Even when trying hard to be contrite, Mike Amesbury somehow cannot help appearing as if he is spoiling for a fight.
Maybe he’s just got one of those faces, but that is how it seemed for a moment when the not-so-honourable MP for Runcorn and Helsby scuttled from court on Thursday after successfully appealing his 10-week jail sentence for violently assaulting one of his constituents.
‘Mike, why won’t you resign?’ came the persistent entreaty from reporters. ‘Why did you tell a pack of lies, Mike?’
In the face of such provocation, was there a danger Amesbury might erupt in venom-spitting rage – just as he did last October when Paul Fellows, a mild-mannered quantity surveyor, asked him a question about a bridge closure in the ancient Cheshire market town of Frodsham and was punched to the ground for his trouble?
This time, thankfully, 55-year-old Amesbury kept his flying fists in his coat pockets.
Having spent just three nights detained at His Majesty’s pleasure, he breathed the cold fresh air outside Chester Crown Court – to which he had arrived handcuffed in a prison van – and announced that he was going home to see his family.
The spectacle left Mr Fellows, 45, feeling ‘a bit sick’ and with the dismaying impression that the politician had somehow managed to ‘ride roughshod over the law’.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Mr Fellows speaks for the first time about the unprovoked attack and his disgust that Mr Amesbury is not just a free man but remains an MP, still drawing a £91,000 salary.
He says: ‘It’s outrageous. If it was anyone else, you or I, we would have lost our jobs, no question.’
He wants Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to change the rules so that MPs automatically lose their jobs if sent to prison. ‘Once you’re convicted you should just lose your job.’
Under parliamentary rules, MPs have a ‘special duty’ to constituents and must ‘act on all occasions in accordance with the public trust placed in them’.
But to much astonishment, Mr Amesbury, though suspended by the Labour Party, has refused calls to resign and now sits as an independent.
Mr Fellows adds: ‘I was surprised by the quickness of the appeal. I feel a charge of affray should have been brought rather than common assault, which the judge said in the appeal hearing.
‘I feel unheard. I don’t think justice has been served. If I saw Amesbury now, chances are I would ignore him.’
He also reveals that police initially told him – incorrectly – that CCTV cameras failed to capture the incident.
‘They said the cameras were turned the wrong way. At that point I felt they weren’t really interested, the case was going nowhere,’ he says.
Yet footage reporters got from a camera by a minicab office showed in shocking clarity the sickening moment the MP knocked Mr Fellows to the ground with one punch to his face and then, as he lay dazed, delivered a salvo of blows to his head.
‘He could have killed me and deserves to be in prison,’ says Mr Fellows. ‘He should never have been let out so early.
‘I was standing on the pavement with my hands in my pockets when he punched me in the face. I could easily have hit the back of my head as I fell into the road.
‘The intent was there. If you punch someone you have to accept the consequences – that you might kill them.’
Indeed, Amesbury would be told by a judge that ‘I have seen a single punch to the head cause fatal injury in previous cases’.
It was only after the CCTV footage surfaced, along with film from phones, that the MP was forced to change his story and come clean.
Initially he told police he had felt threatened and acted in self-defence – an explanation described in court as ‘a pack of lies’.
Mr Fellows says: ‘If it wasn’t for the CCTV, I’m sure the case would have been dropped.’
A private man, Mr Fellows would rather it had never begun and is only talking now to clear up misconceptions. Friends and family attest to his gentle, cheerful nature. Not since his schooldays has he been in a fight.
Certainly, he wasn’t looking for trouble when he encountered Amesbury at a taxi rank at 2am on October 26. Neither did he envisage that the assault would propel him into the spotlight, something he finds distasteful.
What has not emerged till now is that the men had socialised. Mr Fellows’ daughter and the MP’s son attend the same school.
‘I have been out for drinks with him and other parents,’ says Mr Fellows. ‘There was always banter – he supports Manchester United and I’m Liverpool. We didn’t discuss politics.’
Mostly, he found the MP unremarkable and standoffish. ‘When I first met him, I shook his hand and said, “I’m Paul”. He just responded “Hi” but didn’t give his name.
‘He kind of expected me to know who he was. There was a bit of arrogance about him.’
They met a few times, always in the company of up to a dozen other parents. If they passed in the street they would ‘say hello’.
Mr Fellows says: ‘He wasn’t a friend, just someone I knew – another dad.’
With a population of around 9,000, Frodsham is on the Mersey estuary 15 miles south of Liverpool and is described by Mr Fellows as a ‘fairly pleasant place to live’.
Take That singer Gary Barlow grew up in the town, as did 007 star Daniel Craig.
On the night of the assault, Mr Fellows spotted the MP in the taxi queue across the road from a firm of solicitors and decided to ask him about the planned closure of the town’s Sutton Weaver swing bridge, which would see many locals, including Mr Fellows, facing detours of up to 30 minutes.
‘It was due to close for repairs and maintenance but there was no contingency plan,’ he says.
Perhaps it wasn’t the most judicious moment to approach an MP with a constituency matter, but the two were acquainted.
And as the judge in the case would later tell Amesbury: ‘You could reasonably expect robust challenge from constituents and members of the public.’
