Why the family of murdered MP Sir David Amess deserve answers

Few of us will know quite what it’s like to experience the savage murder of a close family member and then to relive the horror day after day in news reports and then in a judicial fight for answers.

But that is the burden that Katie Amess, daughter of the late Sir David Amess, cannot escape.

I’ve just interviewed her in St Peter’s Catholic church on the outskirts of Southend. This is the seaside town - now a city thanks to Amess’s tireless campaigning - that he represented as a much-loved MP for 24 years, till he was assassinated by Ali Harbi Ali on October 15, 2021, in an act of terrorism carried out in the name of Islamic State.

What Katie and her mum Julia want is very simple and would seem to most of us a basic human right, especially after the trauma they live with: an inquest, to establish why police and security services did not protect her father.

This is no self-indulgent “if only” question. The point is that Ali was identified as someone at risk of becoming a dangerous extremist, a potential terrorist, in 2015, and was enrolled on the government’s Prevent programme.

Prevent is supposed to wean vulnerable people off extremism ideology and to keep track of them.

Ali however was on the programme for just a year. And after he was removed from it, he worked day after day as a lone wolf terrorist, to identify a British MP to slay.

He plotted for years to obtain what he saw as just punishment for the UK’s air strikes on Islamic State in September 2014.

Amess appears to have been chosen because he had less protection than - for example, the former cabinet minister Michael Gove, whom Ali also planned to kill.

What Katie wants to know is why precisely MI5 and counter terrorism police seemingly ceased taking an interest in Ali after 2016, even though that is when his terrorist preparations only started in earnest.

They also feel let down by Essex police, whom were contacted by Katie Amess’s brother, also called David, about a threat made to him and his father.

This threat was unconnected to Ali, but Katie believes this should have led the police to automatically send officers to Sir David’s surgery the following day.

The Essex police did not do this, and it was at the surgery that Ali attacked the MP in a frenzied attack with a knife he had been carrying for five years.

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Katie and her mother Julia would obviously benefit from understanding how and why their father was - in their view - let down by the institutions of the state. But she also believes that the family of Ali, whose lives have also been wrecked, deserve respect and answers too.

And she fears MPs are all more vulnerable in the absence of a forensic inquiry into what went wrong.

An inquest was originally opened by the coroner Lincoln Brookes on 27 October 2021. But it was then adjourned until Ali was convicted of murder in April 2022.

Brookes considered whether it should be resumed. He consulted the family who were in shock, partly because Sir David’s wife had just suffered a stroke.

They feared the inquest would add to their stress and said they did not want that. It was only later they learned an inquest was their only route to the knowledge they so desperately desired.

Since then they have been campaigning to persuade Brookes to open it again. In July he decided against doing so.

They are especially angry with James Cleverly, who saw himself as a friend of Sir David. They feel that if the Home Office, when he was Home Secretary, had said the inquest should be re-opened, it would have been.

Instead the Home Office made what it described as a “neutral” submission to the coroner. Katie is concerned its tone and content may have been hostile to the statute-based inquiry she seeks.

Perhaps what I was most struck by when meeting her was how alienated the Amess family now feels from a Tory establishment which claimed to revere Sir David. In their quest for the truth, they feel isolated and alone.

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