So brave... daughter of family stabbed at home fights back tears as she lays f lowers
HOLDING back tears, the daughter of the family allegedly stabbed by a homeless man laid flowers at the scene yesterday.
Lydia Wilkinson, 18, looked determinedly ahead as she placed the bouquet outside the gated house where her mother and younger brother were knifed to death.
She hugged her boyfriend, Will Thompson, for support and said a silent prayer before kneeling to read messages of support.
Miss Wilkinson has been at the bed- side of her father, Peter, 47, a Tory party volunteer, who suffered wounds to his back and chest in the attack early on Thursday.
The Bristol University biology student also paid tribute to her mother, Tracey, 50, and ‘fun-loving’ brother, Pierce, 13. She confirmed the family had spent a year helping a down-and- out prior to the killings.
Miss Wilkinson said: ‘ Our family are devastated at the loss of Tracey and Pierce. They were extremely loved by all their family and friends. Pierce was a fun-loving, friendly and happy boy, who loved computer games and made everyone smile. Tracey was loving, caring and a wonderful mother and daughter. Always putting others before herself.’
She said her family ‘did not provide refuge for homeless people’ but had supported an individual.
It is understood they provided food, clothes and a phone contract, as well as finding the man work at Mr Wilkinson’s engineering firm, and settling him in a rented flat. A friend said the family, who doted on their pet greyhound Mandy, had a rule not to allow the person they were helping to stay at their home, although he had visited the house in Stourbridge, West Midlands.
Mrs Wilkinson, a former ballroom champion, first met the man at a drug rehabilitation unit she visited as a volunteer, The Sun reported.
But the family were understood to have recently cancelled a direct debit and phone contract for him.
Mr Wilkinson remained in a stable condition in hospital yesterday.
Aaron Barley, 23, will appear at Birmingham Crown Court today charged with two counts of murder and one attempted murder.
‘We are devastated at the loss’
WHEN people are murdered, it is normal for those who knew the victims to tell reporters of the many good qualities they had. This brings home to readers the terrible nature of such crimes — although they are dreadful enough without taking into account the merits of the deceased.
But the local tributes to the Wilkinson family, the victims of just such a murderous attack last week, seemed especially heartfelt. Forty- seven- year- old Peter Wilkinson, in fact, is still alive, though very seriously injured. But his 50-year-old wife Tracey and 13-year- old son Pierce were both stabbed to death at their family home in Stourbridge, near Birmingham.
Aaron Barley, 23, of no fixed abode, has been charged with their murder.
Charitable
In yesterday’s papers, friends described the married couple as having ‘hearts of gold’. One said: ‘The family were liked by everyone. No one had a bad word to say about them. They were a very charitable couple, they were Good Samaritans.’
This seemed to have been a reference to that fact that the Wilkinsons had taken in a homeless man they had found sleeping rough in a Tesco car park.
Another friend, a local councillor called Colin Elcock, told the Sunday Times: ‘They took him home, they fed him, clothed him and found him a job. They were bringing him back into society.’
This councillor was also quoted by The Guardian, saying: ‘They were a lovely couple. Peter was a businessman, and used to travel a lot to the U.S. and Europe with his job, but both he and Tracey helped me deliver pamphlets.’
What pamphlets would these have been? You wouldn’t know it from The Guardian’s report, but these were pamphlets urging locals to vote Conservative in council and mayoral elections. Yes, the Wilkinsons were active members of their local Conservative Party association. The Sunday Times’s report makes that clear. The Guardian’s gives us no clue.
Perhaps this was just because the paper thought it was of no interest to its readers which party the Wilkinsons happened to offer their time and support — though it is the kind of detail that helps to build up a more complete picture of the characters involved.
On the other hand, would that newspaper have thought it not worth mentioning if this ‘ lovely couple’ had been active supporters of the local Labour Party, or the Liberal Democrats? You see, The Guardian — admirable as much of its journalism is — thinks it caters for a readership which regards any member of the Conservative Party as lower than vermin.
If you think I am exaggerating, you need to know that, until it closed, The Guardian shop offered T-shirts and mugs to its readers, covered with the image of a rat, with the notorious words of Aneurin Bevan about the Tories: ‘As far as I am concerned, they are lower than vermin.’
(For this remark in 1948, the fiery Welsh politician was reprimanded by the Labour leader Clement Attlee: he understood that, bad taste aside, this was no way to win the support of wavering Tories.)
Grasping
Yet the paper’s modern-day columnists, or at least some of them, still think Bevan was right and Attlee wrong. Thus Charlie Brooker wrote: ‘The Conservative Party is an eternally irritating force for wrong that appeals exclusively to bigots, toffs, moneyminded machine men, faded entertainers and selfish, grasping simpletons who were born with part of their soul missing . . . to reach a more advanced stage of intellectual evolution, humankind must first eradicate the Tory instinct from the brain.’
I wonder which of these categories Brooker would assign to the Wilkinsons? Perhaps the very fact that Peter Wilkinson is a successful businessman — the managing director of Asset International, a firm that manufactures safety barriers — is sufficient to condemn him to the Brooker category of ‘money-minded machine men’.
Though, come to think of it, I imagine the highly successful and talented Brooker has an agent to maximise his own earnings from his many TV appearances.
I should add that I am not a member of the Conservative Party and never have been. But I have had some acquaintance with members of local party associations over the years, partly because my father had been a Conservative MP — his constituency was about 50 miles away from the Wilkinsons’ stamping ground.
And I know that these Midlands party activists were what can only be described as ‘salt of the earth’ people. Hard-working, self-reliant and with a strong sense of social responsibility — centred on their local community.
Slogan
Why else would they have joined the party? They were not after power for themselves. Of course, they did think that a Conservative government was in the national interest, much more than a Labour one. But that was not out of some belief that the Tories had a patrician right to rule — they were as far away from Brooker’s ‘toffs’ as you could imagine (probably further than Brooker himself).
They were just highly aspirational and felt the Conservatives best represented that desire for self-improvement.
The same attitude is clear in the way Peter Wilkinson took in that homeless man and set him up with a job in his business. This was an example in action of the traditional Conservative slogan ‘a hand up, not a hand-out’.
I am not for a second saying that members of the Conservative Party are individually better, as people, than members of the Labour or the Liberal Democrat parties. What I am saying is that the Wilkinsons, with their charitableness and civic-mindedness, are infinitely more typical than the ‘selfish, grasping simpletons’ that so many on the Left believe define those who support or vote for the Conservative Party.
In short, the Left must — for its own sake — learn to stop hating the British people.