Tributes: Sir David Amess MP

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Although I have no doubt that measures can be taken to improve the security and safety of Members of Parliament, I hope that nothing will be done to weaken the links between Members and their constituents, in which surgeries play such an important part. That would be the very opposite of the legacy which David Amess so richly deserves.

[Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)]

My Lords, I knew David Amess when he first came in because I was elected before him. For nearly 40 years, I was on good and friendly terms with him as a parliamentary colleague. I am as shocked as anybody in this House that such a man should come to such a terrible end.

We are all saying the same things about him and the tributes that were paid publicly last week by various people repeated the same points. As others will wish to join in, I will not repeat them all. The reason is that on this occasion the things are all true. We have a very good convention in this country that if you have to pay tribute to someone when they die, you find something polite to say. I have heard people say very moving things about people whom I know they thought privately were rather nasty pieces of work, but they were sympathetic when they died.

With David Amess, as everybody has said—and for the sake of others I will not just repeat it all—the first words that come to mind, or variants of them, when you think of him is that he was a very nice man. I cannot believe that a man like that ever had an enemy and that applied to his political life as much as to his private life. People from across the other side of the aisle from him, people from different parties who disagreed profoundly with him, have said these things. I, too, was a Conservative but it cannot be said that David and I were on the same wing of the broad coalition—as it is with all political parties in this country—that is the Conservative Party. He was a very fierce Eurosceptic. He was a great supporter of capital punishment. These are opinions which, to put it lightly, I do not share.

He was one of that group—the majority of British politicians—who would never have dreamed of allowing political disagreement to interfere with personal friendship. He respected the true right of free speech in a free society, which is that you respect the integrity and the sincerity of the person with whom you are having an argument and you maintain civilised dialogue. He was also an enthusiast—a hard-working, enthusiastic Back-Bencher who never betrayed the slightest interest in being such a keen party man that he was seeking preferment.

He always had campaigns. I shall not list the ones that I have encountered over the years but, at any given stage, he pursued quite a lot of campaigns, and he pursued them all with the same energy and enthusiasm. His personality was always amusing and engaging, and it was one of the things that forwarded what he was trying to argue for and helped recruitment to it.

I join noble Lords in all sympathies to his family, and I agree that the tragedy of this latest disaster for our democracy and our Parliament is that the victim is one of the very nicest political practitioners of any political view that I, and most of us, have encountered. It is a truly moving occasion.

On the wider aspects, you can never make controversial figures such as Members of Parliament totally safe—there is an element of minor and quite acceptable degree of risk for any Member of Parliament, however obscure and quiet. We have always had a fringe of violence in recent years; people have talked of the most recent four knife attacks, all by lunatic madmen. I think that through my time in the House of Commons I lost about six of my colleagues, who were killed by IRA terrorists and others. The most well-known occasions were the Brighton bomb and the murder of Airey Neave in the Palace of Westminster. There were others—I have not counted them all. We have to have precautions, and we have always had to have them. When I was a controversial and prominent figure, there were several weeks when the Nottinghamshire police advised me that they would like to have a Special Branch policeman sitting in the outer office of my surgery. Nothing ever came of it. The death threats that I got were usually from harmless lunatics who were just trying to frighten or offend me. But to a certain extent, it is difficult to minimise. I fear that, whereas the IRA was at least predictable, had a coherent political agenda and was determined to use terrorist violence to advance it, nowadays it is loners, fanatics and madmen, people with perverted views of their own, and it is very difficult to guarantee security against such people.

I shall only echo what everybody else has said about the contribution that political debate can make. The deteriorating tone of debate over the last 10 or 20 years is somehow encouraging these mad loners to start emerging and becoming active. There is an absurd cynicism among the public towards the political class. I fear that if you told the majority of the public in casual conversation that most MPs were crooks and only in it for what they were getting out of it, and it does not matter who you vote for, they would agree, although it is a bizarre, ridiculous and untrue allegation. Standards of honesty in the House of Commons are rather higher on average than the standards of honesty among the general public—although all groups have scoundrels, and the House of Commons has always had one or two.

