuinness (thanks to institutional appeasement) become deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, to see our Queen forced to break bread with him, and to see a former president of the United States – albeit one of the sleaziest in history – pour treacle on him at his funeral.

McGuinness was believed to have committed several murders himself. He also, as an IRA commander, expanded the categories of those the IRA considered “legitimate targets”. One of his most notorious crimes was to order a man to drive a van packed with explosives to an Army base: and when the unfortunate man, whose “crime” had been to work there as a cleaner, tried to warn soldiers, the very fact of his opening the door detonated the explosives, killing him and five soldiers.

The “human bomb” was but one of McGuinness’s grotesqueries, as well as killing soldiers and RUC officers, car bombings, kneecappings, punishment beatings and the rest of the IRA’s armoury of intimidation so attractive to psychotics such as him. He sat on the IRA Council that authorised the Brighton bomb in 1984 and the Enniskillen Remembrance Day atrocity in 1987, in which 11 people died. But worst of all, and despite the nauseating protestations of others to the contrary, McGuinness died, like Ajao, still believing violence was a legitimate political weapon.