Each year, Jo Cox and her husband Brendan welcomed more than 100 guests and their families to their cottage in the countryside to mark the summer solstice — this year’s party was due to happen this weekend, just days before her birthday.
Instead, Brendan Cox issued a dignified statement on Thursday night saying that he and the couple’s two young children were facing “the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love”.
Cox was a Labour rising star, widely regarded as one of the most promising MPs of the 2015 intake. She would have turned 42 on Wednesday, and grew up in Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire, with her mother, Jean, a school secretary, and father, Gordon, who worked in a toothpaste and hairspray factory in Leeds.
She attended the local grammar school and won a place at Cambridge but told the Yorkshire Post in a recent interview: “I never really grew up being political or Labour. It kind of came at Cambridge where it was just a realisation that where you were born mattered, that how you spoke mattered … who you knew mattered. I didn’t really speak right or knew the right people. I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory working where my dad worked and everyone else had gone on a gap year. To be honest, my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years.”
Cox went on to be an aid worker in developing countries and became head of policy at Oxfam. Max Lawson, Oxfam’s current head of policy, who previously worked for Cox, said: “Jo was a brilliant committed activist for social justice with boundless energy and kindness who made a huge contribution at Oxfam.”
Justin Forsyth, the former chief executive of Save the Children and also a Labour adviser, who gave Cox her first big job at Oxfam, described her on Channel 4 as “one of the best of the best” who would be “missed by everyone in the humanitarian and development world.
Cox had also worked as an adviser to Sarah Brown, wife of the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, in her women’s and children’s health campaigns.
As well as campaigning on development and humanitarian causes, Cox had a keen interest in social policy issues, including the future of social care.
She was a committed feminist and had chaired the Labour Women’s Network, which works to try to get more women into parliament, by offering them training, for example.
The network said in a statement : “We are proud to have known her and campaigned with her, and will work tirelessly to keep her memory alive.”
Cox’s husband Brendan advised Gordon Brown on development policy when Labour were in government and recently stepped down as a senior executive at Save the Children.
They have two young children, a boy and a girlCuillen and Lejla. Their home when in London was a boat on the river Thames and they shared what some friends affectionately described as an “eccentric” lifestyle. Others said they were, “hippies at heart”.
Friends said the timing of last year’s election had not been perfect, but when the Batley and Spen seat where she grew up became free, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. While she was campaigning to win the seat, her parents helped to look after her children.
In little more than a year in parliament, Cox had begun to make a name for herself as a campaigning MP, unafraid to take on her own party’s leadership, including a powerful intervention in the debate over whether Labour should back military action in Syria.
She was chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Syria and, while Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was strongly opposed to military action, Cox wrote a joint article with the former Conservative aid secretary Andrew Mitchell, arguing that there was a strong humanitarian case.
The pair argued in the Observer: “There is nothing ethical about standing to one side when civilians are being murdered and maimed. There was no excuse in Bosnia, nor Rwanda and there isn’t now.” She subsequently abstained in the parliamentary vote on the issue.
Lord Wood of Anfield, who knew Cox well, said she worked hard to reach out to those who disagreed with her. “She spent ages and ages buying cups of tea and coffee and trying to create a consensus,” he said. “There’s no one else I know who could have made the progress she did in such a short time.”
Cox’s fellow Labour MP Alison McGovern said: “Jo brought her dedication and her passion both for her home town and for the causes she had fought for all her life to parliament.”
She added that the kind of detailed, knowledgeable parliamentary questions asked by Cox underlined the fact that she used her expertise, including on development issues, to hold the government to account. “She’s that kind of clever, brilliant, committed person who uses parliament to stand up for the people in the world who most need us,” McGovern said.
Cox has been campaigning hard for the remain campaign in next week’s EU referendum. She had used her maiden speech in the Commons to praise the benefits of immigration. She said: “Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir.
“While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”
More recently, she backed Labour’s successful campaign to persuade the government to accept more of the unaccompanied child refugees stranded in Europe by mobilising parliamentary support.
Cox nominated Corbyn before he swept to the leadership of the Labour party last September – though she ultimately voted for the centrist Liz Kendall. She recently wrote a joint article with the new-intake Labour MP Neil Coyle, accusing Corbyn of displaying “weak leadership, poor judgment and a mistaken sense of priorities”.