Dozens of MPs have revealed harrowing stories of abuse, harassment and being threatened with death and sexual violence in a new television documentary.
Politicians from all the main parties have given personal interviews about the risks they face including one MP who had to discuss with her children what would happen if she was killed.
The interviews, to be shown tonight on Channel 4 ’s Dispatches, were conducted by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater whose sister Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency in 2016.
Among the interviewees was Heidi Allen, former Tory MP for Cambridgeshire, who revealed: “[Someone posted] ‘Hey, this is where she lives.
"She’s got scaffolding outside her house, it’s easy to get up to her bedroom.
"As well as my yellow jacket I might just have to order some rope’.
“I remember coming home from London one night there’s two police officers in the lounge, two police officers in the garden at the back, two outside the front door.
"And there’s a helicopter out, trying to find him. And it turned out, he was 200 yards away, hiding in long grass.
"That was close. I freaked out.”
Naz Shah, Labour MP for Bradford West, revealed she had “morbid” conversations with her children about what would happen if she was killed.
Tory MP for Wellingborough Peter Bone said: “I got a phone call from the police. 'Do you know where your young son is?' I rang the school up and he was there, thankfully.
“The reason they called me because on social media, a Scottish revolutionary group, had put up a mock execution of a young boy, who looked like my son. He was about 12 at the time.”
Labour MP Diane Abbott has had especially high levels of abuse with her staff sometimes having to read thousands of threatening messages in a week.
Of the 60 MPs interviewed, nearly all said they had received abusive or threatening messages, three in four said they’d been threatened with physical harm, and one in three of the female MPs had been threatened with sexual violence.
Ms Leadbeater said: “The impact of the constant threats and abuse on my colleagues is clear.
"But we don’t want people to feel sorry for us. We just want to be able to do our jobs properly.”
