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Rayleigh and Wickford MP Mark Francois described his Conservative colleague David Amess as his “oldest and best friend in politics” as he laid flowers outside the Belfairs Methodist church in Leigh-on-Sea (via PA news agency).
Francois was visibly emotional as he paid tribute to Amess, standing sombrely for a few moments in front of the floral tributes displayed outside the church where the Southend West MP was stabbed to death on Friday.
“He was the best bloke I ever knew,” Francois said tearfully, adding that he would say more about his friend at the House of Commons tribute this week.
A yellow police forensics gazebo has been erected in the front garden of a property, believed to be linked to the investigation into the killing of David Amess, the PA news agency reports. Officers have been carrying out searches in Lady Somerset Road, north-west London, since Friday evening. From PA:
One neighbour, who declined to be named, said the Victorian terrace house that has been split into a flat and a maisonette, consisted of a private property and a council house.
She said she believed officers are searching the council-owned maisonette.
She told the PA news agency: “We knew the family quite well as superficial neighbours. Very nice family, the mum was very, very nice.
“They’d say hello in the street, that kind of thing.
“A mother lives there with several boys, my husband believes there’s three boys. The youngest has got to be in his 20s. I never saw a father there.
“They’ve been here for years, we’ve lived here for 20 years and they’ve been here longer than us.”
A coat of arms was unveiled in parliament for Jo Cox as a tribute after she was murdered five years ago and the speaker of the Commons has said that the same honour will be bestowed on David Amess.
Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle tells T&G that Sir David Amess's coat of arms will be erected in the chamber as a permanent memorial to him. MPs will also pay tributes to him in a special Commons session on Monday at 3.30pm, and then hold a church service.@TimesRadio
— Tom Newton Dunn (@tnewtondunn) October 17, 2021
Here is the Guardian’s latest news story about the reaction to the killing of David Amess, with the home secretary, Priti Patel, saying she is considering offering police protection for MPs at their constituency surgeries.
She said:
There are other options that are being considered, such as when you hold your surgeries, could you have officers or some kind of protection?
Patel also declined to rule out the use of airport-style security scanners at MPs’ constituency offices.
Wes Streeting, the Labour MP for Ilford North, said politicians need to take their security more seriously in the wake of the killing of David Amess.
He said:
The uncomfortable truth that lots of us are wrestling with is that if someone wants to attack you in this way, they will do it and there is a risk that comes with this job.
MPs are having really difficult conversations with their families this weekend about the risk that we carry, about whether it’s worth it, and what we might do to make sure that we’re keeping ourselves, our staff and our families safe.
Speaking to the PA news agency outside the Belfairs Methodist church in Leigh-on-Sea, where Amess was stabbed to death on Friday, Streeting said that while he had experienced “plenty of abuse,” the vast majority of his interactions with the public were “wholly positive”.
I can recall in my six years as an MP one moment when I thought that a constituent might hit me in my advice surgery, but most of the time people are coming to you for help, and you deal with people in advice surgeries who are distressed, who are having a really hard time - that’s why we really want to protect those advice surgeries.
Labour MP Wes Streeting says politicians love talking to their constituents, but it has led to "difficult conversations with our own families" in recent days#Phillips: https://t.co/rZ8ldEq6Fn pic.twitter.com/EZaPZHqDMS
— Trevor Phillips on Sunday (@RidgeOnSunday) October 17, 2021
Updated
Writing on the Guardian website, the Labour MP, Alison McGovern, a shadow minister, says “politics, correctly practised, can be the best antidote to cynicism”, as recognised by David Amess and Jo Cox, who realised “how we make progress not just by rallying those who are in our tribe”.
She writes:
If I could say one thing to the politicians who will come after me, it would be this: Jo’s words now written on the wall of the House of Commons – “More in Common” – are not there to remind you what she said. They are an organising instruction. They are there to tell you how to move our country on.
I know many people will find it hard to understand how the bickering they see from us correlates with that instruction. Can it really be the case that the political world forever at war with itself could be any good at bringing people together? True, it is hard sometimes but the answer is not to give up, and David never did, on any of the many campaigns he ran. The answer is to listen more. Think hard about where others are coming from. Empathy, understanding, compassion. These are the skills that make our politics function.
Gordon Brown has urged the country to show that our democratic values are “indestructible” in the aftermath of the killing of Conservative MP David Ames (via PA).
The former prime minister stressed that the reaction to the fatal stabbing of the Southend West MP on Friday could not allow “democracy to be diminished”.
But Brown also called for MPs to have access to increased police protection, predicting that the measures would be introduced within days.
