‘Still struggling with my sister Jo’ s death’

As The Yorkshire Post continues to mark five years of its loneliness campaign, Lindsay Pantry reports on how Jo Cox’s sister is continuing her work on the issue.

SOCIETY: The sister of murdered MP Jo Cox says she is still struggling to cope with her death while at the forefront of national campaigning on loneliness.

Kim Leadbeater has gone from being a college lecturer and fitness trainer to become a community campaigner and media spokesperson.

THE SISTER of murdered MP Jo Cox has revealed she is still struggling to cope with the politician’s death while at the forefront of national campaigning on loneliness which has left her questioning her own identity.

Since the fateful day on June 16, 2016, when her life “changed forever”, Kim Leadbeater has gone from college lecturer and fitness trainer to become a community campaigner, media spokesperson and an ambassador of the foundation set up in her older sister’s name.

Whether she is speaking in Parliament or chairing a meeting of More In Common Batley and Spen, it is Mrs Cox’s voice that echoes in her mind, telling her to “push herself more”. She is “under no illusion”, she says, that her busy new life, which also includes maintaining her personal training business, “is a way of coping”, and she admits to struggling with her new found public role.

“When Jo became an MP, I, along with mum and dad, was very clear, that we’ll support you, we’ll pick the kids up, we’ll provide you with food and money and lifts to the station, but we want to just stay in the background,” she said. “Obviously after she was killed, suddenly everything changed forever.

“And I still struggle with that. I have a real issue around my own identity. Whenever I do anything, I have to think, now who am I today? Am I an ambassador for the Jo Cox Foundation? Am I the chair of More in Common? Am I Jo’s sister? Or am I Kim Leadbeater? Inevitably, I am all four of those things.

“I’m under no illusion that it is a way of coping and I think many people who have lost somebody try and create something positive. I almost have a sense of moral responsibility to Jo to do something good. She always used to say to me ‘you need to push yourself more, you’re wasted’.

“I was very happy with my life, I was going to go back to university to my masters degree, but the fact that I can hear those words when I am doing certain things, does enable me keep going.”

Taking on her sister’s passion for tackling loneliness, and for creating a sense of community, has been something that has come naturally for Miss Leadbeater and her family, who are “very people-oriented”.

She said: “We’ve always naturally looked out for people around us. The key thing with most problems, though, is how you create a dialogue around it.”

Part of that dialogue is creating a “positive legacy” for her sister but also tackling more divisive community issues.

“We can’t be shy or naive about the fact that there are issues in local communities around division and around cohesion that do need some work on,” she said. “As much as I have tried to create a really positive legacy for Jo, there are more challenging issues that we need to address as well.

“I don’t want the work that I am doing through the foundation to be perceived as pretending that everything is fantastic, and particularly in the current political situation, people do feel more divided than ever and we need to think about ways in which we can deal with that.

“Loneliness is part of this issue around communities. If you go back 50 years, you did know your neighbours, and you did feel your kids could play out until it was dark, and there was a much stronger sense of community. Some of that is nostalgia, but actually there’s a lot of truth around that as well. We need to look at the reasons why things have changed, and think ‘OK, how can we rebuild this sense of community’.

“Politically, why do people feel disengaged and that they are not listened to? The knock-on effect of that can be that people feel lonely - or worse still - are drawn towards extremism.

“A lot of what we have done so far, in the sense of bringing people together, has been preaching to the converted, and we now need to reach out to areas where people don’t naturally embrace the concept of More in Common.”

Far-right extremist Thomas Mair was jailed for life in November 2016 for the murder of Mrs Cox as she attended a constituency surgery in Birstall.

■ Tomorrow: What does the future hold for Yorkshire’s two £6m loneliness projects?