After the Supreme Court ruled that parliament must re-open, prime minister Boris Johnson went on the offensive in the House of Commons.
Johnson ignored pleas from female MPs to adjust his tone. When friends of murdered MP Jo Cox implored the prime minister to tone done his rhetoric, which included inflammatory words like as “surrender”, he replied:
Humbug!
Johnson’s remarks have been condemned by his own sister, former cabinet minister Amber Rudd and many MPs including Jess Phillips and Jo Swinson.
Now Ellie Cooper, daughter of Labour MP Yvette Cooper, has taken to Twitter to let people know exactly what it’s like being the daughter of a female MP.
Cooper described on Twitter how the murder of Jo Cox changed her life, and left her fearing for her mother.
The thread, which was published as an article in The Independent, describes with brutal honesty the experience of being a child of a politician in 2019. Cooper says that language which “puts people’s lives at risk” has made politics become “a matter of life and death”, and blames Boris Johnson for furthering this rhetoric for his own gain.