Speaking to Sky News, Brown said:
This is an attack on our democracy, so the answer cannot be less democracy.
This looks as if it is a terrorist incident, it is probably related to Al Shabaab or to al Qaeda, and we’ll find out more in the next few days.
But the answer when you come across a terrorist incident is we don’t blink, we don’t shirk, we don’t flinch, we don’t show weakness and we stand up for what we believe.
And, of course, we will increase the security that is available to members of parliament and councillors when they’re doing their surgeries, and that is something that must happen immediately.
But it’s true also to say that we must not allow our democracy to be diminished because a terrorist attack has occurred.
Brown, who was an MP at Westminster from 1983 to 2015, continued:
I think the history of dealing with terrorism is that if you ever show weakness and if you ever give the impression that coexistence is impossible and that you’re going to back away and give up on your values, then you show something that gives terrorists hope. We must not do that.
Hearts are broken, but our resolve must be unbreakable. A life has been tragically destroyed but our values - our democratic values - they are indestructible, and we must show that now.
Asked if close protection officers or bodyguards should be offered to MPs, Brown said he believes that will happen imminently.
We must say to members of parliament: be careful where you hold your constituency surgeries in a place that is protected but, at the same time, if you need police protection that is going to be available.
It need not be obtrusive, it need not be so obvious, but I think the protection has got to be made available now to members of parliament who feel that there is a risk to what they are doing. I think that will be introduced in the next few days.
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown describes Sir David Amess as a "good man of the people", and that he "died doing something which he enjoyed most"#Phillips: https://t.co/rZ8ldEq6Fn pic.twitter.com/MshkBTZB2v
— Trevor Phillips on Sunday (@RidgeOnSunday) October 17, 2021
Andrew Rosindell, MP for Romford, said his Conservative colleague David Amess may have received threats before he was stabbed to death on Friday.
Rosindell said he had himself “received threats over the years, but frankly we brush them off”.
“But it does make you wonder, there’s some very bad people out there. What happened here was pure evil and it cannot be ignored,” he told PA News agency outside the Belfairs Methodist church in Leigh-on-Sea, where Amess was killed:
When asked if Sir David received threats before the attack, Rosindell said: “I understand that he may well have done, but this is not something I can comment on; this is a matter for the police investigation.”
He said he was not aware if the suspect was known to Amess before the attack.
Rosindell told Sky News’ Trevor Phillips On Sunday programme that police did not always follow up reports of abuse:
I’ve been an MP 20 years, and during that period I see a lot of more nasty people around than ever before, and they are willing to say and do things in a way that I would never have thought possible in this country. And we all have to be really aware and keep our wits about us.
The abuse we get on social media, by emails, I mean we get it all the time. But we brush it off because we’ve got a job to do. And we tell the police, the police have got other things to do, it’s not always followed up.
And I think probably this has all got to change, we have got to take this a bit more seriously in future.
I’ve had my office was arsoned (sic), my car was smashed up, someone tried to get into my house and injure me - managed to stop them.
All these things have happened over the years, but you take it in your stride because our priority is to get on with our job, and we do tend to not think much about our own security, I’m afraid. But I’m thinking now maybe we should do a bit more.
"My office was arsoned, my car was smashed up, someone tried to get into my house"
— Trevor Phillips on Sunday (@RidgeOnSunday) October 17, 2021
Romford MP Andrew Rosindell says abuse directed at MPs has got worse in recent years and there are "more nasty people around than ever before".#Phillips: https://t.co/rZ8ldEq6Fn pic.twitter.com/nnJ6g1O8tI
Updated
Patel is asked whether the long lockdown has led to more people radicalised.
She says
We have the best security and intelligence agencies in the world ...Their work is phenomenal, it is outstanding.
Patel says we have seen much more extremism at both ends of the spectrum (Islamists and far right).
Marr asks if the government could accede to the long-held wish of Amess that Southend be made a city. Patel smiles but says that is not for her to say. “He was Mr Southend, he was Mr Essex,” says Patel.
The home secretary, Priti Patel, a fellow Essex MP, tells Andrew Marr David Amess was “a dear, dear friend” who she had known for about 30 years.
She says Amess had an “infectious energy”. When she heard the news “our world was shattered”.
She says measures are in place and are being looked at again but stresses:
We are here to serve, we are here to be accessible to the British public.
Protective measures are available, many of which came about after the murder of Jo Cox, says Patel. There is one-on-one engagement with the police.
Patel says she has been subjected to “a lot of abuse over a considerable amount of time”.
