‘I can’t listen to my sister Jo Cox speaking 10 years on – it’s too upsetting’

Kim Leadbeater with her sister Jo Cox, who was murdered by a right-wing terrorist in 2016

Watching Jo Cox’s maiden speech as an MP from 2015, what stands out now is how normal it is.

She speaks in her warm Yorkshire accent, wearing a plain red dress, holding some papers and cracking a few gentle gags. Cox was one of 177 new MPs who had been elected the previous month, and all would get their moment to stand up and beat the drum for their local area.

Even the line that would ultimately resonate so strongly with the public – that her diverse constituents in Batley and Spen ‘are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us’ – gets barely a nod from those listening around her.

Kim Leadbeater, Jo Cox’s sister and Labour MP for Spen Valley, has not watched the video of the speech ‘for a while’.

‘I find it comforting to have photos of Jo, and I’ve looked at a lot of photos of our childhood recently, I find that really comforting,’ she told Metro.

‘[But] seeing Jo actually speak, I do find really upsetting and really difficult. Because it really then hits home that she’s not here anymore.’

A decade has passed since Cox was killed while walking to her constituency surgery by a right-wing extremist who shouted ‘Britain first’ and ‘make Britain independent’.

It was the first time a sitting MP had been murdered in the UK for more than a quarter of a century. The brutal crime shocked a nation which was in a frenetic political state just one week before the Brexit referendum.

For Leadbeater, much of the following period is blank.

‘I’ve probably got that six months of my life where I don’t remember very much, and I think that’s obviously what trauma and shock does to you,’ she said.

‘But I remember the very febrile nature of the Brexit debate ahead of Jo’s murder and the atmosphere that existed then.

‘Then, I also remember how after Jo was killed, people said that we need to do things differently, and we needed our politics to be more compassionate, and we needed to be able to be more respectful to each other, even on issues that we disagree about.

‘And that didn’t last very long.’

On June 23, the UK voted to leave the European Union, setting the scene for years of acrimonious debate. In October 2021, Conservative MP Sir David Amess was killed by a supporter of the Isis terror group.

Even the period leading up to the tenth anniversary of Cox’s murder has been dominated by violence on the streets of Belfast and Southampton.

Kim Leadbeater became the MP for her sister’s former seat of Batley and Spen in 2021 (Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Leadbeater fears the country is ‘almost forced to be divided’ by a media bent on driving negativity and a social media landscape that discourages nuance, as well as ‘some people in positions of responsibility with a large platform who seem intent on stoking the division’.

But she also believes it’s ‘not just a political problem’: ‘One thing I cannot comprehend is that you go to the local doctors for an appointment, and there are signs up saying, please be nice to the staff, please be respectful.

‘When did we have to start telling people to be nice to each other? Now, I honestly don’t know where that came from and when that started, but that I just find utterly depressing and really worrying.’

It is a marked contrast to the attitude of Cox, who was ‘just full of a desire to help people’, her sister said.

She was evidently far from a pushover, though. In a recent debate on Cox’s legacy, Tory MP Andrew Mitchell spoke about acting as the ‘good cop’ to her ‘bad cop’ during a meeting with the Russian ambassador about atrocities in Syria.

He said: ‘During the meeting, Jo did most of the hard-ball talking, and at the end of it she had triumphantly reduced a seasoned diplomat to incoherence, laying bare his inability to defend the indefensible. I very much doubt he will ever forget that meeting.’

Jo Cox worked for humanitarian organisations for 15 years before entering Parliament (Picture: Reuters)

Leadbeater said her sister also didn’t ‘take any crap’ when they were growing up together, though she was ‘incredibly kind and thoughtful and caring’.

She added: ‘What we don’t talk about, Jo was actually very shy when we were kids, and she had to work extremely hard to overcome her shyness.

‘I think when we see people in public life, we often think they must have always been really confident and self-assured, and actually that was not the case for Jo.’

That was a message she took to a Great Get Together gathering with local schoolchildren on the morning of the interview, just one of many events taking place across the country to remember Cox.

There is ‘a lot of Jo in our community’, Leadbeater said: ‘For example, the sixth form centre at the school that we went to is named after Jo.

‘There’s a plaque up at the birthing unit at the local hospital. Primary schools have the Jo Cox Award, which they award every year to the student who’s been most compassionate and the kindest and most thoughtful.’

She added: ‘I said it’s the kids at the event this morning – look, the reality is sometimes really dreadful things happen, but actually when they do, often then lots of really good things happen. That’s what we’ve got to remember.’

Events for the Jo Cox Foundation’s Great Get Together will take place this weekend, ahead of what would have been Cox’s 52nd birthday on June 22. Find out more on the charity’s website.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Comments Add as preferred source