Mr Fellows says: ‘I went to him and said, “Mike, what are you going to do about the bridge?”.’ In hindsight, he concedes his inquiry was blunt, more so than normal, ‘but I’d had a few to drink’. The MP, though, had more than a few.
Mr Fellows had been out in Manchester with work colleagues and returned to Frodsham to meet friends. Amesbury had also been drinking in local pubs – though his evening had begun with a police meeting about community safety.
Mr Fellows says: ‘He recognised me. He said something to the effect of, “I’m your MP, who are you speaking to?” I said, “Yes, you are my MP, that’s why I am talking to you”.’
According to Mr Fellows, a divorced father-of-two, the conversation didn’t progress much beyond this, at least not in a meaningful way – because the politician, he says, was rambling incoherently, ‘clearly angry about my comment about the bridge’.
Not for a moment did he himself become aggressive or threatening, a fact recognised later in court, and borne out by CCTV footage. ‘The most I said after this was, “I asked you a question”. I didn’t say or do anything remotely threatening.’
In the footage, the two men stand face-to-face, less than a few feet away. At one point Amesbury jabs his finger in his constituent’s direction.
‘I walked away at one point because I couldn’t be bothered with it and then he came back at me. I remember there was a period of silence, not long, and then it happened,’ recalls Mr Fellows.
‘It [the MP’s left hook] came from nowhere. He connected with my cheekbone.
‘I lost my balance and went down in the parking bay. I felt shock, I didn’t really know what happened. He kicked me on my side, my abdomen, and rained five or six punches on the top of my head. I tried to hold my hands up to protect myself.’
Afterwards Amesbury was then heard saying: ‘You won’t threaten your MP again will you, you f****** soft lad?’
Judge Steven Everett told the MP on Thursday that he had committed a ‘prolonged and persistent assault after drinking umpteen pints’, adding: ‘Your behaviour was simply disgraceful’.
Mr Fellows says: ‘I felt bewildered at the time. It was like, “What the hell just happened there”. You don’t expect it. I hadn’t been in a situation like this, nobody has ever hit me before.’
When he staggered to his feet a few minutes later he noticed that the MP, who lives in Frodsham, was still in the taxi queue.
Someone told him to phone the police. ‘I rang them and told them I had been assaulted by Mike Amesbury and they said they would come out but I left before they got there.’
Next morning, while nursing his injuries, he was visited by two police officers who took a statement. ‘I asked them if there if there was any CCTV and they said they’ve investigated that and there was no footage because all the cameras were facing the wrong way or a different way.
‘I thought this was strange – particularly when a media outlet would later get hold of it.
‘The officers seemed to be taking a neutral line, possibly going through the motions, and I thought it would go no further. The impression I got from them was that nothing would happen.’
Over the next 48 hours, however, footage began to appear online. ‘My overriding emotion when I saw the film was shock, it seemed worse than I remembered. It was weird seeing myself. If anything, prior to that, I’d been downplaying it to my friends,’ says Mr Fellows.
‘I was angry that he went to the police voluntarily to head it off at the pass and blame me. If it was the other way round I think I would have been arrested and thrown in a cell. It strikes me that he was handled with special care because he’s an MP. I might be wrong but that was my feeling.’
Looking back, he says he should have heeded advice from police to go to hospital to get checked out straight away – but only did so on the following Monday because he ‘suffered a couple of dizzy spells and was having trouble sleeping because of pain in my neck and shoulder. They were killing me.
‘I was also getting severe headaches. So I went to a walk-in emergency centre to get checked out, later having an MRI scan which was thankfully all clear. Even so the headaches lasted weeks. Police got in touch around this time to offer me a victim support number but didn’t say much about the investigation, just that it was ongoing. And I haven’t heard much from them since – which is perhaps surprising given it became so high profile’.
He was ‘surprised’ when Amesbury was originally given a jail sentence, less so when his appeal was successful. The judge said that while the length of the sentence had been ‘spot on’, it should be suspended for two years.
Judge Everett also ordered Amesbury to do 200 hours of unpaid work and undertake an alcohol monitoring programme, go on an anger management course and carry out 20 days of rehabilitation work.
As he left court Amesbury, who has been an MP for eight years and a Labour member since he was 17, described his behaviour as ‘highly regrettable and of course I’m sincerely sorry to Mr Fellows’.
But Mr Fellows says: ‘I’ve not had any kind of personal apology, anything in either writing or trying to contact me. I felt like it was just purely for the media and the judge.’
During his sentencing hearing on Monday, Amesbury’s defence team said he had previously been subjected to threats due to his role as an MP and added six people who work for him would lose their jobs.
‘I think that’s totally outrageous to use that as an excuse to defend his behaviour,’ says Mr Fellows.
Declining to say whether he for voted for Amesbury, he conceded only that he has voted both Labour and Conservative in the past.
Amesbury remains at risk of being ousted. If at least 10 per cent of his constituents back a recall petition, a by-election will take place – with Labour facing a formidable challenge from Reform.
For now though he is still free to sit in the Commons and to carry on fighting for – if not with – the people of Runcorn and Helsby.