The widower of the murdered MP Jo Cox is to marry a violence against women campaigner.
Brendan Cox is to remarry with Anna Ryder seven years after his wife was shot and stabbed by a far-right extremist. Ryder, 37, is the director of Killed Women, a group that supports the bereaved families of victims of violence.
Cox, 44, said: “We are both very much looking forward to celebrating with our families.”
Jo Cox, a Labour MP, was attacked outside her constituency office in West Yorkshire by a rightwing terrorist during the EU referendum campaign in June 2016.
Speaking on Wednesday, Cox said he and Jo had previously discussed the idea of marrying if either of them died. The father of two told ITV’s Lorraine that Jo had said she would want him to remarry.
“I always knew that she would want that,” he said. “But I never thought it would happen because when you lose someone like Jo, you never think you’ll find somebody with the energy and the love and the enthusiasm and the excitement that Jo had. I’m incredibly lucky that I have.”
He added that his children were “very excited” when he told them that he intended to propose to Ryder. “I said: ‘I’m thinking about asking her to marry me. What do you think?’ I think their response was ‘you’re never going to do any better than Anna’, which I think was basically a nice thing and a compliment,” he said. “They’re very excited about it.”
Cox also said there is still “huge momentum” behind this weekend’s The Great Get Together, which celebrates Jo’s memory. The series of events are based on the message in Jo’s maiden speech in parliament in which she said that “we have more in common than that which divides us”.
Cox said: “What The Great Get Together is about is bringing communities together from different backgrounds, different areas, different races, different religions and just saying actually that the thing that Jo talked about so much, which is that we do have more in common than the things that divide us, it’s just that we’re not always very good at remembering that.”
He said that Jo’s sister, Kim Leadbeater, who is the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, is bringing MPs together in parliament on Wednesday as part of the events.
Cox became a prominent campaigner in the wake of Jo’s death, setting up two charities in her memory. In 2018, he resigned from his posts at More in Common and the Jo Cox Foundation, after being publicly accused of sexual assault.
It was claimed in the Mail on Sunday that he had assaulted a woman in her 30s at Harvard University in 2015. Police filed her complaint as assault and battery but action against him was dropped.
Cox denied the claims but admitted making mistakes in a previous role with the charity Save the Children.
