My niece now wants to be an MP just like her mummy
One year after the death of Labour MP Jo Cox, her younger sister Kim tells Radhika Sanghani of the drive to keep her memory alive for the sake of her family
‘Ican’t believe it’s already been a year.” Kim Leadbeater shakes her head gently and looks down. “I feel like it was yesterday that I last saw her. She came round after a day at work, took her posh dress off, and said, ‘can I borrow a hoodie?’ It was typical Jo.” A week later, Kim’s older sister, Jo Cox, was dead. The Labour MP was in her West Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen when 52-year-old Thomas Mair shot and stabbed her on June 16, 2016. Jo died an hour later, leaving behind her husband Brendan and two children Cuillin, then five, and Lejla, three. She was aged just 41.
Her younger sister Kim, now 41 herself, will never forget that day. “I was at the garage when Brendan called to tell me she’d been shot and was in hospital. I started shaking. There wasn’t an emotion, just acute shock. He was hopeful, but I knew instinctively it wouldn’t be a good outcome – maybe it was a sister thing.”
She rushed to Jo’s bedside, where her parents were waiting, but it was already too late. It was left to Kim to telephone Brendan, who was on a train up from London, where the family lived on a Thames houseboat. “It was one of the hardest conversations anyone can have,” says Kim. “I said to him, ‘she’s not made it’. Brendan asked, ‘do you mean … she’s dead?’ I said, ‘yes.’ That’s all I remember.”
Jo’s tragic murder devastated her family – and an entire nation. MPS from all parties wept as they mourned the “caring, eloquent, principled and wise” woman, labelled a “passionate and brilliant campaigner” by the prime minister. Her maiden speech to Parliament, which she had given in 2015, was shared widely and one particular sentence – “we have far more in common than that which divides us” – became a social media hashtag. Hundreds of people across the world sent so many letters, flowers and gifts that Kim was forced to re-do her loft to store it all for Jo’s children to look at in the future.
“We have a very personal loss,” explains Kim, who used to work as a health and fitness lecturer at Bradford College and is now a personal trainer. “But there’s also a public loss, which means you can see quite clearly that we’ve lost a very good person. She was my sister, but she was also someone who achieved incredible things and cared deeply about others.”
To mark the anniversary of Jo’s death, the family decided to do something positive that would encapsulate everything she stood for. Brendan has just published a book,
Jo Cox: More in Common, in his wife’s memory. And this weekend sees The Great Get Together, a nationwide event where communities across the country will host neighbourhood parties, barbecues and picnics in honour of Jo.
“We wanted something that could bring people together,” says Kim. “The world at the moment seems quite unstable and divided, so this gives people an opportunity to maybe have a bit of time off from politics and celebrate.” She pauses. “It’s a way of creating a legacy for Jo, and a way of coping. When you have this to focus on, you can push your personal pain to the back. My worry is, what about when all this calms down? I’ll have to process what has happened and that’s really scary.”
Kim does not think that she has fully dealt with her sister’s death, for which Mair was jailed for life in November.
“I have a really busy day where I’m really focused – talking about Jo a lot – but then at night I crash and that’s when I get upset, and reality hits.
“There’s an overriding feeling that I’m just looking after things until she comes back. I still think, ‘oh she’d laugh about that’ or ‘we’ll tell her about that’ – and that will take some working through to stop.”
The two sisters were always close. Jo was two years older than Kim and – in the style of the woman the rest of us have come to appreciate over the last 12 months – was incredibly generous in letting her little sister hang out with her friends. “We did everything together,” says Kim. “From BMX biking to dancing. Then as adults, we’d speak most days. I used to text her when she was on Prime Minister’s Questions with inappropriate messages like ‘give us a wave’. She’d say, ‘Kim, leave me alone. Stop stalking me!’”
She recounts one of her favourite memories of Jo, from just weeks before she died. Kim had hired a house in Yorkshire to celebrate her 40th birthday with her closest friends. They had spent the weekend making cocktails, singing karaoke and wearing 1980s fancy dress. “It was special,” smiles Kim. “Jo was just Jo. She wasn’t a wife, a mum and she certainly wasn’t an MP – she was just my sister, and one of my best friends.”
More recent occasions make for far more painful memories. Months after Jo died, the family – Kim, her parents, Brendan and the children – went to Center Parcs to celebrate Jo’s dad’s 70th birthday. “There were seven of us, so there was always one empty chair,” says Kim. “At one point Cuillin said, ‘If Mummy was here, that’s where she’d be sat’. I just felt my heart breaking.”
Kim doesn’t have her own children but has “an intense love” for her niece and nephew, and says they are “thriving” due to the amount of support the family has given them over the past year. “They’re so like Jo,” she says. “They’re fun, sparky, and being around them is just lovely. Lejla looks just like Jo did as a girl, which is hard, but heart-warming as well. She now wants to be an MP like Mummy.”
Kim was always a hands-on aunt, but is now determined to become a mother figure to the children, while making sure they don’t forget Jo. “It’s really important to establish a routine where they come to Yorkshire and I come down to London. Jo wouldn’t want them to lose their roots, and we talk about her all the time. They know crazy Mummy stories, like when she went on the cycling holiday with Daddy and forgot her bike. I’ll make sure they never, ever forget how amazing she was and how much she loved them.”
Kim has been approached by numerous politicians asking her to become an MP. But she is hesitant. “I’m politically interested but not active. One of the hardest things for me is my identity. To so many people, I am Jo Cox’s sister, and I’ve never been prouder. But I need to keep my individuality as well.”
She is, however, keen to continue spreading Jo’s message of community spirit, especially after the recent terror attacks in Manchester and London. “We found that really hard on a personal level. It brought it all back, and we knew what those families were going through – the shock, horror, disbelief. Those emotions are just so raw.”
But she believes her sister would want the world to come together now, more than ever. “I can’t speak for Jo, but I think she’d feel the same way: you have to keep doing your best every day. The majority of people in this world are good. We can’t let these things tear us apart – we have to come together and try to celebrate life.”