I fear being targeted like Jo, says sister who took her place as MP
THE sister of murdered MP Jo Cox has spoken of her fears that she too may be targeted by violent extremists now that she has entered Parliament – but says she refuses to be scared because ‘politics needs good people’.
Kim Leadbeater’s defiant words come in a candid interview with today’s You magazine, in which she discusses her ‘emotionally loaded’ decision to stand in her sister’s former parliamentary seat last year.
She says: ‘My fear was more for my family, that if something were to happen to me, the impact on my parents and on Jo’s kids having to go through that again would just be unimaginably horrific. People will say lightning doesn’t strike twice, but I really don’t know if I am more or less vulnerable because of what happened.
‘I am incredibly careful though, and very well looked after by the police. What I do know is that politics needs good people and I refuse to be scared of getting involved.’
Jo was shot and stabbed by far-Right fanatic Thomas Mair six years ago as she walked to a meeting with constituents. She was just 41.
Kim, 29, stood for Labour in the same West Yorkshire seat, Batley and Spen, last July and won a narrow 323-vote victory. She says the killing of Tory MP Sir David Amess at his Essex constituency surgery last October ‘had a very profound effect on me’, adding: ‘We all couldn’t believe this had happened again.
‘I was visiting a local school that day, then reports started to come through that an MP had been attacked, and then that he was dead. The police took me straight home, as I tried to call Clare [her partner] and my mum to let them know I was OK, knowing that they would see it on the news and be very worried.
‘I felt like I’d been plunged right back to June 2016, to those emotions of shock, disbelief, grief.
‘And knowing the awful journey his family were embarking on from that day onwards, for the rest of their lives. I know their suffering because as a family we have lived it too.’
Mair, a white supremacist who was obsessed with Nazism and shouted ‘Britain first’ as he attacked the MP, was convicted of murder in November 2016 and sentenced to life imprisonment. A by-election after Jo’s death, which was not contested by the other major parties, was won by former Coronation Street actress Tracy Brabin, but she stepped down last year to become Mayor of West Yorkshire.
While Ms Leadbeater agrees that it was Jo’s death that brought her to Westminster, she insists: ‘Now I am here, I will do things my way.’
She adds she and Jo were very different personality-wise but had very similar values instilled in them by their parents.
‘I think about Jo every single day – I will never stop missing her,’ she adds. ‘There is a void that can never be filled.
‘On the days when I feel nervous, still getting to grips with this job, and wondering am I good enough, I hear her voice telling me, “Kim, you are.”’
‘Politics needs good people and I refuse to be scared of taking part’