FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
LONDON She took up the baton that fell in the blood five years ago: yesterday she was elected to Parliament Kim Leadbeater, the sister of Jo Cox, the congresswoman killed by a right-wing extremist on the eve of the Brexit referendum in June 2016. And Kim led Labor to success in the same seat in Batley and Spen, in West Yorkshire, the same one that belonged to Jo: a a particularly important victory, which interrupted a disastrous cycle of defeats and revived the leadership of Keir Starmer.
On the other hand, the destinies of the two sisters they had been closely intertwined since childhood. Growing up a few miles from Batley, separated by only one year of age, they dated and shared friendships and ideals. «But Jo was the most beautiful – Kim told al Guardian – she had cute cheeks and dimples: I was the one with the effervescent personality! ”
Both sports, both good at school, were always spurred on by their parents, their mother as a school secretary and the father who was a worker in a cosmetics factory who had become a manager: both girls attended a grammar school, one of those super-selective public institutions where only the most gifted enter and where Jo was appointed head of the students, while Kim was deputy.
The eldest was later admitted to Cambridge, the first of her family to go to university, while to the minor they advised Oxford: but Kim decided it was not for her, and after a few months at the University of Leeds she realized that she was not cut out for studies at all. So she went to work as a salesperson for a bed company, quickly becoming their national sales manager. But even this role suited her: following her obsession with fitness, she converted into an aerobics instructor and now works as a personal trainer.
Jo, on the other hand, had taken a different directionShe went to work in Brussels and New York for Oxfam, the international charity, and then became a parliamentary assistant in Brussels. In those years the relationship between the two sisters became more distant: in 2009 Jo married Brendan Cox, a director of Gordon Brown, and had two children, who are now ten and eight years old. Until she was elected deputy in 2015, she was a fervent pro-European in a constituency that the following year would have voted 60 percent in favor of Brexit.
Jo Cox immediately made a big impression in Westminster, with her ability to transcend party divisions: but soon she began to experience the dark side of contemporary politics firsthand, with the insults and threats that rained down on her from social media. Although Kim is convinced that she would have persevered, because Jo wanted to make a difference.
Labor leader Keir Starmer and Kim Leadbeater
Until June 16, 2016, the threats became a gun and a knife that took Jo’s life into the hands of a fanatic. Kim said that even today she is unable to deal with that drama: it was her turn to go and identify her sister’s body.
And it is also in his name that he will now enter Parliament. His was an unexpected victory: the polls predicted that that seat, Labor by tradition, would fall into the hands of the conservatives, as has already happened in many other constituencies of the former «Red Wall».
If Kim had lost, would come the showdown for the leadership of Keir Starmer, accused by internal opponents, right and left, of not knowing how to give direction to the party. Already his popular deputy, Angela Rayner, was preparing to openly challenge him.
Now Starmer has gained a minimum of leeway: but it remains to be seen whether Kim’s victory will be able to reverse the decline of a Labor that in recent years has lost the working class, seduced by Brexit, and now seems to have lost its raison d’etre.
July 2, 2021 (change July 2, 2021 | 22:14)
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