U.K. Conservative Member of Parliament Murdered

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Tom, first and foremost, my condolences to you for the loss of your colleague and your friend. What is your reaction to the senseless murder?

TOM TUGENDHAT, BRITISH PARLIAMENT MEMBER: Well, mostly, it’s just grief. I mean, this is the second of my colleagues and friends that I have lost in Parliament in the last five years. Jo Cox, who I was working with at the time, was murdered in 2016, and now David today. This is, I have got to be honest, not what I expected in British democracy, in British Parliament, in British life in 2021. This is certainly not the level of political violence that I think is acceptable in any country.

GOLODRYGA: Acceptable nowhere. And, of course, our thoughts are also with his family and his wife and their five children. To give our viewers a sense of David’s background and in his career in Parliament, he’d served in Parliament for 38 years and really working for his constituents in Essex. I have heard many, many now tributes come in from people across the political spectrum, just talking about his dedication to his constituents. Can you give us a sense of who he was both as a man and as a politician?

TUGENDHAT: Well, he had a very strong faith. He was a very strong practicing Roman Catholic, and I know that all of our prayers are with him today. He was — he set up and made work the All-Party Parliamentary Group, the friendship group, if you like, across party M.P.s for the Holy See. And he was an incredibly charming and fun guy. I mean, he’s always smiling, always happy, always with a joke. And so I think for a lot of us this is particularly painful, because, frankly, if you can take against David, you can take against anyone. I mean, there’s really — there’s absolutely no possible justification for it. And, in fact, David wrote a very sadly prescient piece a year ago, in which he spoke about the importance of members of Parliament meeting constituents. And, of course, he’s right. You can’t represent people you don’t know. And you can’t get to know people if you don’t meet them. And so he wrote, quite rightly, about why, despite the dangers, since the murder of Jo Cox, that all of us hold sessions in village halls on our own or with a single member of staff across the country almost every Friday and Saturday, and why it matters so much. So, to see him murdered as he was really doing his bit for democracy and for the community and for our country is really heartbreaking.