Our television screens are filled with the courage of the survivors and the stoicism of commuters determined to continue their lives as normal. But those who paid with their lives in the attacks on London last week cannot speak. I feel I owe them a debt. In a sense they died on our behalf. In the lottery of terrorism fate decreed that they took that bus or train and occupied that seat, not you and not I.

Those families whose lives have been wrecked will rightly be allowed their privacy and we are unlikely to know much about the dead, except that the newspapers will carry a name and maybe show the victim incongruously grinning from a fuzzy holiday snap. So the rest of us have to make an imaginative effort to construct an idea of the gap they leave behind. I see it as a way to thank them for their sacrifice. Unwittingly they took the places that might have been ours.

I find it helpful to think of one killed by terrorists that I did know. Ian Gow was a Conservative MP. He was blown up when he climbed into his car on the driveway of his Sussex home and died shortly after in the arms of his wife, Jane.

Ian was perhaps the best man I ever knew. His antennae had a way of detecting when people were in distress and needed to be taken out for a drink, even if he had not seen them for a long time. I never knew such a principled person. He had rigorous standards and values and he was happy to sacrifice political advancement when he felt that he could no longer serve the Tory government with honour. He had a wicked sense of humour.

Fifteen years after his death I still cannot think of him without tears, nor can I forgive those who killed him. It is a measure of their depravity that it served their cause to eliminate the noblest of human beings.

Those who died on Thursday were not targeted by name as Ian was. The “cause” for which they were murdered is not picky about whom it destroys. But they will have friends and relatives who are thinking, as I think about Ian, that the terrorists have cut down the finest person of their acquaintance, maybe the light of their life. As the rest of us now deploy our stiff upper lip and resume our normal lives we should remember them.

Don’t misunderstand me. I believe that British stoicism is magnificent, truly one of our best qualities. If I have any criticism of the prime minister it is that in his first statements following the bombs he seemed to be struggling to contain his emotion.

He has often told us that London’s day of infamy would come, but he seemed less prepared for it than most. Perhaps it was his way of telling us how acutely he feels the burden of responsibility. If so, his faltering voice jarred in that moment when we looked only for resolve.

The pitch of his voice contrasted with the measured and professional tone adopted by policemen, emergency workers and doctors. Even television reporters and newsreaders were superbly in control, reporting accurately, seeking neither to dramatise their feelings nor to exaggerate the scale of the tragedy.

Whatever his demeanour, what the prime minister said was spot on. When he expressed defiance of the terrorists he certainly spoke for me and I suspect for most of the nation. Whatever you think of the government’s foreign policy, on our day of horror and mourning we turned not to new Establishment figures such as Bono or Geldof, but to the prime minister, the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury to voice our national outrage and grief.

Tony Blair was careful about what he said. It is common sense to say that we must suspect a cell linked to Al-Qaeda, but for now we cannot be sure. He avoided the terrible error of the last Spanish government, which immediately after the bombing of trains in Madrid last year pinned responsibility on Basque separatist terrorists, fearing that if Al-Qaeda were guilty the government would be blamed for engaging in the Iraq war.

That blunder not only cost Jose Maria Aznar’s administration the election (three days after the attacks) but also has left Spain polarised. Perhaps the fanatics who slaughtered nearly 200 Madrilenos would be well satisfied to see the bitterness that they have provoked in Spanish politics.

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