Lord Hill: Belgium’s spirit will not be broken by these cowardly terrorists

The texts started pinging in from people back home just a few minutes after the news broke about the first attack at Brussels’s Zaventem airport, about six miles from where I work. The second, an hour later, was closer — at Maalbeek metro, just a couple of hundred yards from my office, halfway to the building where officials in my department work.

It was at the end of the morning rush hour, thousands of people coming in for their normal day at work. And then we started hearing the sirens.

Over the years, Londoners have sadly become familiar with terrorism: the terrible day on 7/7 and, for those of us with longer memories, the years of IRA attacks. Our responses in London were much the same as people’s responses here today. Shock, and then wanting to know if family, friends and colleagues are safe.

What is a little different is that Brussels is a much smaller city than London. So everything feels slightly closer to home. The distances aren’t great; there’s one main airport. The chances are higher that if something happens here someone you know will have been there.

So people who work down the corridor from me were at Zaventem when the bombs went off. Thankfully they are fine. Thankfully, too, the officials who work for me in my department have all been accounted for. But others won’t have had that sense of relief.

The streets around here have been nearly empty all day, except for the police, bomb disposal teams and a lot of ambulances. People have been following the news but otherwise getting on with their jobs. We’ll do the same tomorrow, although we might have to walk a little further to work.

As today’s events sink in, people will no doubt adapt. Yes, there may have to be more security. Yes, no doubt people will have to look again at laws and how the security services work together to catch those who want to do us harm.

But we shouldn’t give these people who are trying to make a point by killing and hurting others what they want: to give them significance, to bend to their warped will. We need to carry on as before, just living our daily lives, to show that the terrorists have lost.

Every country, every city, has its own way of coping. In Britain, we tend to KBO, as Churchill put it. In Brussels, people show with typically Belgian surrealism that they won’t be bullied.

In the lockdown a couple of months ago there were warnings that the terrorists would find out where the police were searching by following Twitter. So the people of Brussels responded by flooding Twitter with pictures of cats. I liked that refusal to be panicked.

Whatever the terrible pictures and stories that emerge today, Brussels stays what it is: a quirky city, warm, relaxed and hospitable. What has happened today hasn’t changed that or the people who live here.