Inside Kim Leadbeater’s office in Parliament, ‘five’ and ‘zero’ helium balloons are gently deflating. They are a reminder of the weekend the Labour MP for Spen Valley has just had in Harrogate celebrating her birthday, but also carry a more poignant memory.
Ten years ago, Kim’s sister Jo Cox was the star guest, arriving last minute from Parliament, throwing off her MP’s suit and embracing the party spirit in a neon tutu. “We had so much fun that weekend,” Kim says. “Jo wasn’t an MP, she was just Jo. We’d rented a big house in North Yorkshire, and we were in 80s fancy dress. Jo wore a tutu, and we sang ‘I Know Him So Well’, our karaoke song, together.”
Kim’s 40th birthday was on May 1, 2016. Six weeks later, arriving for a regular constituency surgery in a library in the community she and Kim had grown up in, Jo was was murdered by a Far Right extremist.
Her family went from sitting down together to watch the England-Wales Euros game, to being plunged into a nightmare from which they have never emerged. “I haven’t been able to grieve,” Kim tells me now, 10 years later. “We just had to keep going forward, through the pain of it, through the trial. I needed to be there for my parents and for Jo’s kids. Even now I think, if I stop to grieve I might just fall apart.”
Ten years on, it is glaringly obvious that Jo’s murder has not been the watershed we all wished it could be. In June 2026, two acts of gross violence have been ruthlessly exploited by Far Right agitators. Belfast has seen families hunted down by race, there have been racist attacks in Glasgow, and families in Southampton remain frightened, after orchestrated violence.
“When Jo was killed, it should have been the end – and the start of something different,” Kim says, now. “And for a moment it felt like that might be the case. But at this moment things are worse than ever. Believe me, I really do understand anger. But we all have a choice as to what you do with that anger. It would be really easy for me to want to hate every individual who looked like the individual who took my sister’s life. I chose not to do that because that act was his and his alone.”
I remember seeing Jo tearing through this same building in Parliament, after she had been elected in May 2015. Now, it’s Kim – who five years after her murder, stepped into her sister’s shoes – who has an office at Portcullis House. For a decade, Kim and the rest of her extraordinary family have done everything they can to live by Jo’s ‘More In Common’ optimism, spreading love through national campaigns like The Great Get Together. But this tenth year feels different.
“Every day is awful without Jo,” the former fitness instructor says, speaking frankly. “The tenth anniversary will be no different. But this year, I think we need to talk more about what is happening in the country. We’ve done such a powerful job as a family and as Jo’s friends to remember the good things, and to do good things – but what we haven’t done is talked about the fact she was killed by a right-wing fascist neo-Nazi.
“So I want to talk about that this year. I don’t mean talking about him – we have never talked about him or even named him. But we need to start talking about the context.” During her own time in Parliament, Kim has not lived in her big sister’s shadow. Today, she is widely known as the MP who fought for an Assisted Dying Bill. In the process, Kim has had to live every one of the values she and Jo tried to bring to politics – in trying to disagree well.
“I do try to find common ground with people,” Kim says. “Jo and I were brought up like that. And sometimes to agree to disagree.” The Bill means she is regularly stopped, she says, by people who want to talk to about dying. It must be hard to talk to people constantly about death when she had been unable to grieve? “It is hard,” she agrees, “but it is such a human issue – and we don’t talk about death enough. We are all going to die.”
Her passion on the issue is palpable, and I wondered if it had something to do with her sister’s death – that Jo had not died with dignity. “Well, it’s about choice,” she says, after a pause. “All the bill is asking is for a choice. Jo didn’t have a choice.”
The June sunshine and the approaching World Cup are echoes of that moment in June 2016 when the world seemed to turn on its head. “I can’t really remember that time,” Kim says. “It’s a blur. I was just on autopilot. I had to be there for my mum and dad, and for Jo’s kids.
“So, we threw ourselves into the good stuff. Her government strategy on loneliness, supporting the White Helmets, More in Common, the Jo Cox Foundation, the Jo Cox run, the Jo Cox bike ride… It’s been the worst of humanity followed by the best of humanity.”
This week, has been full of privileges Kim says she wished she had never had. She gave a lecture at Jo’s old Cambridge college, Pembroke and spoke at Downing Street alongside the Prime Minister. In her speech she said that “perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay to Jo is not merely to repeat her words, but to live by them”.
Kim knows that people often find her and Jo very similar. “We were very similar, growing up,” she says. “We had the same values, and the same friendship group. We both loved school, we loved sport, and having a good time. We loved going out for drinks when were old enough.
“But Jo was also very shy. I think people don’t always know that. She had to work very hard on public speaking. I was always much more confident when we were children.” Like her sister, Kim can never stay serious for long, and she sees me looking at the copy of Vogue on her desk, which carries an interview with her. We both know what Jo would have made of seeing her little sister in Vogue.
“Jo would have found it absolutely hilarious!” she says, with a big laugh. “As I do! It is bloody hilarious. I’ve never had the least interest in fashion and clothes. I’m not built for being a fashionista, all the clothes are for tall people. I’m literally wearing a charity shop shoes, dress and jacket!”
Perhaps it is Kim’s voice, so similar in warmth to her sister’s, but for a moment it is easy to imagine Jo is still here in the building – still sharing an office with her old friend Stephen Kinnock, who laughingly put up with her cycling gear, and babysat her young children while she voted.
Kim, it turns out, often has the the same thought. “Jo was killed on Thursday 16th June 2016,” Kim says. “That weekend I was due to go to an open day at Leeds Beckett University for a Master’s degree. And I suppose that in that future I never would have been an MP.”
She smiles. “Or maybe… well, just maybe there would have been the boundary changes, and Jo might have persuaded me to stand for the other local seat – because she was always trying to get me to do something in politics, and she was very persuasive – to become the neighbouring MP.
“She’d have been the MP for Dewsbury and Batley and I would have represented Spen Valley. We’d have both been representing our home and the area we love.” The lost possibility of this parallel world seems unbearably sad, but Kim shakes her head. “It makes me happy to think about that,” she says. “Thinking of us both here.”
She looks out of the window, where tourists’ cameras flash from boats viewing Parliament from the River Thames. “But I have gone on my own journey, instead.”
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