Senseless waste of a life
THE most striking thing about JO COX: DEATH OF AN MP (BBC2) was how much time it spent on the killer compared to the victim. To some that might have felt misguided. Were we interested in Thomas Mair, this deluded nobody who cruelly snuffed out the life of a remarkable person on grounds so confused he’s never been able to explain them? Did we not want this to be a tribute, almost a year after the events, to Jo Cox, sister, wife mother, helper, believer in people?
The answer to that perhaps was provided at the end of the programme by the senior police officer on the case, Detective Superintendent Nick Wallen.
How different was Mair, he asked, from other loners who acted out their rage in the name of other causes? What did it say about our society, he asked, that people could just be “left to their own devices”, becoming so lonely and bitter that violence was their only outlet?
It was an interesting perspective from a senior policeman and, you suspected, one the late Jo Cox MP would not have argued with either.
The programme paid much tribute to her as a person and politician, building up a picture full of light, warmth and energy. Colleagues recalled her being so busy on the day she was killed that she’d had to quickly eat pasta as she ran down the stairs of her constituency office to get to her next, and last, engagement.
Earlier the Labour MP for Batley and Spen and committed anti-Brexit campaigner had been at a local factory, the bulk of whose workers intended voting Leave. It was typical of Jo, the factory boss said, that it was still a good-natured meeting.
Elsewhere across the country as we saw via an assortment of news clips, things were less amicable. Jabbing fingers, ugly claims and counterclaims, it was a time of unprecedented public and private nastiness. How much of that seeped into Thomas Mair we’ll never know. He was however no more a nobody than anyone is. He was reclusive, anxious, had never worked and lived in spartan abstinence in a house almost empty apart from a treasured hoard of right-wing pamphlets and books on fascism.
No one can ever be summed up in so few words, though, and the man who spent months plotting Jo Cox’s murder also spent several years volunteering in the community.
He’d been a clever but awkward boy, always at home, reading or writing stories. In later life, battling mental illness, he seemed to have reached out to the world, almost found a place in it, then lost his grasp. Much time has been wasted ever since on whether Mair committed an act of madness or one of political violence. Last night’s documentary hopefully closed the debate. If Mair could be many things, so could his actions.
I keep a list entitled “Things I Never Thought I’d See On The Television” and THE BABY BOOMERS’ GUIDE TO GROWING OLD (More4) expanded it in just one episode. Cricket commentator Henry Blofeld and actress Amanda Barrie, for example, setting up a dating agency for older folk and Johnny “Think Of A Number” Ball taking Esther Rantzen to a daytime jive session.
Top of the list was John Prescott and Roy Hudd sniggering over an uncomfortably graphic American public information film about contraception for the elderly.
Actually, that didn’t go on the list. It went on the other one I call “Things I Can’t Unsee”.