The home secretary says abuse is unacceptable, MPs go into politics to “be a force for good, serve our country”.
She says she is vigorous in challenging Facebook, Twitter etc. Talking about anonymity she says “we can’t just apply a binary approach” referring to the use of social media by pro-democracy groups. But she adds that children are also targeted on social media.
The shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, a close friend of Jo Cox, told BBC One’s Andrew Marr show:
We can’t believe it’s happened. I think a lot of MPs are in a state of shock.
She said Amess was involved in a lot of things that were all aimed at improving people’s lives and she wishes people could see that beyond the yelling.
Nandy said:
It’s heartbreaking, it does make you anxious but none of us are going to stop doing our jobs.
Asked if she feels safe doing her job, Nandy says “No.” Like a lot of other MPs have said since Amess was killed, she says the police response to threats and fears about safety has been “patchy”.
Do you feel safe doing your job?
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) October 17, 2021
"No, not really, if I'm honest," Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy reacts to the killing of Sir David Amess, adding, "this is not the first time it's happened"https://t.co/TZdig24nWF #Marr pic.twitter.com/uuvSw4lQ1s
She says you will never be able to eliminate risk “but there is more than can be done, particularly online”.
Nandy will receive threats after this interview, she says, adding that no action has ever been taken against anyone who has made threats against her online.
She says she is cautious, as is Labour, about ending anonymity on social media because it can be lifesaving for whistleblowers and people speaking up against oppressive regimes. Labour wants top executives of social media companies to be held responsible and be subjected to fines for failing to act to combat threats etc but the government does not support this, says Nandy.
Updated
The home secretary told Sky News the Prevent scheme, to stop radicalisation, is already under review. The suspect was previously known to the Prevent scheme, the official programme to stop radicalisation although his involvement was short and he has no known previous terrorist involvement, the Guardian has learned.
Priti Patel said:
Prevent is going through an independent review right now. It’s timely to do that, we have to learn, we obviously constantly have to learn, not just from incidences that have taken place but how we can strengthen our programmes...
We want to ensure that it is fit for purpose, robust, doing the right thing. But importantly learning lessons, always building upon what is working and addressing any gaps or issues where the system needs strengthening.
Priti Patel says 'we need to close any gaps' in the safety arrangements for MPs
The home secretary, Priti Patel, said this morning “we need to close any gaps” in the safety arrangements for MPs (quotes from PA).
She said “there are practical measures” being taken around the safety of MPs and politicians, giving as examples “booking appointments in advance, checking the details of the individuals that you are seeing, checking the locations in advance that you are going to, making sure that you are not on your own. I could go on - there are other things, linked to policing and security as well.
“There are things already in place but I’m now very much, and Lindsay Hoyle the speaker of the House and I, with the police, and with others as well, we need to close any gaps basically where we feel that you know there are concerns.”
Asked if MPs could receive the level of close protection they receive in Westminster she said: “All these issues and options are in consideration right now.”
She added: “There is a lot of work taking place already.”
Pointing out that councillors are also “out there every single day”, Patel said: “We should, rightly, our elected representatives need to be able to go around with confidence - with confidence that they are safe and secure in the work they are doing.”
The home secretary said immediate changes were actively being put in place and discussed.
But she said she did not not believe the murder of Sir David Amess should change the relationship between MPs and their constituencies, saying MPs “are part of the fabric, the DNA of society, our democracy, freedom”.
"We need to close any gaps basically where we feel there are any concerns"
— Trevor Phillips on Sunday (@RidgeOnSunday) October 17, 2021
When asked whether we could see police at constituency surgeries or close protection officers given to MPs, Priti Patel says this is being considered
Follow #Phillips live: https://t.co/rZ8ldEq6Fn pic.twitter.com/HBe9MVHkEC
Updated
The Sunday morning politics shows this morning will be dominated by one story today - the killing of the Conservative MP David Amess, who died after being stabbed several times at an open advice surgery for his constituents in Essex on Friday.
The death of Amess caused shock and revulsion across the political divide. The 69-year-old was a popular figure in parliament as reflected in the outpouring of warm tributes. It has also, inevitably, coming just five years after the murder of Jo Cox, prompted renewed debate about MPs’ security and what can be done to prevent such a tragedy ever happening again.
Among those who will be discussing Friday’s awful events this morning will be the home secretary, Priti Patel, and the former prime minister Gordon Brown. We will be bringing you all the latest updates here.
In the meantime, you can read a tribute to Amess by the speaker of the House of Commons. who also says the discourse around MPs must change.
And the Observer has a piece on the abuse and threats that MPs are regularly exposed to:
