That so many people have wanted to say something about how the Queen touched their lives, whether or not they met her, shows quite how powerful her service was. The tributes this afternoon in the House of Commons were moving because they showed the breadth of that service, from the way she carried out her constitutional duties with the government to her personal impact on many members of the House. When parliament pays tribute to someone who has just died, the cloying phrase ‘it was the House at its best’ quickly emerges. This is self-regarding, because what today’s tributes showed was not the best bits of MPs but the best bits of the Queen.

Liz Truss was the Queen’s last Prime Minister, and surely the last politician to have seen her, too, given she was only at Balmoral on Tuesday afternoon. The Prime Minister’s tribute to her was thoughtful and sincere: she spoke of the wisdom that Elizabeth II had shared with so many leaders, herself included. ‘She gave counsel to Prime Ministers and ministers across government. I have personally greatly valued her wise advice… It was just three days ago at Balmoral that she invited me to form a government and become her 15th Prime Minister. Again, she generously shared with me her deep experience of government, even in those last days.’ She described her reign as ‘dignified but not distant’, with ‘sheer humanity’ and devotion making her admired and loved across the world.

Sir Keir Starmer’s speech was still more moving. He told the chamber that ‘the loss of our Queen robs this country of its stillest point, its greatest comfort, at precisely the time we need those things most’. He spoke as much about what the Queen meant for Britons’ sense of self as he did about her impact on politics. He said:

At this moment of uncertainty, where our country feels caught between a past it cannot relive and a future yet to be revealed, we must always remember one of the great lessons of our Queen’s reign. That we are always better when we rise above the petty, the trivial, the day to day, to focus on the things that really matter. The things that unite us, rather than those which divide us. Our Elizabethan age may now be over but her legacy will live on forever.

There are some moments in the recent past that most hope are firmly behind us. Both leaders reminded the Commons that it was the Queen who had reassured us that ‘we will meet again’ in the darkest days of Covid. ‘It wasn’t simply the message that allowed a shaken nation to draw upon those reserves, it was the fact she was the messenger,’ said Starmer. ‘At the time we were most alone, at a time we had been driven apart, she held the nation close, in a way no one else could have done. For that, we say: thank you.’ The Queen, of course, mourned her husband alone at his funeral because of Covid restrictions.

As the tributes wore on, humour joined the sadness. Theresa May recalled the Queen smiling at her and pretending that nothing happened when she managed to drop some cheese on the floor during a lunch – and then replace it on the table. Harriet Harman was touched by the way the monarch had invited her to tea to thank her for her service after she had been sacked after just one year in government. Iain Duncan Smith similarly found himself with the Queen after being deposed as Tory leader, and wryly observed that she must have grown rather used to these changes.

What has run through all the speeches so far this afternoon is a profound gratitude and almost disbelieving admiration for the commitment the Queen showed to her role, but also a feeling that every member speaking really felt the Queen was theirs, as well as everyone else’s, because she had somehow moved them at some point too. Even Boris Johnson confessed he had been so moved by the prospect of her passing that he had broken down during an attempt to pre-record a tribute to her and had sent the camera crew away.

When the Queen met MPs’ constituents, it was often to praise them for making the best of themselves or their communities. Often those people were unsung, unnoticed in their work to keep people and places stitched together. But her special gift was to make those people feel she had seen them at their best. It is this memory of the Queen seeing people and the country as they wanted to be seen by her that has been the best thing so far about this afternoon’s session of the Commons.