A warm maiden speech whose gentle line about having more in common than divides us became, a year later, the epitaph of an assassinated MP.

In June 2015 the Commons was still settling into the shape David Cameron's surprise majority had given it: a Conservative government freed from coalition, an EU referendum now inevitable, and a Labour Party licking its wounds and drifting towards the leadership contest that would deliver Jeremy Corbyn by autumn. Into this arrived Jo Cox, part of the 2015 intake, a former Oxfam campaigner who had spent her working life in conflict zones and humanitarian relief before coming home to the Yorkshire towns where she was born. Her maiden speech is, on its surface, a conventional example of the genre: the affectionate tour of the constituency, the biscuits and the fish and chips, the nods to predecessors, the gentle joke about Dr Broughton bringing down the Callaghan government in 1979. It is warm, competent, well-turned, the work of someone who plainly knew how the House worked and intended to master it.

But one sentence lifts it out of the ordinary and into history. "We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us." At the time it read as a graceful reflection on a diverse west Yorkshire seat of Irish Catholics, Gujarati and Kashmiri Muslims. Just over a year later, on 16 June 2016, in the town of Birstall in this very constituency, Jo Cox was assassinated by a far-right extremist in the final week of the referendum campaign she had promised here to fight for. The words became her epitaph, engraved on hearts across the political divide, taken up as the name of a foundation, and repeated in tributes from a chamber that fell utterly silent.

History therefore reads this cheerful maiden speech through tears. The pride in a diverse community, the passionate commitment to Europe, the insistence on what unites rather than divides — all of it acquires an unbearable poignancy. She was, on this evidence, exactly the sort of principled, practical, humane MP the Commons most needs and can least afford to lose. It is worth reading now not as prophecy but as portrait: the first public words of a woman whose last public cause was the one she named on this day, and whose most famous sentence she spoke here before anyone knew what it would come to mean.

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