On the 10th Anniversary of the Murder of my Friend, Jo Cox

You can’t talk about life without talking about friends.

Stu and I were outside, sitting on the crappy plastic chairs that the Portuguese deli had chucked out onto the pavement when the news broke that Jo had been shot and stabbed in the street, about 180 miles North of where we then sat.

Stu is an aficionado of true crime, and not just as a genre. He showed me his phone. ‘It doesn’t look good mate,’ he told me grimly.

Stu explained that because updates on Jo’s condition had stopped being made on the news, what that meant, probably, was that she’d died already and that they were telling the family first before they went live with that.

Then we saw that Jo’s husband Brendan had posted a brand-new photo of Jo on his socials. She was stood in front of their houseboat, and we guessed from that that he’d been told and that this was the image of Jo he wanted to be used through the coming storm.

So it proved.

It was during Euro 2016. The Portuguese deli had wheeled out a big screen for the football, shaded it with a cheapo gazebo, co-opted the pavement. Stu and I were nicking off work to watch England v Wales.

I don’t remember anything about the game.

I do remember taking our daughters that night to their Aikido lesson in the community centre as normal, and the news coming through officially that Jo was dead, and just sitting at the back holding hands and blubbing, my wife walking out so as not to freak the girls.

I do remember that later, my wife and I, in some unusual blast of fiscal maturity, had invited some finance guy round the house to help us draft our Last Will and Testament, and that we went along with the meeting, despite Jo’s death - glazed, obedient, polite; timing being as crucial to tragedy as it is to comedy.

And I do remember that that weekend we’d had a camping trip planned with the kids and some friends and we stubbornly went along, insisting on some level of normality for the benefit of our girls and ourselves, and that unbelievably Brendan, Jo’s husband, turned up coincidentally at the same campsite with his folk band, honouring his own family plans, insisting on some level of normality himself, seeking the succour of friendship.

*

It will be ten years on June 16th, 2026, since the sitting Labour MP Jo Cox was assassinated, just one week before the Brexit referendum that would take the UK out of the EU. I don’t want to touch the political-cultural stuff, rehearse some narrative line that leads from 2016’s troll farms, Brexit bots, and Boris bus to today’s post-truth Makerfield Reformation. There’ll be plenty of people doing that in the coming weeks.

What I also don’t want to do is talk about the inadequate person that killed Jo, the confused misogynist that murdered her in the street. I don’t remember that person’s name. Proper nouns are best used elsewhere.

Really, I just want to say some things about Jo as a mate, some unconnected things probably about her friends, just record a few things before they get lost in the wind. You can’t talk about your life without talking about your friends.

*

Jo grew up eight miles from where I grew up in West Yorkshire, but we didn’t meet then. Jo went to the same university as me at the same time, but we didn’t meet then.

Where we did meet was in Brussels. I was a trailing spouse as my wife worked for the European Commission, and Jo was an assistant to Glenys Kinnock, then Member of the European Parliament, and she was already wired into the whole Labour machine.

Brussels, clearly, was super political and a hotbed for smart kids going places. This was Jo. She was funny, smart, and twinkly and - despite me being the cliched aloof Steppenwolf writer guy - we got on. It helped that we were both working-class kids from Yorkshire. It helped that she also supported Leeds United who we referred to as The Leeds, and who we’d watch together on satellite TV in the ex-pat bars.

You’ll have seen that at the top of this piece there’s a photo of Jo and me gleefully talking shit at the wedding of our friends Joanna and Hywel, in Brussels, in 2002 maybe I’d guess. Our friend Lucy is in the background talking to my wife, her back to us. I’m wearing some moth-eaten Paul Smith suit that my friend Andy gave me a few years before. This is the only photo I have of Jo and me together. Thanks to Joanna for sending it.

We met Jo before she married Brendan Cox, when was called Jo Leadbeater. And so she’ll always in my mind be called by her nickname, The Beater, which I think is a name that our friend Danny came up with.

What else to tell you?

The Beater was a minx. She liked a drink. I have this memory of drinking White Russians with her round our mate Paul’s, watching England beat Denmark in the World Cup in 2002. Why are so many of my memories of her to do with football? And not just of her, I remember watching England beat Sweden at the World Cup, with Kim, her sister, two years after Jo was killed.

After Brussels, my wife and I ended up living in Oxford and Jo pitched up there too, living with us in our tiny flat overlooking the Thames for a few weeks before she got herself sorted. Then we’d bike over to see Jo for dinner after she’d bought her first house in the city, and it was always, always jacket potatoes. She was a crumby chef.

What else?

She came to our wedding; we went to hers.

Jo had velocity.

She would reminisce about her hometown’s crap nightclub, The Frontier, which she called T’tier.

My wife knew Jo much better than me, worked with her, was amazed at how quickly Jo mastered a brief, deleted the associated emails, moved ever forwards.

The Beater was irrepressible, had bouncebackability. The day after the 2010 general election when Labour got shut out by the infamous Liberal-Conservative coalition she texted me to say - tough night. we go again! She became an MP at the next election.

I can maybe be a bit cold hearted and once Jo said to me, ‘I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of you’. Don’t worry - you didn’t.

Our friend Joanna campaigned to have a square named after Jo in Brussels, which came through in 2018. We took our daughters in 2019 and just kind of slumped there and cried. It’s quite something, to have a square named after you. A plank across the volcano.

What else? My wife’s friend Jamie, who performs magic in refugee camps to cheer up kids, planted a load of trees for Jo in an Oxfordshire village, where we planted a load of trees too. I haven’t been there for ages. I should make the time.

I still pass that house Jo bought in Oxford, when I drive up Between Towns Road, taking my kids on a TK Maxx odyssey as I did this week, and every time I think about The Beater and her jacket spuds and watching The Leeds, and I try not to think about how scared she must have been in the road.

I’m quite screwed up about it still. I haven’t dealt with it, I’m sure. Not exactly sure how to - a mate being assassinated is dissimilar to other things that happen.

I loved those Portuguese deli lads: the smiley one and the grumpy one. Brothers. Grafters. Nodes. The deli’s gone now but I still see the smiley one round town, driving the buses. I haven’t seen Stu for ages.

If I had to guess, I’d say our friend Paul loved Jo most of all.