‘Vile’: Husband’s tweet to Farage hours before death
BRENDAN Cox was involved in a powerful attack on Nigel Farage’s provocative anti-immigration poster campaign at the time of his wife Jo’s death.
The Ukip leader unveiled his controversial poster, depicting a column of impoverished refugees under the banner ‘Breaking Point’, on Thursday morning.
Mr Cox, a Remain supporter, reacted immediately by forwarding an angry message from a fellow Twitter user which read: ‘I feel sick. Refugees are people fleeing being bombed, starved. Nigel Farage is a person fleeing facts and humanity.’
At 11.18am, after the Ukip-backed, pro-Brexit organisation Leave.eu had tweeted a picture of the poster, Mr Cox messaged them with a single word: ‘Vile’.
Just 90 minutes later, his wife was shot and stabbed to death in her West Yorkshire constituency. The next message to appear on his Twitter feed, at 3.50pm, was a picture of his wife standing by their houseboat in London.
The previous day, Mr Cox had taken to the couple’s dinghy to join the protest against Nigel Farage’s Fishing For Leave flotilla up the Thames – and was hosed with water by the pro-Brexit boats. Jo Cox tweeted a picture of them on the river, with the message: ‘My hubby and children taking part in the battle of the Thames – because we’re #Remain.’
Mr Farage’s poster, showing migrants crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015, was reported to the police for inciting racial hatred, because every person in it is from an ethnic minority. Although it was disowned by non-Ukip Brexit campaigners – Boris Johnson said that it was ‘not my politics’ – Mr Farage defended the poster as ‘an accurate, undoctored photograph’.
The Ukip leader said he was ‘deeply saddened’ by Jo Cox’s death.