The life of Sir David Amess is proof it’s wrong to link ‘Right wing’ with ‘uncaring’

According to conventional Left-wing opinion, the late Sir david Amess could not have been one of the good guys. He was a conservative MP — and therefore one of the type the Labour Party deputy leader Angela rayner recently described as ‘scum’.

More, he was firmly on the right of the party, a Brexit-supporting Thatcherite.

He was also a supporter of the restoration of the death penalty and, as his

obituary in The Times recalled, ‘offered to act as executioner if capital punishment were restored’.

But the much more important aspect of the man, evoked by colleagues across the political spectrum in the days since he was stabbed to death while conducting his constituency ‘surgery’, is that he was a thoroughly good human being. or, in the word now greatly overused: caring.

Urgent

Ed Holmes, who used to work in the Southend MP’s constituency office, recalled that Amess didn’t show much concern, still less anger, when Holmes forgot to pass on an ‘urgent call’ from the then party leader, david cameron, ‘but when he heard someone he knew in the constituency was dangerously ill, he would call everyone he could think of.

‘i remember listening to him late into the evening, on the phone to some of the most senior medics in the land, nagging, cajoling, pleading for them to intervene. david never stopped trying. no votes to be had, no cameras in sight.’

in other words, this was a man — and a politician — who was much less interested in being seen to be caring than in actually doing the right thing.

As a devout catholic (despite his support for the death penalty), Amess would have absorbed the gospel injunction: ‘Let us not love in word and speech, but in deed and truth.’ This was the approach of Amess’s political hero, Margaret Thatcher.

She was disconcertingly hostile to those she dismissed in a notorious broadcast as ‘people who drool and drivel that they care’, but in her dealings with her most junior staff she was unfailingly solicitous and personally kind.

This apparent contradiction was explained to me by a friend who had been a secretary to many MPs over the years.

She said that those whose image was generally of being ‘caring’ tended to be the most unpleasant to work for. Whereas those whose public face seemed to be harsh, and even unfeeling, turned out to be a delight as an employer.

i am not mounting a defence of the kindness of conservative MPs versus Labour ones. My friend only worked for Tory members, so her observations reveal ghastly hypocrites within those ranks.

The point is that we should not be in the least surprised when a so-called ‘rightwinger’ turns out to be much more decent than many who would consider that very person’s politics to define him as wicked.

That was and is the mindset within the corbynite faction of the Labour Party, most notably demonstrated by the former leader’s left-hand man, John Mcdonnell, who described the conservative MP and

then cabinet minister Esther McVey as ‘a stain on humanity’.

That style of denouncing all Tories as wicked (or ‘lower than vermin’, in the words of the Labour minister Aneurin Bevan in 1948) actually repels voters, who see more cruelty in such rhetoric than in the policies of those who are being denounced.

one of those Labour MPs who forfeited her apparently ‘unlosable’ seat in Labour’s so-called red Wall, precisely as part of this

general public revulsion against Mcdonnellstyle politics, is Paula Sherriff.

Last week, in a deeply affecting interview on the BBc, she recalled Amess’s personal kindness to her when she was afflicted with illness and said: ‘on paper, david and i possibly shouldn’t have been friends. But he was the most wonderful man; he was caring and kind, and a great support to me when i was diagnosed with cancer.’

Hope

There was a similar, though much less touching, encomium from the Archbishop of York, Stephen cottrell. He also stressed the deep personal kindness of the murdered Tory MP, and observed that while he didn’t share Amess’s politics (perish the thought) he ‘had the same values’.

i don’t think we should hold out any hope for a similar admission from the Bishop of St davids, Joanna Penberthy, who tweeted last year: ‘never, never, never trust a Tory’, and, when an opinion poll showed the Tories with a tremendous lead over Labour, declared: ‘A very sad indictment of the British electorate that so many still want

to vote Tory. Absolutely appalling. i am ashamed of each and every one of them.’

This idea that to vote for a ‘right-wing’ party is to participate in a moral crime might actually be described as the Left’s own presiding sin.

Besides, the whole notion of ‘Left’ and ‘right’ is entirely divorced from the cares of voters, which are, as david Amess always understood, not about abstract notions of political affiliation but about how we actually behave.

or, as one of his Essex constituents told a reporter over a pint of beer in a pub: ‘He was a diamond geezer. And i ain’t even a blue.’ He added, which might be taken as a special token of respect: ‘They should hang whoever did this.’