While we were showboating, Jo was serving her country
LAST Wednesday, I’d never heard of Jo Cox. I didn’t know that the rigid inflatable scudding alongside our vessel held her two precious shock-headed tots in the prow and was skippered by her husband Brendan. I didn’t know he’d helped organise last week’s ‘thrilla of the flotillas’ on the Thames or that the Cox family were big Remain campaigners and had been there on my lovely day out on the river.
I wish I had known, for since then I have been thinking of little else but Jo Cox – but what a difference a day makes. In fact, going back to Wednesday, I felt rather embarrassed to find myself cruising on the gin palace commandeered by Sir Bob Geldof to scupper the Farage barge, which was headed downriver with an armada of fisherfolk to the House of Parliament, and have been teased about it ever since.
Bob had rung me to see if I’d come on board. Now, I’ve got a lot of time for Bob, he is a force for good etc, and when he orders you to do something it’s hard to say no. But I didn’t want to do anything disloyal to my brother – cheerleading the Brexit campaign – and said so.
At this point Bob assured me that it was an undercover guerrilla operation against Nigel Farage, who had just released the latest in his nasty racist poster series.
‘Don’t put anything on social media about it,’ he ordered me. ‘I won’t,’ I promised. ‘The last thing I want is for any of this to be about me.’
‘And the last thing I want is for this to be about ME,’ Bob assured me. ‘Trust me! It’s top secret.’
When I boarded HMS Geldof, a news helicopter hovered overhead. There was a team from the Mirror on board and we had to make a special stop to pick up a crew from ITN.
We set off to Tower Bridge first to intercept a red trawler sailing under the ‘Save Our Country, Vote Leave’ flag. The harbourmaster kept coming alongside to tell us to turn down the sound-system blaring out a special playlist on a loop – The In Crowd by Dobie Gray and Please Don’t Go by KC & The Sunshine Band. Finally Bob removed his ancient Nokia from his blouson jacket and did the only possible thing to do in the circumstances – and it was not to turn the deafening music down as requested. It was to call David Cameron. ‘What did Dave say?’ I asked. ‘I told him to tell someone in authority to tell the harbourmaster to let us play the music,’ he said. ‘But he said he was prepping for Prime Minister’s Questions.’ We would chase the Farage barge as fishermen retaliated by soaking us and the campaigners, sitting ducks in open little rigid inflatables. ‘So this is the moment that the Vote Leave lot start hosing my kids with river water,’ Brendan Cox tweeted, with a picture. ‘Nice friendly lot #flotilla.’ As the Good Ship Bob sailed under bridges draped with banners, people mostly made thumbs-down and more offensive signs at us, for which I couldn’t entirely blame them, as they took in the sight of the pop star in white jeans and a baker boy cap, haranguing Farage (in a nautical blazer with brass buttons) through a loud-hailer. For hours we took pictures, and the press took pictures of us. It was all over the news. That was Wednesday. On Thursday, Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency.
We know all about Jo Cox now – her work for Oxfam, for refugees, for Syria, for justice, for her constituency. From everything everyone has said about Jo as a mother, a wife and as a politician, it is clear that she was a shining star and that she was universally loved.
BUT this is what I can’t help thinking, amid much else, as we mourn her. Jo did not stay to zoom up and down the river with her husband and her two small children as the Battle of the Thames trended on Twitter, and MPs left Prime Minister’s Questions to stare at the skirmishes from the terrace, drinks in hand.
She headed north on her own to conduct a surgery as the MP for Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire. There she was killed in the line of duty, doing a job she loved, in the heart of the constituency she was so proud to represent.
There is showboating. And there is service. The life of Jo Cox is a lesson to us all.