A Government minister has decided to step down at the next general election due to a series of death threats and an arson attack on his office. Conservative justice minister Mike Freer said, "by the skin of my teeth I avoided being murdered" by Ali Harbi Ali, who later killed Southend West MP Sir David Amess.
"There comes a point when the threats to your personal safety become too much," he told the Daily Mail. Mr Freer, who has been the MP for Finchley and Golders Green in London since 2010, said it was time to "say enough" as he couldn't put his family through more worry about his safety.
In a letter to his local Conservative association, Mr Freer wrote that it "will be an enormous wrench to step down", but the attacks "have weighed heavily on me and my husband, Angelo". The MP and his team have chosen to wear stab vests at public events in his constituency after finding out that Ali had watched his Finchley office before knifing Sir David to death during a constituency surgery in 2021.
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Mr Freer told the newspaper: "I was very lucky that actually on the day I was due to be in Finchley, I happened to change my plans and came into Whitehall." He added, "Otherwise who knows whether I would have been attacked or survived an attack. He said he came to Finchley to attack me."
He shared that MPs often try to "make light" of threats, but the possibility of being harmed always lingers in his mind. Mr Freer also revealed he had received threats from a group called Muslims Against Crusades who said they were "about coming to stab me", and even found fake Molotov cocktails on his office steps.
The MP described an arson attack on his north London constituency office last December as "the final straw". the police have stated that the incident is not being treated as a hate crime.
Mr Freer, who has pro-Israel views and represents a heavily Jewish constituency, said "I don't think we can divorce" antisemitism from the intimidation.
Mr Freer won his seat by about 6,600 votes in the 2019 general election, defeating a Liberal Democrat challenger. He now joins a list of MPs who have decided not to run in the next election, expected later this year.
Sarah Sackman, Labour's candidate in Finchley and Golders Green, expressed her shock at the news, saying: "We should have been able to face each other in the polls based on our ideas and merits." She added that politics is now often distorted by violent language, hate, and the dangers of social media.
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