Tributes: Sir David Amess MP

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I will pay a very brief tribute to David, based on 32 years of shared friendship in the other place. As my noble friend Lord Howard said, he was basically loyal to his party. Speaking as a former Chief Whip, of the 876 votes in the 2010 Parliament, David supported the Government 97.6% of the time. No one could complain about that. However, he was a man of strong principle, impervious to the bait of ministerial office, as my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke said.

When he voted against the Government, he did so on a matter of principle. Your Lordships might be interested to hear that he voted against the Government on the House of Lords Reform Bill in 2011. He also voted against military action against Syria, when the Government were defeated, and he opposed the badger cull, animal welfare being one of his special subjects. More recently, he actually voted against the Government on leaseholder compensation post the Grenfell tragedy, on which many of us may share his views.

His sunny optimism, revealed by that broad smile, his basic decency, his generosity and his modesty made him a great colleague. We would see him walking briskly from engagement to engagement with a sheaf of papers under his arm, his timetable fractured both here and in Southend by his willingness to stop and talk to colleagues. The shadow Leader mentioned his insistence that the House of Commons should not adjourn for the Christmas Recess until it had answered 18 issues of great importance to the burghers of Southend. Just pity the Leader of the House replying to that debate.

I mention one other factor about David. He was generous with his time and happy to visit and speak in the constituencies of Conservative MPs—an obligation often overlooked by his more self-important colleagues. He was also capable of mischief. He once came to North West Hampshire, and the convention is that the visiting speaker pays a glowing tribute to the industry and energy of the incumbent, however well founded in truth that may be. But there was none of that from David. “Great to be here in George’s patch,” he began, “but I don’t want to waste time talking about him. I want to tell you about myself.”

Reading and listening to the tributes paid to David over the weekend, I asked myself whether people would join the dots and link the tributes we are paying to David today with those we paid last week to James Brokenshire and those we paid earlier to Jo Cox. I realised that those public servants, whom fate has cruelly taken from us too early, were between them more representative of this country’s often-abused public servants than the bad apples who get us unfavourable publicity. David’s family has expressed the hope that some good should come from this tragedy. David was essentially a generous man, and he would not mind sharing some of the tributes to him more broadly if it helped to change the perception of the profession to which he has selflessly given his life.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I was also elected in 1983, but I first discovered Sir David’s fundamental decency, integrity and courtesy when I was a junior Whip. Later, I was David’s Chief Whip for four years. I held him in the highest regard because he was the sort of MP we Chief Whips liked and rated—not because he sycophantically voted for us 96% or 97% of the time, but because he always told us well in advance on the 3% of occasions when he could not because his conscience and constituency priorities prevailed. Chief Whips can live with MPs who have that level of courtesy and decency.

As has been said, he was deeply religious. That clearly influenced his views on political issues, but he was always capable of seeing the other point of view. He always disagreed with the viewpoint, not the person making it; that is a sign of greatness and generosity of spirit. He followed the great commandment of Jesus to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. Well, David loved 70,000 neighbours —all his constituents in Southend West—and people further afield in the UK and even further afield around the world, as has been said. In fact, those suffering in the world were David’s neighbours—and not just people; as the great hymn by Cecil Alexander says:

“All things bright and beautiful,


All creatures great and small,

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.”

If the Lord God made them, David Amess defended them.

I say this carefully: I think that David died a Christian martyr. I mean “martyr” in the proper Greek derivation of the term meaning a witness and nothing else. He died a witness to his belief in the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity and to their practical realisation, including in working for others until the very end. He did his duty to his God, his family, his constituency and his country. What truer passport is there to eternal life? I am reminded of the opening to the anthem “In Paradisum”, which was sung at the funeral of Lady Thatcher. It begins:

“May the angels lead you into paradise”—


but there will be no resting in peace for David Amess in paradise, for even now he will be campaigning among the angels and archangels for heaven to be granted city status.

I pass on my sincere condolences to Lady Amess, David’s children and all those others who may have been traumatised by his awful murder. It was a privilege to know him and I really liked serving with him.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, there is one aspect of Sir David’s work that is perhaps not widely known. Every year for the last 30 years, he took into his office a young American student from the Catholic University of America. I had the honour of arranging the programmes over those years, so I worked closely with him. He gave those young people a wonderful insight into British parliamentary democracy. Those young people, who had perhaps met the Senators or Congressmen they had worked for on the Hill only once in a three or four-month period, saw Sir David every day. He took them to his constituency. They saw at first hand what it meant to be personally represented. They all benefited from that experience, and he made an intangible contribution to British-American relations in the process.