Separately, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch confirmed to the BBC the man who pleaded guilty to sending her threatening messages also sent them to her family.
Kieran Kyle, 43, pleaded guilty to two counts of sending communication of an indecent or offensive nature to Badenoch and her family when he appeared in court in September. He will be sentenced on October 29.
“I just think that whether it’s Nigel Farage, or even Keir Starmer who had his home fire bombed, that there is a threat to politicians that is increasing and we just need to crack down on this,” she told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.
Asked how Badenoch coped with threats to her safety, she replied: “it’s really tough, but you just have to get on with it”.
Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice, who told the BBC he also experienced threats to his safety, told the programme “this was far from where any of us want to be”.
“We have to find the middle ground where we’re accessible but we’re protected and in the overall scheme of things if that requires a bit of extra taxpayers’ money, I think hopefully voters would say ‘yes’.”
Amess said her father “loved meeting people”, saying “he was one of the easier members of parliament to take a meeting with because that’s what he lived for – to meet people, shake their hands, smile, help them with their problems. My dad wouldn’t have wanted constituency surgeries to stop.”
She added that he would have wanted to be alerted to someone being reported as a potential threat.
His killer, Ali Harbi Ali had been referred to the government’s counter-terror programme Prevent in October 2014 but his case was closed in 2016.
A review published in February 2025 found Ali’s Prevent case was closed too early after “problematic” assessments.
