MPs recalled the impish grin, megawatt smile and cheeky chappie humour of Sir David Amess in tributes that included how he once got the pope to bless his boiled sweet, and how his office often resembled a pet shop.
James Duddridge, Conservative MP for neighbouring Rochford and Southend East, recalled how Amess, a devout Catholic and regular visitor to the Vatican, once found himself in the receiving line as the pope was dispensing papal blessings. “David, having a sore throat, reached into his pocket for a boiled sweet. David got his timing wrong. The pope took the sweet, thinking it was a revered object to be blessed. Blessed the revered object. And David had to put it back in his pocket. A holy sweet.”
When Amess would later recount the incident, which he did many times, he would always finish by reaching into his pocket, pulling out a sweet and proclaiming: “And, this is the sweet. It’s been blessed. Mr Speaker, I suspect there have been many sweets passed off as the holy sweet.”
Amess would introduce Duddridge at events as “a millionaire lottery winner” or a “Strictly Come Dancing winner for people over 100”. “My favourite icebreaker was: ‘Meet James. He’s my neighbour. He’s recently got out of prison’,” he said.
He loved animals, said Duddridge. “There will never again be the infamous ‘Dog of the Day’ tweets. He will never again dress as a knight in full battle finery, mount a horse and ride across the city of Southend, as he did after receiving a knighthood.”
Amess’s office was “always packed with people, paperwork, and, as anyone who’d been there would know, fish and birds, despite the House authority’s ban”. “Part office, part museum of decades of political memorabilia, part pet shop. It was an office like the politician: unique,” he said.
Mark Francois, Conservative MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, recalled campaigning for Amess in Basildon in 1992, and knocking on a door on an estate. “And this monster of a bloke opened the door.” The occupant looked at the blue rosette, and said: “Conservative! Tory! You must be bloody joking, mate. I’m voting for David Amess.”
He recalled his friend’s legendary timekeeping “or rather lack of it”. Amess was always running late at constituency events because he was so popular everyone wanted to speak to him, he said. “He invariably overran. But because of this wonderful trait …among his closest friends he was known affectionately as the late Sir David Amess.”
“Well, now he really is the late Sir David Amess,” Francois said, adding: “But I am absolutely determined that he will not have died in vain.”
Boris Johnson spoke of Amess’s indefatigable campaigning for city status for Southend, which has been granted in his honour. “He never once witnessed any achievement by any resident of Southend that could not, somehow, he cited in his bid to secure city status of that distinguished town.
“Highlights of that bulging folder included a world record for playing the most triangles at once; a group of stilt walkers travelling non-stop from the Essex coast to Downing Street; and a visiting foreign dignitary allegedly flouting protocol by saying he liked Southend more than Cleethorpes. A compelling case.”
Iain Duncan Smith, former Conservative leader and MP for Chingford and Wood Green, who knew Amess for 29 years, once accused him of “going to the opening of an envelope”. To which Amess replied: “‘I damn well hope so, because I wrote it to them so I could go there in the first place.”
“I also remember when they won Basildon council for the first time, I think. Not enough for David to just be with them when they went in. He formed a conga outside the chamber and took the whole of the newly elected councillors on a conga right the way through the council building and into the chamber.”
Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, recalled how Amess’s then parliamentary staffer, Edward Holmes, fresh out of university, forgot to tell the MP about an urgent call from then prime minister, David Cameron.
“He said he felt terrified until he finally plucked up the courage to tell David, whose response was typical. ‘Don’t worry about that, Edward’. So relaxed was David that Mr Holmes suspects he never actually called the prime minister back,” said Starmer. “That tells of a politician who has his priorities right, one who puts people before his party, his patch before his personal advancements.”
Chris Bryant, Labour MP for Rhondda, said: “I never managed to persuade him to support gay marriage, but he always asked after my husband and I think that that was the character of the man.”
Theresa May, former prime minister, said she could never think of Amess without laughing. “Laugher, service, compassion; these are three words that spring to mind when I think of David Amess. Laughter, because you could never have a conversation with David without laughter and smiling,” she said, referring to the “outrageous stories” he loved telling. “There were always smiles, always laughter, always fun around David.”