Kim Leadbeater, MP: My Sister's Murder and Why I Never Wanted To Go Into Politics

Welcome back to The Rest is Perseverance, the mini-series that we're doing on Perseverance. We're going to be talking to some of the people in the book, and we brought two of them together today because they've been through similar, but as you'll hear, very different experiences. The first is Lindsay Nicholson. Now, Lindsay is one of my oldest, closest friends. I've known her for almost 50 years, and she was married to my best friend in newspapers, a guy called John Merritt. John died aged 35 of a very rare blood cancer at a time when Lindsay was pregnant with her then unborn daughter, Hope. And then, to make matters worse for Lindsay, a few years later, their daughter Ellie died, aged nine, of the same rare cancer. Lots more she's had to contend with. She's had breast cancer. She had a second marriage which ended truly horribly, and with her locked up in a police cell over spurious claims. about assault. So much to deal with, and yet, if you bumped into her on a train, or if you sat down with her today, you'd see somebody very positive, very happy-go-lucky, with a really warm and outgoing look on life. Kim Ledbeater is an MP. She's a Labour MP for Batley & Spen, and prior to that, her sister did that job, Jo Cox, who was murdered in 2016 during the Brexit referendum by a far-right fascist currently serving a long, sentence in jail. And Kim is a remarkable woman. She never wanted to be a politician, but she had, if you like, politics thrust upon her. She's also digging deep in her own reserves of perseverance right now, because she's just tried to get the law changed on assisted dying, and she's failed. Both of them have got extraordinary stories to tell. I'm very pleased that we managed to get them on the sofa together. I think you'll be as inspired to hear them as I am to know them. I've got two women with me today who, I think, epitomise, in many ways, perseverance. One of whom, Lindsay, I've known for almost half a century, a long, long, long time, and who has gone through an awful lot in life. Lost her husband, who was my best friend, while she was pregnant, with their second child, who's Hope. Now a wonderful young woman with her own child, then lost their first daughter, who has had cancer, who has survived a pretty horrible ending to a second marriage, and who, around the same time, lost her job as well. And who, if you met and just bumped into her on a train, you would think was a positive, happy-go-lucky, wonderful human being. And then Kim Ledbeater, who is an MP, and the only reason, Kim is an MP, really, if we boil it down, is because her sister, Jo Cox, who I also knew, was an MP who was murdered during the Brexit referendum. So two extraordinary women who've had very, very different experiences, but who I've put into my book as examples, to me, of the positivity of perseverance. Okay. Now, as Kim looks like she's about to break down crying, I'm going to go, I'm going to go first to you, Lindsay. Okay. When you set out all the bad stuff that happened to you, I sometimes do wonder, even though I know you so well, I do often wonder how you've managed just to keep going. Yeah. I wonder that too. I honestly do. I kind of, sometimes I think like on the way here, I think, yeah, that is quite a lot. The thing is you don't think that at the time. At the time, you are just kind of nose up against the rock face doing what you can do. So I don't, I don't tend to toss it up. I mean, there have been periods that have, as you know, that have been really bad. 2017, most of 2017 was pretty much a write-off for me. I was very, very low. And I think I had the breakdown that I should have had 20 odd years earlier when John and Ellie died and I'd kept going. And then it hit me 2017, and yeah, what can you do? And just John and Ellie, I mean, is there a day you don't think about one or both? Oh, it's not an hour that I don't think about them. They are with me always. I look at their picture last thing at night. And just to those who don't know your story, and by the way, I say in my book, I quote both of your books, which are extraordinary. One, which is about essentially about grief and then the second book really about how you've rebuilt your life since. Just tell, just tell us what actually happened, how they died, when it was. So John and I met when we were very young in our early twenties, around the same time that you met Fiona. And, um, in our early thirties, we both had dream careers, really. John was the chief reporter of the Observer newspaper and we had a daughter, Ellie. And then. John was diagnosed with what was then referred to as leukemia is now a very rare form of blood cancer. He fought it. He was at work one Saturday. He used to go into work in between bouts of chemotherapy and he died on a Monday morning. Ellie was three years old and I was four months pregnant with hope, which was terrible. As you can imagine that you were there, you were there, you know, it was terrible. Um, and I sort of pulled back from that. My friends were really important. My family was really important. My career. I worked in magazines was really important to me. And then absolutely bolt from the blue was that Ellie was diagnosed with the same form of blood cancer when she was nine years old. It is a very rare form of