What can one helpfully say? I did not know the late MP for Batley and Spen. It adds an edge to regret when a person’s great virtue is made famous only by the infamy of their demise. We can say only that this is a horrible, horrible thing, it has touched everybody, and her husband and children have a nation’s love. We wish we’d known her; now it’s too late.
What I want to say next is not meant to detract from this. Or from the sincerity of people who have laid flowers in her memory; or the impulse which brought David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn together in Yorkshire yesterday; or the tweets by people who want to show that they respect the efforts of their MPs, even when they did not vote for them; or even by the sense that parts of our political life have been befouled and that this unnecessary, bitter referendum has made the mood worse. All this is true and all this is a reason why people who don’t often cry found themselves crying.
But still, I hesitate. The urge to find a pattern in this cruel event is real, and the pattern is not hard to picture if you try, but this does not make the pattern real. The sharp horror of an event can lead us to believe there must be a matching, sharply defined cause, and that a sharp response must follow. But sometimes things can be both awful and meaningless. This outrage, to me, is one of them.
The MP’s murder teaches us nothing about the security problems with MPs’ constituency surgeries — or nothing we didn’t already know. When I became an MP 37 years ago I sat alone in my surgery office as a doctor might — my agent acting as my receptionist outside. It’s questionable whether that was a good idea, even then, and I remember my agent’s anxiety whenever a constituent known to be volatile was ushered in. What happened to Jo Cox could have happened at any time, and did most recently only six years ago, to Stephen Timms, MP, who survived. We must take what security measures we think necessary.
A more incendiary lesson has been drawn by some, including some columnists. You will hear it half-alleged everywhere. Let’s spit it out. People are suggesting that the Leave campaign, albeit unintentionally, stirred the furies that may have grown in the breast of Jo Cox’s assailant. It’s implied they have whipped up an atmosphere of paranoid dislike of immigrants and other European nations; and a hatred of the “Westminster elite” who are said to be complicit in the weakening of our British nationhood; an elite (of which the late MP wa
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