The Southport killings might not have happened if there’d been an inquiry, and now Keir Starmer won’t give us the answers we need

When Lady Julia Amess met Sir Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in Downing Street last week to plead for a public inquiry into the brutal killing of her dearly-loved husband Sir David, she brought a photograph of him and placed it on the cream sofa where she sat with their eldest daughter, Katie.

‘Heartbroken’ Lady Amess, 72, is not a well woman. Nine months after the monstrous Ali Harbi Ali, 29, fatally stabbed the 69-year-old Conservative MP for Southend West at his weekly constituency surgery in Belfairs Methodist Church, she suffered a stroke.

Even climbing the stairs to the first-floor sitting room in No 10 for her meeting with the Prime Minister exhausted her.

‘She was so out of breath she had to use her asthma pump,’ says Katie, a warm, spirited soul who is supporting her mother.

Lady Amess is determined ‘not to let dad down’ so will fight to her last breath for a full inquiry into why his killer was dismissed as a ‘very low’ terror threat by Prevent (the government’s anti-terror programme), leaving him free to plan the terrorist atrocity in 2021 that ended the life of her husband of almost 40 years.

‘We put my dad in between my mum and me,’ Katie says. ‘He was in a suit and smiling. When they noticed the picture, Yvette said how lovely it was. Sir Keir said what an amazing man he was and how everybody feels his loss. 

My mum said: ‘He’s here with us because we wanted you to be able to see him and remember him.’

‘We wanted them to look him in the eye and to have to face the reality that this was their friend, their colleague they were failing.’

As it is, the Prime Minister has now offered a review of the Prevent learning review, which was published last month.

Barrister and life peer Lord Anderson will, as Katie says, ‘review the paperwork of the paperwork’. She sighs. ‘The Prevent learning review wasn’t an investigation. They didn’t interview anybody. They just looked at emails, time logs and stuff. They never asked themselves: ‘Who was responsible for the failings? Why did they make these mistakes?’

‘My mum told them how sad she is and how we’re still living in this heartbreak, this torment, because we’re not getting the answers we need. When Sir Keir suggested the review of the review, I asked why they wouldn’t agree to a full inquiry. I kept saying: ‘Why can’t we do it? Explain why.’

‘My mum said: ‘You’re just kicking this down the road.’ She was very emotional. The meeting ended because she was getting tearful. She just wanted to get home. She’d been through enough. She hates going back there anyway.

‘My dad stood for Parliament and stood for what it means to be a politician serving his country and constituents. He worked 24/7. She feels his loss so deeply having to go back to that place because that was the reason he lost his life: because he was a politician.’

Katie, 39, who moved to Los Angeles 14 years ago to pursue her career as an actress, adored her dad and misses him terribly.

She last saw Sir David, who had five children – Florence, Alexandra, Sarah, Katie and son David – a month before his death after a three-week visit home for her sister Alexandra’s wedding.

Normally, she tells me, she’s ‘sad to go back’ to America but on that occasion she was due to return in less than two months to get married to long-time boyfriend Josh, who’s also from Southend.

Sir David was, she says, ‘on cloud nine’ to be fulfilling a long-cherished dream of walking one of his four daughters down the aisle in the Crypt of the House of Commons. ‘It was going to be so special that my dad and I called it the Royal Wedding,’ she says. 

‘He was obsessed. He’d even bought the photo frames for the wedding pictures to go in. We spent tons of time together in those three weeks planning it. We were at the House of Commons together doing a walk through, choosing the food menu, sorting the flowers.

‘We’d just chosen the music he was going to walk me down the aisle to: Pachelbel’s Canon. I remember we were prancing round the house, practising. The next time I heard that music was when they brought his coffin into the church for his funeral.’

Tears overwhelm Katie. We stop for a few moments for her to collect herself. I wonder if this is too painful for her, but she’s determined to continue. She’ll do whatever it takes to stir the consciences of those in Westminster to do what is right.

‘After he died, they handed back to us the bag he had on him that day,’ she says. ‘I went through it and saw a notebook he had with all these secret plans he had made for the wedding. He’d got me a horse and carriage because he and my mum had one at their wedding, stilt-walkers and a Eurovision Song Contest participant. I didn’t know any of this.

‘It was really hard to see those plans and know they would never be. He even had the wedding invitation in his bag. That’s how much he loved me.’

Katie was 5,000 miles away in Los Angeles and, owing to the eight-hour time difference, fast asleep when the despicable Ali ended her father’s life. Her family desperately tried to call her but her phone was on silent.

Lady Amess pleaded with the authorities not to release details of his murder until they had made contact with Katie, but the terrorist atrocity was already headline news when she awoke at 8am local time.

‘The whole world knew before I did,’ she says. ‘Thankfully, somebody got in touch with Josh so he was able to tell me before I read about it on my phone.

‘I called my mum and asked: ‘Is it true?’ She said ‘Yes’ and I just fell to the floor. My whole body was shaking. My teeth were chattering. I went to the toilet to be sick. I couldn’t do anything. I don’t remember anything – nothing – only that afterwards I said to my husband: ‘Quickly, let’s pray.’ Josh is Jewish but we knelt down and said a Hail Mary.’

The flight from Los Angeles to Heathrow was a blur. ‘I was in a state of shock. It was surreal, like this wasn’t happening to me. It still feels like that. Even being here.’

We are talking in a hotel across the River Thames from the Palace of Westminster. She looks out of the window and shakes her head.

‘Seeing the Houses of Parliament, I’m like, ‘How is this real? How has this happened?’ You wake up every morning just wishing it wasn’t.

‘I still have recurring dreams where it isn’t true and he is here but there’s nothing I can do. Only try to get answers and try to stop it happening to somebody else because we, as a country, are very vulnerable to terrorist attacks right now. If somebody doesn’t ask the questions – if we don’t get answers – it’s going to happen again and again.’

Katie says it was ‘terrible’ landing at Heathrow without her father there waiting to collect her, as he always did. ‘When I got home, I ran up to my parents’ bedroom and grabbed his dressing gown. I put my face into it so I could smell him. My mum hadn’t been home since he died because she couldn’t face it. So when I went into the kitchen, I had to wash up his breakfast plate and teacup.

‘Then I saw he’d picked some runner beans from the garden. They were on the table ready for my mum to cook. After that, I had no idea what was going on. Your body just shuts down. I can only remember bits – mum’s complete and utter disbelief. When you’ve known someone for that long and they just suddenly disappear it’s hard and . . . it was like it wasn’t me experiencing this.

‘Probably my greatest memory from the days immediately afterwards was when I went with my mum to the scene where it happened. My mum thought going was the right thing to do and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her go there by herself.

‘So I took my rosary that my dad had given me and just held on to it. Seeing his car there . . . it was a tip.’ She smiles through the tears. ‘Because it was still Covid there were facemasks, pieces of paper, his sunglasses. Seeing how crooked he’d parked the car because he was a terrible, terrible driver so he’d just pull up, do an emergency stop and leave the car wherever he wanted.’ Again, she smiles then bites her lip.

‘I couldn’t look at the building. I was just trying to focus on the pictures people had left of him and them together. There was so much love and appreciation for him. Then I saw this beautiful, blue, heart-shaped balloon that had been left at the scene. It was just blowing in the wind. It said ‘Thank you for all you did for the Muslim community’ and it really touched me because my dad welcomed everybody with open arms.

‘I won’t go down the route of thinking about the evil because then that guy has won. I just think about my dad and the love and beauty of his life.’

Katie did not return to Los Angeles for six months, remaining at the family home to console her mother. She postponed her wedding to the following year and helped plan her father’s funeral.

Lady Amess wanted two services: a private family one at his parish church and a funeral mass at the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral where he’d married his wife. His casket was carried in a horse-drawn hearse and he was laid to rest in the suit he’d intended to wear to walk Katie down the aisle.

Lady Amess and Katie didn’t go to the murder trial during which Ali boasted about how easily he’d fooled Prevent. ‘Basically, they took him out for a cup of coffee in McDonald’s and said: ‘Are you a terrorist?’ He said: ‘No,’ and they never followed up on it again. A couple of weeks later he bought a knife.’

The trial heard how he wanted to join the Islamic State group in Syria and take revenge against MPs who voted for airstrikes in the country. Ali was given a whole-life prison sentence in April 2022.

‘My dad wouldn’t have wanted me to go to the trial and listen to the most traumatic things,’ says Katie. ‘I was in enough pain as it was. My dad would have wanted me to stay at home and look after mum.’

Three months after the verdict Lady Amess suffered a stroke. ‘She was trying to deal with selling the house she’d shared with my dad for 25 years. She couldn’t stay there. There were too many memories,’ says Katie. ‘She wasn’t in the best of health. She has arthritis and she’s a cancer survivor. The stress of everything led to her having a stroke.

‘I came back [from LA] immediately and stayed for another six months. She couldn’t pack up the house so I had to pack up all of our childhood memories. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. We started to think we needed answers. We knew who did it, we knew why he decided to do it, but we didn’t know why he was able to do it. Why was he let go by Prevent? Why were so many mistakes made?’

Today, Katie tells me, her mother is physically ‘not great. She can’t remember dates, times or locations. She doesn’t walk very well. She just says that she’s lost. It’s the most unimaginable thing.’

Lady Amess found the strength to walk Katie down the aisle in her husband’s place in the Crypt of the House of Commons in December 2022.

‘I had pictures of him everywhere and thought: ‘I’m not going to let evil win.’ So I did it. My mum was well enough to walk me down the aisle and my dad gave me the strength to put one foot in front of the other.

Of the questions asked following Sir David’s death, she says: ‘We presumed during that first year all the failings would come to light because that’s what you think should happen if somebody’s being monitored by a scheme and the scheme doesn’t work. But nothing happened. Once my mum started to feel a bit better, I said: ‘Right, come on. We’ve got to follow up with these things.’ That’s when we started to realise people weren’t going to help us.’

She means Sir David’s Westminster colleagues. With a Conservative government in turmoil as leader followed leader and home secretaries came and went, they were, she says, ‘completely shut down’.

‘We started writing letters, but our letters were ignored so we got lawyers involved,’ says Katie.

‘Can you believe during the election campaign [then prime minister] Rishi Sunak and [his home secretary] James Cleverly came to the constituency to do a speech about my dad on the election trail but were ignoring our petitions for help.

‘My mum was like: ‘What on earth are you doing? This is disgraceful. They’re not his friends.’ ‘

Within a few weeks of the Labour Party’s landslide victory at the 2024 General Election, Axel Rudakubana stabbed three young girls to death and attempted to kill ten others at a Taylor Swift-themed workshop at a dance studio in Southport, Merseyside. He, like Sir David’s killer, had been monitored by Prevent.

‘I just felt complete and utter heartbreak to think of the evil that was committed and what the families would be going through. I also felt so much anger. If we’d had the answers to who made the mistake to let him [Ali Harbi Ali] back into society and held them accountable, lessons could have been learnt and Southport wouldn’t have happened.’

As it is, the Prevent learning review into Sir David’s murder blamed mistakes upon ‘an administrative error’.

‘We were in complete disbelief. My dad lost his life meeting someone in a church because of an administrative error.’ Her fury is palpable.

‘My dad campaigned for the right things for more than 20 years. He never gave up. I can hear him cheering me on saying: ‘Don’t give up.’ I won’t. We deserve the answers to why mistakes were made to make sure his death wasn’t in vain and this won’t ever happen to anybody else.’

‘My mum said after that meeting [with Starmer] she wants to feel like we did Dad proud and we haven’t done that yet. She said: ‘We’re still fighting. I don’t want to let dad down.’ I told her: ‘We absolutely won’t. This isn’t the end.’ ‘