JO BELIEVED IN A BETTER WORLD
Tribute to factory worker’s girl who went to Cambridge and fought for child victims of war
SHE believed in a better world and risked her life in war zones to help make it happen.
Jo Cox might have been petite but, as Andrew Mitchell MP put it, she was ‘a force of nature, a five-foot bundle of Yorkshire grit and determination absolutely committed to helping other people’.
During ten years as an Oxfam aid worker and policy chief, a year as an MP and five years as a mother, Mrs Cox fought passionately to improve the lot of others.
And despite being so new to Parliament, she had already been tipped by some as a future prime minister.
Mrs Cox, whose father Gordon worked in a toothpaste and hairspray factory and mother Jean as a school secretary, recently took the lead in a women MPs’ tug- of-war team at a recent charity event. A committed hiker and runner, she found out she was pregnant with her first child when climbing on the Isle of Skye. She suffered morning sickness while abseiling the ‘ Inaccessible Pinnacle’ on the Cuillin range – and named her son in honour of the mountains.
Cuillin, now five, and his sister Lejla, three, share their mother’s adventurous streak, and the day before she died she proudly tweeted a photo of them whizzing along the Thames in a dinghy with her husband Brendan, 37, and an ‘In’ flag during a light-hearted skirmish with the Leave campaign.
In fact, the MP and her husband, who was chief strategist at Save the Children until last year, and their children lived on the river.
Since 2009, when the couple married in Scotland, the family home has been a converted Dutch barge moored on the Thames at Tower Bridge, and Mrs Cox commuted to the Commons by bike each day.
She was passionate about the plight of refugee children and played a central role in persuading the Government to accept 3,000 from Syria into Britain. ‘Those children have been exposed to things no child should ever witness, and I know I would risk life and limb to get my two precious babies out of that hellhole,’ she told MPs in April.
Mr Mitchell said last night: ‘It is hard to believe someone so brave and fearless and fun is dead, but the hardest thing to think about is her two lovely little children.’
Mrs Cox’s 42nd birthday would have been next Wednesday. She was born Helen Joanne Leadbeater on June 22, 1974, and grew up in Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire, in the constituency
‘I didn’t really speak right’
she eventually came to represent. She excelled at Heckmondwike Grammar School and won a place at Cambridge – the first from her family to go to university – where her political awakening occurred.
‘It was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. I didn’t really “speak right” or know the “right people”,’ she told the Yorkshire Post last year. ‘I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory, working where my dad worked, and everyone else had gone on a gap year.’
She said Pembroke College, where her degree was in social and political studies, was a culture shock for a ‘working-class lass from Batley who hadn’t been anywhere apart from the odd holiday on the Costa Del Sol’.
She recalled: ‘Suddenly being in an environment where kids had had gap years and been to India or whose parents were diplomats or who had lived overseas – I was completely out of my comfort zone and I felt intimidated.
‘But I got over it. It made me realise a lot of things about how the world works. To be honest, my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years. Ultimately, though, it proved useful.’
After graduating in 1995, she worked for Baroness Kinnock in Brussels for two years, then joined Oxfam in her twenties. During a decade with the aid agency, she rose to become its policy chief, head of humanitarian campaigning based in New York and led its European operation in Brussels.
Afterwards, she joined Sarah Brown, the wife of former prime minister Gordon Brown, on a campaign to prevent mother and baby mortality in childbirth, before moving to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an anti-slavery charity. Her husband is a former adviser to Mr Brown.
As an aid worker, she visited war zones including Sudan and Afghanistan, and had ‘been in some horrific situations’. She worked with rape victims in Darfur and with child soldiers in Uganda who had been forced to kill members of their own family.
Mrs Cox entered Parliament at the 2015 election, winning the seat of Batley and Spen with a 6,057 majority. Fellow Labour MP John Mann remarked: ‘She is one of the stars of the new intake.’
Although she nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the labour leadership, she later regretted the decision and voted for Liz Kendall. She lamented Mr Corbyn’s ‘weak leadership, poor judgment and a mistaken sense of priorities’.
Yesterday Mr Corbyn paid a heartfelt tribute to her ‘lifelong record of public service and deep commitment to humanity’.
Mrs Cox summed up herself on her Twitter page as: ‘Mum, proud Yorkshire lass, boat dweller, mountain climber and former aid worker.’