Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
We thought Jo would SAD LOSS JO’S TEAM
JO Cox and her sister Kim Leadbeater are standing back-toback, belting out I Know Him So Well into plastic karaoke microphones. It’s Kim’s 40th birthday party in May 2016, six weeks before Jo was murdered. The audience are howling with laughter and singing along.
“I was Elaine Paige, Jo was Barbara Dixon,” Kim laughs. “Jo could sing but never knew the words. I knew every word, but couldn’t sing. Together, we just about worked.
“It was my 40th, I’d rented a cottage with some of my closest friends and we didn’t know if Jo would be able to come.
“She had so much on, work, kids.
But she made it and had such a brilliant time. She was able to relax, she was just Jo, my sister, again.”
As we approach the second anniversary of Jo’s death, and pass Kim’s second birthday without her, this is the way Kim is determined to remember her brilliant big sister.
We are at Kim and Jo’s parents’ house in Yorkshire, where the family are preparing for the Great Get Together.
It’s a now annual celebration of Jo’s belief we all have “more in common than that which divides us”. This year, instead of commemorating Jo’s death, it will take place from June 22 to 24, to mark the weekend of what would have been her 44th birthday. And Jo loved a party.
Kim’s mum Jean is baking a Great Get Together cake. “It’s a Bakewell cake, not tart,” she says. “With blueberries, because Jo loved blueberries,” she smiles, but she is looking out into the garden.
“She was killed right here,” she says, quietly. “Five minutes from where we live, on streets we walk down every day.
“After all the places she travelled. Syria. Darfur. That hurts us so much.”
She pours the mixture into the cake tin. “She’d never have wanted to be MP for any other constituency. Only here. We thought she’d be safe.”
Kim puts down her tea. “How can you reconcile that?” she says. “I went back to that street quite quickly to take back where we live. And out of respect for the innocent, good people who were witnesses who had to go back to their places of work every day and relive that.”
She shakes her head. “Why would anyone want to hurt Jo? I still can’t believe it. Maybe I never will.”
Food is a perfect way to remember Jo, a terrible cook so active she was always hungry.
Her family home was a houseboat in