blood cancer. Not much is known about it. It's not known particularly to be inherited. I mean, it's a very rare form of blood cancer. I mean, I remember arriving at great Ormond street and the consultants were running up and down the corridors saying, we've never seen this before. Has she been in contact with any chemicals? You know, they, they couldn't understand it. She fought it for eight months. I stayed with her in hospital, but sadly she died in 1998. So Lindsay, you having lost John to blood cancer and then lost Ellie to blood cancer, then you got breast cancer yourself. Did that frame the way you dealt with it, your prior experience, was it any benefit to you? Was it useful or did you just feel, oh my God, here we go again. Some yet more shit has happened in my life. I assumed I was going to die because in my experience, people had cancer, they died. And so when I was diagnosed, I just thought I was going to die and made preparations for that really. And I hadn't really kind of, I didn't really make the difference between this very rare blood cancer that John and Ellie had suffered from and breast cancer, which amazingly is, is not a hundred percent curable or treatable, but has got much better statistics in its favor. And I'll never forget, I was waiting for my radiation treatment and I'd been waiting an hour and a half in the waiting. And I went up to the receptionist and I said, excuse me. Cause I was magazine editor at the time. Excuse me. Do you know who I am? I've been waiting an hour and a half. And, um, she said, oh, there's much sicker people in front of you. And that was the first time that I realized that I probably wasn't going to die. Oh, some lovely rudeness just to make you feel better. Yeah. I think rudeness sometimes can often bring you back down to earth a bit. We'll come back to all of that. But Kim, when, when Joe died, just talk us through where you were, what you were doing, how you found out. And then kind of how you just coped with it in the immediate. I don't think I have coped with it. And I suppose that's the interesting thing about grief, isn't it? That it looks different for different people and for different circumstances. Um, but for me, I mean, I had, unlike Lindsay, who's had a huge amount of trauma in her life, um, for a prolonged period of time, I'd had 40 years of having a really great life, lovely life, uh, no issues, no major dramas or traumas and things were good. Our family was nothing exceptional. We were a very normal family. I mean, what's normal, but for us, you know, it was, we were, we're just, uh. You're sounding like Andy Burnham, just normal. Just normal from the north. Um, but we were, we were, we were just a normal family growing up in Yorkshire. You know, Joe and I were very close. There were just the two of us as sisters. Uh, we'd got the best parents ever, uh, loving family, loads of mates, good friends. Um, you know, and six weeks before Joe was killed, we just had my 40th birthday and I'd hired a big house up in North Yorkshire. And I got about 25 of my mates to come and we had a massive party celebration and everybody said, oh, Joe won't come. She's an MP now. She'll be doing MP things. And, and actually she did come and we had just the most wonderful weekend. And that's one of my most precious memories of Joe. But six weeks later, she was dead. So I think how I look at loss is at the heart of every loss is you losing that, that person from your life. And then the circumstances of that loss are like the layers of an onion. So everything around that loss depends on what it looks like and feels like. So up until Joe had been murdered, I'd only ever really lost my grandparents. So it was very much the natural order of things. And it was sad. it was upsetting, but I think, you know, my granddad Arthur was 92 when he passed away. So I understood what it was like to lose someone from your life. But, you know, when you lose somebody in, for us, clearly such horrific circumstances, in such public circumstances, and you are thrust into the worlds that we were thrust into as a family, whether that was the media side of it, the politics side of it, the criminal justice side of it, all those different aspects to it just put so many extra layers on it. And knowing that someone you love was murdered intentionally killed. And I think that, again, is very, very different from the tragedy of losing someone to an illness, which is horrific. Jo was killed because of who she was. So you put all those different layers on top of what happened. And I don't think I've processed any of that. I can talk about it. It surprises me how I can talk about it very openly, but I haven't emotionally dealt with it. And I think that's why I'm probably the worst person to have on to talk about grief, because I don't think I have actually grieved. What I've done is just go 100 miles an hour for the last 10 years and trying to create as much positive energy and action as possible from the worst of circumstances. And on the day itself, what does it, because as you say, Lindsay had the illness. You could see people failing and you prepare yourself in a way, even though it's a horrible, horrible shock when it happens. And I'll never forget the day that Ellie died and just how Lindsay just sat there talking to her like she was still alive. It was terrible. It was