The public exchange of views has become nastier and simpler. Politicians themselves are partly to blame, but social media has had a dreadful effect on the tone of debate, and the media give more courage to the lunatic fringe on the edge of perfectly good lobbies than they do to the people arguing the cause. As parliamentarians, we all have to maintain the standards, as we undoubtedly do, and mourn the loss of a very great, very nice and hard-working parliamentarian.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

I associate myself with the remarks of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, particularly about the declining standard of political debate. He is also right to remind us of the high price that so many in politics have to pay. I was elected to the House of Commons in 1979 on the very day before Airey Neave was murdered in the precincts of Parliament. It was with profound and aching sorrow that I heard the shocking news on Friday that Sir David Amess MP had been murdered. Over the past 40 years, David and I had become close friends, and I shared many platforms with him, in his constituency and elsewhere.

We both had our working-class origins in the East End of London and, indeed, were baptised within a year of one another in the same church by the same Franciscan priest. He often joked that there must have been something in the holy water. His faith was in his DNA, and it animated his belief in public service and the principle of duty.

I first met David when he came into the House in 1983. From across the House, we joined forces in taking up the case of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jewish lives from the Nazis. In 1997, thanks to David’s assiduous campaign, a statue was erected to Wallenberg outside the Western Marble Arch Synagogue. There were other campaigns, about Soviet Jewry and the plight of Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Russian Orthodox dissident. We frequently shared platforms to highlight the persecution of people because of their religion or belief or human rights violations, especially—as we have heard from others—the situation in Iran.

David’s faith informed his passionate commitment to the very right to life, human dignity and the common good. But it was also rooted in his absolute conviction that an MP’s first priority was to their constituents. It was the death of a constituent from hypothermia which led to his successful Private Member’s Bill on fuel poverty.

Just a few weeks ago, David asked me to take part in the launch of his memoir, Ayes & Ears. Typical of David’s kindness and generosity, as we heard from the Leader of the House, the proceeds of the book were dedicated to three charities: Endometriosis UK, Prost8 and the Leigh-on-Sea-based Music Man project. David’s causes were rooted in the neighbourhoods and people he represented. He was committed to direct face-to-face engagement, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Howard, was right to remind us, is at the very heart—the essence—of being a Member of Parliament. Indeed, the noble Lord contested the constituency I was ultimately elected in in a previous general election, and he knows, as I do, that it is a precious relationship you have with your constituents. But now it has taken David’s life, as it took the life of Jo Cox, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, reminded us, and Andy Pennington. If it had not been for a mercifully foiled plot, it would have also led to the murder of another friend since teenage days—Rosie Cooper, the Labour Member of Parliament for West Lancashire.

But as Mr Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has rightly said, heinous crimes must not be allowed to drain the lifeblood from our representative democracy. This was an attack on democracy itself. We would be making a terrible mistake—and I know it is not what David would have wanted—for his death to simply lead to more barriers being put between the people and their representatives. We will all want to understand the killer’s motivations; to delve deeper into the failure of the Prevent programme; and to understand the radicalisation which takes place in our prisons and through the promotion of intolerant, toxic and violent ideologies, sometimes with the indulgence of social media. Our thoughts today should also be with every family in this country—far too many—who have lost loved ones to knife crime.

As David’s family said in a statement today, people of faith, from all the great religions, and people of no faith must work much harder to create a more respectful society which honours difference. Too often we have been in denial about the sources of the hateful threats to the foundations of a liberal, open and pluralistic society. As David’s horrific death demonstrates, notwithstanding all the good in the world, we still have the capacity to do truly evil things.

His death reminds us of the deep-seated challenges we face. Above all, it will have devastating consequences for his family and loved ones, and my principal thoughts and prayers today are with Julia and their children. May this good man now rest in peace.