How the murder of my sister, Jo Cox, changed Britain
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This is The Guardian.
Today, 10 years on, Kim Ledbeater on the murder of her sister, the MP Jo Cox.
On the 16th of June, we were at home and we were about to watch football. But I'd taken my car in for an MOT and I was trying to be all healthy and I ran down to collect my car from the garage. And just as I arrived at the garage, my phone rung and I got the call saying that Joe had been attacked.
Reports of a stabbing, reports of a shooting in Burstall near Leeds. And we do know that the Labour MP Joe Cox has been injured. She has been airlifted to hospital in Leeds, still awaiting...
What happened on the day Jo Cox was murdered?
And to be quite honest, I don't remember a great deal after that moment. I remember I started shaking and I just couldn't stop shaking. And instinctively, I knew this was not good. And I don't know if that's a sister thing. I don't know if it's just an instinct thing. I don't know what it was, but I just knew straight away. I remember saying to my partner, who was saying, as people do, it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay. And I just remember saying, I just don't think it's going to be okay. And I sort of knew.
Just before one o'clock today, Jo Cox, MP for Batley and Spenborough, was attacked in Market Street, Burstall. I am now very sad to have to report that she has died as a result of her injuries. Before going into further detail, I would like to express our deepest sympathies to her family and friends at this tragic time.
To be honest, I probably don't remember a huge amount about the next six to 12 months because it's all a bit of a blur. And I think your body and your mind just go into autopilot. They go into self-protection, self-preservation. We obviously had to deal with the first few days, weeks and months. And look, everybody loses people. We all have our own experiences of death and loss and bereavement. But what happened to Jo was just unbelievably horrific and so incredibly public that literally within hours, the world's media descended on Burstel and us as a family.
Jo Cox was a Labour MP for Batley & Spen, the place she'd grown up and known her whole life. She was firmly pro-Europe. a passionate campaigner for social justice and the mother of two young children who were five and three years old. On the 16th of June 2016, at the height of a toxic Brexit campaign, Jo was murdered by a far-right extremist. He shot and stabbed her several times outside Burstall Library in West Yorkshire, shouting, this is for Britain. She was 41 years old.
And all I remember thinking was, I've just got to look after my mum and dad and do whatever I can for Jo's kids during that time. And for our community, because, you know, people talk about us as a family, but our whole community was literally shaken by what happened to Jo. And so many people were impacted by that day, not just us. The shopkeepers, the witnesses, the people who were there, the people who'd worked with Jo while she was an MP, people who, you know, we hadn't heard from for years, saw it on the news. So we ended up doing this massive press conference in Bristol And this was me, like I'd never done anything like that before in my life.
They came, they said, because they wanted to focus on that which unites us and not which divides us. Jo Cox's father, her mother and sister.
There are some things in life you should never have to do. Last night I had to go and identify my sister's body. Yes, this was Jo Cox MP, and she was many things to many people in her too short life. But she was my sister, my only sibling, my parents' firstborn child, a wife and a mum.
I think it says something about your family and your need and drive to do that. But one of the things that really stood out is that she begged her staff to leave and to escape and said, I think the quote was, get away, get away you two, let him hurt me, don't let him hurt you.
Those were her last words. That is who Jo was. Jo was an incredibly selfless, lovely, kind, compassionate person. She was full of nothing but goodness. And she'd spent years working in humanitarian organisations around the world in some of the world's worst war zones and, you know, really dangerous places, often which she didn't tell us about as a family.
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