Charlie Kirk had an unending zest for debate and a tireless energy for argument. It was surprising to discover upon meeting him how relaxed and pleasant he truly was. Unlike many celebrities and politicians who might anticipate a confrontation, Kirk was naturally welcoming to all.

“Great to meet you,” he greeted me when we met last May, shaking my hand warmly. Charlie had journeyed to Britain to engage in what he was passionate about – intensely debating university students over various issues, right up until the moment he was tragically killed.

While observing him being introduced to others – including Left-wing Cambridge students who strongly opposed his views – I noticed his approach was uniformly cordial. This wasn’t an act; he had a genuine curiosity about meeting new people.

The debate that evening was the most intense I’ve observed. In person, I witnessed what millions have seen online – the excitement, the fervor, the strong conviction that shone in his eyes and through his words as he engaged with his challengers.

What really fired him up was testing his ideas against smart, informed debaters – and what fascinated him, he told me afterwards, was just how ignorant some of these privileged and supposedly educated students were of many of the views he expressed.

Charlie regarded many of his own opinions as mainstream, not radical. To take a few: pandemic lockdowns were ruinous and cruel, especially to children. Compulsory vaccine programmes were tyrannical. Mass immigration has been destructive to Western civilisation.

When he claimed that the entire Black Lives Matter movement was founded on a fallacy – because George Floyd died of a drugs overdose in Minneapolis in 2020, and not as a result of police brutality – the liberal Cambridge audience reacted with outrage and horror.

And he loved that. If the students had sat there meekly, he wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun. He fed off their hostility, and it fuelled him to be the best, most articulate communicator he could be.

After the debate, and in my capacity as a political consultant, I was invited to have dinner with him by my friend, the conservative commentator and academic James Orr.

Charlie arrived with two staff members, who were clearly devoted to him. Even as we sat down, he was critiquing his performance. ‘I should have answered that question like this,’ he reflected. ‘That point needed to be emphasised more strongly.’

He had just faced an almost entirely antagonistic audience for two hours – and emerged, despite his jetlag, with exactly the same energy he had at the start.

With his team, he began mentally choosing moments from the debate that would prove effective online. Sure enough, that night’s clash went viral on social media even by his standards. Millions upon millions have since watched his battle with a young and excitable – but quick-witted – Cambridge student over the war in Gaza.

His global reach shocked even me. I was sitting right behind the Union’s equivalent of the ‘dispatch box’, so was visible in every clip.

Friends I hadn’t spoken to in years messaged to say they’d seen me. Charlie dominated swathes of social media in this way by pushing out endlessly addictive, watchable snippets of him debating Left–wing students and professors.

He could distil three hours of argument into 30 seconds of cut–and–thrust that crystallised complex ideas for Gen Z – young voters who gather much of their political information from short–form videos.

In doing so, he successfully re-opened controversial topics that had seemed settled for decades, expanding what political scientists call the ‘Overton Window’ of acceptable debate.

A devout Christian, he believed deeply that human life begins at conception, not at birth. He rejected feminist standpoints on women’s rights. And these were not the rantings of some reactionary boor: Kirk was on a mission to make people think again, to challenge accepted wisdom instead of swallowing it whole.

Central to this ambition was Turning Point USA, the campaign group he founded in 2012 while still a teenager, and which promoted conservative ideas in schools and universities. It became the dominant youth force on the American Right through huge rallies, summer camps and lectures – and its arguments spread across the Anglosphere.

Over dinner, he also talked to me about his other, lesser-known work. His Turning Point Faith spread the message of Christianity, while away from the cameras, he and his team had built Turning Point Action, an operational arm focused on getting voters, especially young people, to the polls.

This was astonishingly effective. TPA spent millions of dollars and hired more than 1,000 staff to target battleground states and help elect conservative candidates in recent elections, including Donald Trump’s in 2024. He spoke about this modestly, even though, as the New York Times has reported, Trump himself credited Charlie for the Maga surge in young voters.

So why did Charlie appeal to countless millions of young people on both sides of the Atlantic? Why did his videos attract billions of views, and how did he draw tens of millions of followers across social media?

The answer is simple. Young people admired him and devoured hours of his content because they respected his most crucial conviction: that the Right must compete for the next generation, rather than writing them off as lost.

In recent years, the Republican establishment in America and the Conservative Party in Britain have, for the most part, feebly surrendered this ground to Left-wing parties (including, here, the current socialist Labour government, the Greens and the resurgent Corbynistas). Kirk refused to accept defeat – and a generation of hitherto politically homeless young people loved him for it.

In a world that seemed increasingly detached from reality, especially after the explosion of wokery from the late 2010s onwards – Charlie told Gen Z that they could and should reclaim the future they deserved.

All of this he achieved without ever holding elected office. In his short life, he put his name and face to arguments that in Britain could have resulted in arrest. In America, his opinions got him killed.

We still do not know yet for sure who murdered him – or why. But in a resurfaced video, he warned: ‘It’s a growing trend: people like me are facing violence [from the Left] … When people stop talking, that’s when violence happens … you start to think the other side is evil and they lose their humanity.’

The question now – one vexing millions of young people as they watch and debate this week’s historic events – is whether America has reached that point. What happens to a country when one half of its citizenry believes the other half is beyond redemption?

Kind, affable Charlie Kirk treated everyone, including his opponents, with respect. He lived by his commitment to free speech, and he was murdered for it.

So the generation he helped inspire now face a choice. Will they keep faith and honour his commitment to open debate, artful persuasion and the bustling marketplace of ideas? Or will they embrace something darker and altogether more ruthless? We shall soon find out.

• Jack Anderton is a political consultant and commentator

Listen to Jack Anderton discuss why Charlie Kirk ws so influential for young people on Daily Mail podcast ‘The Assassination of Charlie Kirk.’ Available wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube now.