hot. You know, it's heartbreaking for everybody. But you know, it's a horrible, horrible shock when it happens. And I'll never you've got your situation, like you're literally just going about your business and you get the news, presumably from where, you hear that your sister's been killed. Yeah, I got a phone call saying that she'd been attacked. And for me, I don't quite understand how this would work, but I instinctively knew this was not going to be good news. From that moment on, I remember I started shaking uncontrollably. But again, you do, as Lindsay sort of described, to some degree, you go into autopilot and, you know, right, okay, what do we need to do? What can we do? Because you're in a situation over which you have no control. And so you have to start to think about things that you can control. But to be honest, Alistair, like those first few weeks, months, maybe even the first year is just a blur to me. I haven't dealt with it. Again, as much as I'm able to talk about it, I haven't processed it. But I think for me, I mean, I've always been a sort of a doer. I've always been at, right, let's sort this out. Let's take charge. And I just thought about my parents. I thought about Joe's children. I thought about all the other people who are going to be massively impacted by this. And I thought, right, someone's going to have to be strong in the middle of this. And I think that's going to have to be me. That was for those other people. But I think it's probably also for me as well. Because if I just focus on keeping going, and trying to say and do the right things, then at least that gives me something to sort of think about. But you know, the reality is, look, you've got two people here who've had dreadful things happen in their lives. But sadly, we're not that unique. Things happen to normal human beings every day. You know, I know what happened to Joe was a pretty unique set of circumstances. But people do lose people every day. And people deal with horrendous things happening. I went to the recent first ever National Day for Remembering Victims and Survivors of Terrorism. And I met people in that room who have all had horrific things happen in their lives, just normal people, whether it's the Manchester Arena attack, whether it's, you know, going back 25 years now, 9-11, these things happen to people. And what we see when these horrific things happen is the true strength of human resilience. And it is outstanding. And it's people like that, I think that also inspired me to try and keep going. Just on politics. So, you know, I'm guessing politically, you're gonna have to dig quite deep into your resources of perseverance to get over what's just happened, which is you had a private member's bill, you get drawn in the ballot, in the ballot, you decide to try to get legislation for the assisted dying bill, it goes through all the stages in the Commons, you get these small group of peers in the House of Lords, put down hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of amendments, try to slow the thing up. It's brought back by a colleague of yours in this session of Parliament, and it fails in the House of Commons. So, and we'll maybe talk about the issues, because I know Lindsay's got slightly different views to yours on this. But do you now feel that this is a battle you've lost and therefore you give up? No, far from it. Far from it. I mean, it's an issue that's not going away. And the campaign will absolutely continue. And it's still very raw for me, because as we're recording this, this only happened a few days ago. And I am really struggling with what happened, not on the issue itself. We not got the bill through in 2024 and 2025. I think I would have been accepting of that, because it would have been a fair process. And we would have done all the work that we did. And believe me, hundreds and hundreds of hours went into that bill. And it is an extremely robust piece of legislation, which I would stand by. But what happened recently, was just simply undemocratic. So we did what we needed to do in the House of Commons. We did all that work on it. And I sat up till one o'clock in the morning on the bill committee and met with opponents, you know, had loads and loads of meetings and discussions. The civil servants were outstanding. The people who write legislation were outstanding. You know, this was a very, very thorough process. And we sent that bill to the House of Lords. The House of Commons voted for it twice, as we do. And then, as you say, a relatively small number of people in the House of Lords who are unelected, some of whom were not only unelected, but were actually rejected by the electorate without naming names. And they took it upon themselves to table 1,200 amendments, some of which were at best unnecessary, at worst cruel, saying people would have to have their assisted death filmed, saying they couldn't travel overseas, saying that everybody would have to have a pregnancy test, whether you were a postmenopausal woman or a man. And I sat through those Fridays in the House of Lords. I watched Lord Faulkner, who's become a close friend of mine, go through those debates and deal with some of the crap, quite frankly, that he had to deal with. I got my constituency wrong, some of which I think was probably done intentionally. It was horrible. So we should