Sir David’s compassion for all reached across divisions
‘Ican’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to turning the tables on you,” he chuckled with that characteristic glint in his eye. Those were the last words Sir David Amess spoke to me at the Conservative party conference earlier this month. He trotted off chuckling to himself.
On Friday night, I had been due to be the guest speaker at a dinner organised by Southend West Conservatives, where David was going to quiz me about, well, anything he fancied. It wasn’t to be.
At 12.29pm on Friday I was on my way to lunch when I received an email from the organiser of the Southend West Conservatives event. I quickly read the contents and exclaimed “Oh my God” in horror. She had explained that David had been stabbed multiple times, but she didn’t know his condition. She was adamant that David would want the event to go ahead. I thought she must have missed out the word ‘not’. She was right, though. He would have. But as time passed, the fact that he was being tended to by medics at the scene rather than having been taken to hospital made me fear the worst. And so it came to be.
It was a speaking engagement I would never fulfil.
David was elected to the House of Commons in the Thatcher landslide of 1983, at the age of 31. Nowadays, it would not be unusual for someone from an East End working class background to be elected as a Conservative MP. In those days, it was more of a rarity. He blazed the trail for others, as he did so often during his 38-year parliamentary career.
I first met him not long after he was elected, when I was working as a researcher for his Conservative colleague Patrick Thompson. I was only 10 years younger than him, and we immediately hit it off, bonded by a mutual love of West Ham United and Margaret Thatcher. He never lost that puppyish, youthful demeanour, nor the thought that he couldn’t quite believe he was a Member of Parliament and doing his dream job.
He died doing the job he loved – helping his constituents.
But it wasn’t just them that he inspired. His fellow Essex MP Kemi Badenoch told me yesterday: “He lived
to make others happy. That was him. He sent so many people words of encouragement. He lived to make his colleagues happy. If you got a promotion, he wrote congratulations. If you got sacked, he wrote to commiserate and say how fantastic you were. Just a fabulous man. He was like a godfather to us new Essex MPs.”
The former Corbyn-supporting Labour MP Chris Williamson, who has been expelled from the Labour Party,
‘If you got promotion he wrote congratulations. If you got sacked he wrote to commiserate. Fabulous man’
also paid tribute, tweeting: “When I was suspended from Labour, he sent me a private message, as he did when I lost my seat.” That was the mark of the man. Compassion for all, even his most vociferous of opponents.
A friend of mine just emailed me to say: “When I was younger I was very anti-Tory. David was one of the first people I realised you could be a lovely, kind person, but not have politics I agreed with.”
David would have loved that.
He was a great campaigner on all sorts of issues, but particularly animal welfare and raising awareness of the medical condition endometriosis. If you were a Labour MP wanting to run a campaign, you knew that if you got David onside, your campaign was more likely to succeed. His decade-long campaign to get a statue erected to commemorate Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, ended in success in 1997, and was a model of how to use the art of persuasion, cajoling – and sometimes shaming – to get your way.
When booking MPs to come on my radio show, sometimes young producers get short shrift from politicians. Not from David. My producer Corey Froggatt tells me: “Whenever we spoke to Sir David Amess on LBC, he was unfailingly kind and warm to everyone backstage. A properly decent bloke. My thoughts go out to his parliamentary team – my memory of Sir David will always be him laughing with them like they were family.” And that’s what they were. They loved him.
His former researcher, Ed Holmes, tweeted: “When he heard someone he knew in the constituency was seriously ill, he would call everyone he could think of. I remember listening to him late into the evening on the phone to some of the most senior medics in the land – nagging, cajoling, pleading for them to intervene. Even when they were clearly fed up of him – and even when it was clearly a hopeless case – David never stopped trying. No votes to be had, no cameras in sight. I think that’s when I admired him the most.”
David was not alone in this kind of ‘“go the extra mile” service and perhaps those of us in the media should think a bit more about covering this aspect of politicians’ lives and work, rather than just reporting the disagreements and rows.
Despite being a Parliamentary Private Secretary to Michael Portillo for 10 years, David never made it to ministerial office, something I never really understood. I quizzed him about this in May, in an interview about his book Ayes & Ears. “I wasn’t driven by ambition,” he said. “Maybe I should have been pushier.”
The best tribute to David would be for the Government to make his dream come true and make Southend a city – and for a statue of Dame Vera Lynn to be erected on the white cliffs of Dover – something he was leading the campaign for.