HEARTBREAK OF JO COX’S HUSBAND BRENDAN AS HE TOLD THEIR TWO CHILDREN:

THE husband of murdered Labour MP Jo Cox has revealed his heartache at telling their children that he “couldn’t bring mummy back.”

The mum-of-two was shot and stabbed outside her constituency surgery at Birstall Library on June 16 last year by far right extremist Thomas Mair who yelled “Britain First” as he attacked her.

The 41-year-old’s death as she tried to protect her assistants shocked the country and in November Mair was jailed for life for her murder.

As her widower Brendan Cox prepares for the first anniversary of her death he has talked about her terrible death and its impact.

His book, Jo Cox – More in Common, is being serialised this week in the Daily Mirror.

Brendan, 37, was in London where the family lived in a houseboat when he first heard Jo had been hurt in her constituency.

He immediately jumped on a train to Leeds and it was during that journey that he received the devastating call from Jo’s sister Kim Leadbeater that she had died.

On the sensation of hearing the news, he said: “It feels like an explosion or a hand grenade going off inside you.

“And then you’re a just a shell really and retreat into shock mixed with collapse.”

Brendan then faced the anguish of breaking the news to their young children Cuillin, then five, and Lejla, three, without using “metaphors and mysteries.”

He recalled: “They asked questions about what had happened and I just answered them as honestly as I could.

“I had to say, no, I couldn’t dream up a way to bring Mummy back to us.

“I explained to Cuillin that his good idea that scientists might be able to inject life into her wouldn’t work. We also couldn’t make a new version of Mummy out of wood, as Lejla had suggested, and we weren’t going to see her in another world.

“I told them that Jo was gone but that she lived on in our hearts and heads.”