I fear being killed like Jo, says sister who became MP
THE sister of murdered MP Jo Cox admits she may be targeted by extremists after entering Parliament – but 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 seat last year.
She says: ‘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. What I do know is politics needs good people and I refuse to be scared of getting involved.’
Ms Cox was shot and stabbed by Kilmarnock-born Thomas Mair six years ago as she walked to a meeting with constituents. She was 41.
Ms Leadbeater, 45, stood for Labour in the same West Yorkshire seat, Batley and Spen, in July, securing a 323-vote victory. She says the killing of Tory MP Sir David Amess at his Essex constituency surgery in October ‘had a very profound effect on me’, adding: ‘We all couldn’t believe this had happened again.’
Mair, a white supremacist who shouted ‘Britain first’ as he attacked Ms Cox, was convicted of murder in 2016 and sentenced to life in jail.
While Ms Leadbeater agrees her sister’s death brought her to Westminster, they had very different personalities, and she insists: ‘I will do things my way.’