never have had to go through the Commons again. That's what I'm more cross about now. I'm very respectful of the different views on the issue, very respectful of that. And I always have been. And I've tried to conduct the debate with respect and civility throughout. What I don't understand is why the numbers of Labour MPs who supported you first time round fell. Well, you know, Alistair, politics is about numbers and it was all about turnout. People who couldn't be there for the vote, sadly. So there were trips overseas, there were weddings, there were various reasons why people couldn't be there, which I think, I don't know if that makes it worse, probably, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. But it is a numbers game, isn't it, ultimately? And ultimately, if you think, and we'll probably touch on religion at some point, but if you think that it is not God's will for this law to pass, you will turn out and you'll do everything you can to stop it. And we saw some evidence of that last week. And again, I respect that, but that isn't where the public are. And I cannot tell you the emails, the messages that I have had from people over the last few days saying, A, they're absolutely devastated. B, how dare people choose to take away their choice. Very, very limited set of circumstances. People who've literally got less than six months to live have to have a diagnosis, have to go through various different stages. The reality is lots of people will pass away before they go through those stages because the process is so robust. A lady on the train just folded a little piece of paper up to me on my way back up and I opened it up and she said, thank you so much for everything that you've done. I'm so sorry. It didn't go well today. And that over the edge. So that is where the public are. The argument will not go away. The debate will not go away. The direction of travel internationally is very much that people want this choice. France have just passed legislation. We've got other countries. So yeah, it's still quite raw and I'm deeply, deeply upset. Through the assisted dying debate, either on the policy, but also when it started to get really tough for you personally, are you chatting away in your head? Yeah. I mean, I think when it came to that particular issue, Joe was with me on a number of levels, partly because of how she handled difficult subjects. And again, was always very respectful, always trying to bring people together to hear different opinions and different views. And that's how I operate, but very much how Joe operated. So it was a challenging issue. So I thought about, you know, Joe's style of doing things. But I think also because of my own experiences of death and dying, which we all have, I think the thing for me around losing Joe was like, there was absolutely no control about that situation for, for any of us. And I think what resonated with me with so many families that I met was that they were just asking for control. And when you've lost people in a situation where it is just unbelievably out of control, I think that kind of resonated with me as well. Lindsay, what is it? What's your sort of basic opposition? Actually, I think him and I feel the same way that we think that people should have the best possible care, whatever that looks like. For me, I feel my husband died in the Hammersmith Hospital on a general ward, no privacy curtain. I mean, it was just, it was shocking. Hospices in this country are only a third funded by government, two thirds funded by people selling old jumpers on the high street. I don't think we should be funding hospices like that with old clothes. If we got everything like hospice care, like social care for elderly people, if we, coercive control is very, very underreported in this country and under prosecuted, get all those solved. I'm fine. I'm with it. People do whatever they want. I am concerned, and this will be where I differ with you, that if you had assisted dying, then you wouldn't even get that third of support for hospices that we have now, that the hospice movement would be the ones to suffer. Yeah. And I think the government were very clear that that wouldn't be the case. And again, I really welcome the comments of the prime minister around his focus on palliative care and social care. Absolutely. But you know, government should be clever enough to do all those things together. And what they shouldn't do is penalise a very small number of people, literally less than 1% of deaths who might want to make the choice of having assisted death in their darkest days and their final few months at the expense of doing all those other things as well. We can do all those things. We should be doing all those things. Those were exactly the same arguments that were made 10 years ago when the bill was last debated. So, you know, politicians need to step up and sort all those other things out as well. Of course they do. And we can do all those things. But the other reality is, you know, even with the best palliative care, I've met people with hideous throat cancers, mouth cancers, bowel cancers, pancreatic cancers. They have had good palliative care. They have had pain relief. It cannot meet everybody's needs. And also around the choice and the control element of it. Part of it is about pain for people, but the big thing is about