David Johnston

David Amess showed why people should go into politics

(Photo: Getty)

I often joke that when I became an MP in 2019, after being a charity chief executive, I went from saint to sinner in the mind of the public.

When you work for a charity, people assume you’re one of the good guys: honest, principled, in it for the right reasons. Too often politicians are seen as the opposite: dishonest, unprincipled, in it for themselves – and probably fiddling their expenses.

Both stereotypes are wrong, yet they persist. I am regularly asked why I made the switch – not least by friends and family members, who know politics matters but wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.

It is a question that I know will be asked more regularly after the senseless killing of Sir David Amess. Here was a kind, big-hearted man with a permanent smile, going about the business of serving the community he loved. You couldn’t get much further away from an object of hatred than David.

To know that someone like him could be attacked in this way – like Jo Cox and Stephen Timms before him – has left us all shocked and feeling hollow. That has nothing to do with being in the same party as him: the tributes have come from all sides of the House. There is a special camaraderie that we 650 MPs feel despite our political differences.

We all share an understanding of the pressures of the job: the long hours, the frustration of not being able to fix every constituent’s problems however hard you try, the toll it can take on relationships, the angry abuse you receive, including death threats.

But I think the life of Sir David Amess shows why people still should enter politics and not be put off. Here was a man who grew up poor.

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