To those of us of a certain age, the first memory of David Amess cropped up in the small hours of election night in 1992, when his remarkably solid victory in supposedly marginal Basildon signalled that—despite the polls—John Major was going to win a fourth Conservative term. Later he moved to a Southend seat, and just like another of the town’s noted MPs, Teddy Taylor, he combined some strident right-wing views (on Europe and capital punishment) with real passion and compassion when it came to animal welfare.
Suddenly, of course, none of this matters—all that does is that a father of five was going about his work before being murdered in cold blood. The first thought is, and has to be, the human one—for the man and his family.
But as well as a human being, David Amess was a public figure, and as well as a human tragedy this is an ugly event for our public life. What I found myself writing in the Guardian on the day of Jo Cox’s murder bears repeating: the line between civilisation and barbarism is thinner than we might like to think.
It is routine to decry politicians as “out of touch,” and yet—as the FT’s Jim Pickard reminded us today—we have in this century seen far too many of these sorts of attacks: not just the assassination of Cox, but the 2010 double-stabbing of Stephen Timms and the murder of Nigel Jones MP’s assistant at the constituency office in 2000. Amess was at an advertised constituency surgery. Politicians advertise their whereabouts and availability precisely because they feel a duty to be in touch. We should salute them for it, and hope that attacks like that on Amess don’t end up driving them to become more remote from their communities. That temptation to hunker down behind closed doors will now be strong, and indeed reasonable at the individual level. For our collective politics, though, it would be a great loss: a retreat guaranteed to widen the gulf between the governing and the governed.
There’s something we should all do. As I write, I don’t know if there was any intelligible motive at all for this particular murder, but I do know that the tendency to demonise and dehumanise that is such a feature of online discourse can only ramp up the risks of violent attack. We are lucky to have politicians whose inclination is to open themselves up to the public. It is incumbent on the rest of us not to say or write anything that could ever lead anyone to forget that politicians are people too.