control because they've had everything else in their life taken away from them in terms of the things that they control. They are dying and they know they're going to die. So the comfort and the reassurance that it provides people, and this is how people describe it, of just knowing if they wanted to and about what they're going to do, they're going to do it. And so, you know, we've got to a third of people who start the pathway, don't use it. But if they wanted to, it's there for them to relieve their suffering and to have that control. You know, we can't have the inequity of Dignitas in Switzerland, where if you've got 15 grand, you can go, that's also traumatic, just for the record. I've heard some horrendous stories of that and waving loved ones off in the back of a taxi, you know. So we've got an inequitable and an unacceptable situation as it stands. And that's why four former directors of public prosecutions are supportive of a change in the law. So there's different layers to the argument, the legal, the legal, the legal, the moral. And then there's, of course, the bill. And interestingly, when people have said to me, MPs and other people, well, there's just not enough safeguards. And I said to them, oh, would you like to talk me through which clause you're particularly concerned about? They don't know, because they've not even read it. And that's really disheartening as someone who has spent months and months and months. And I can tell you about clause 12. And I can tell you about clause five. And I can tell you about all the work that went into that bill, because it was bloody hard work. So the narrative and the media have to help with this as well, from people who are ideologically fundamentally opposed. Oh, it's a dreadful bill. It's got no come and sit down. And I said this to everybody in the Commons, in the Lords, come and sit down in a room with me and talk me through what your concerns are. Some people did. Lots of people didn't. This is why you don't like politics. Yeah, it's one of the many reasons, to be honest, Alistair. There's many more as well. Yeah, yeah. Did Jo love politics? Jo loved it. Yeah, Jo did. Yeah, Jo was a very political. I mean, she was politicised sort of during her, we didn't grow up in a political family. So we wouldn't sit around the dinner table talking about, you know, political issues. We always were very focused on, human beings and human issues, but they are all political issues. So I guess I went on my own journey realising that. But when she went to uni, I think that journey sort of started. And then when she went to work in the European Parliament for Glenys Kinnock, you know, she really became much more politicised. But then working in international humanitarian aid organisations, she realised that, you know, you need politics to make a difference on those big international issues as well. So, you know, she, yeah, she was politicised much earlier than I was, I would say. But again, I think. The other thing which I realised later in life is that, as I say, everything is politics. Until we have better political education in schools and beyond, I don't think we're ever going to get the kind of politics that we want, because people just don't understand it. And you'll know from your time spent with MPs, like, the stuff you get in your inbox, a lot of it, 50%, maybe more, is not about being an MP. Like, people think you're a lawyer, they think you're a police officer, they think that you're a counsellor of either type, you know, and that's not their fault. You cannot blame the public. But they've never had it explained to them who does what. And that partly feeds in then to the hostility in politics and public life, because people are angry, because they want answers to their problems. They don't quite know who to go to, and therefore they want to shout at someone. And that's where the work that you do around civility in public life is so important. And the Joe Cox Foundation continues to work on that. You know, and I've tried throughout my five years as an MP to be respectful to everybody, even those that I profoundly disagree with. I've never tried to personalise it. I've never, you know, been rude about people. Maybe I haven't at home, but not publicly, because that's not helpful. Yeah, yeah. But the toxicity. Yeah, I've heard you talk about Michael Gove and Therese Coffey every now and then. I've had a few words. Yeah, I've heard a bit. Privately more than publicly. There is so much that I get into with Kim, Leadbeater and Lindsay, my friend. And this really is one of my favourite interviews that I've ever done. There's some fascinating things coming up on unprocessed grief, on how much Kim's sister. Joe Cox still informs so much of what she does as an MP. I will also get into a agreeable disagreement between Lindsay and Kim on the assisted dying bill. And Lindsay, I should warn you, has a story that is pretty harrowing. But she and Kim are both in their very different ways, incredible examples of what I mean by perseverance. So to hear the rest of the episode and also upcoming interviews, I'm going to have to wait and see. I'm going to have to coming episodes with David Blunkett and Clark Carlyle, the former footballer who several times tried to take his own life and now runs or is head of one of the biggest mental health charities in