Interview

Assisted dying

Culture

Politics

S&U interviews

13 February 2025

5 min read

Marsha de Cordova: the personal experiences driving her passionate politics

“What disabled people need is assistance to live, not to die.”

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A woman wearing a red jacket stands formally beside an office stair case.

When Marsha de Cordova talks about most issues relating to her work as the Member of Parliament for Battersea, in south London, she sticks to the standard position of her Labour party. Meeting at her constituency office by the busy Clapham Junction railway station, she dutifully defends her party’s government, elected last July. She points to ministers’ work to reform planning and improve renters’ rights as evidence they are making progress.

But when conversation turns to the Assisted Dying Bill currently going through parliament, her tone becomes unmistakeably more urgent and her passion more obviously personal.

The strong feelings mark de Cordova out as one of a group of Labour MPs who have been spurred by personal experience and, in many cases, religious conviction to oppose the Assisted Dying Bill introduced by a colleague, Spen Valley MP Kim Leadbeater. While the legislation is a private member’s bill without official government support, it has been widely seen as reflecting the views of Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

De Cordova, who is Black, expresses similarly trenchant views about the government’s rhetoric on immigration. She is also a strong supporter of rapprochement with the European Union.

However, her views on assisted dying – informed partly by being a committed Christian – are particularly forcefully expressed. She answers tersely, “No, I’m not”, when asked if she is happy about the political capital the new government has expended on the Assisted Dying Bill. She adds that she voted against it at second reading, the first parliamentary vote on a bill. She intends to oppose it again at third reading, before it passes to the House of Lords.

“We didn’t need to expend so much capital on it,” de Cordova says. “The aim now has to be to ensure the bill doesn’t pass third reading.”

Many of the Labour MPs who have opposed the legislation have cited religious objections. In the Cabinet, they include health secretary Wes Streeting and foreign secretary David Lammy, both Christians, and justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, a Muslim.

De Cordova also links her opposition to her disability. De Cordova is registered blind because of nystagmus, in which the eyes repeatedly move involuntarily, disrupting vision. There have been fears assisted people could come under greater pressure than others to seek assisted death.

“As a disabled woman, I’m incredibly concerned,” de Cordova says. “What disabled people need is assistance to live, not to die. That should be our government’s priority.”

“My faith is an integral part of who I am. It really is part of my values, my beliefs, my politics.”

The assisted dying fight has garnered unusual levels of publicity for the Battersea MP, who entered parliament seven years ago when barely expecting to do so. De Cordova, now 49, was serving as a Lambeth borough councillor when the 2017 snap general election was called and decided to seek the Labour nomination for Battersea, then held by the Conservatives.

The seat was one of several Conservative seats in pro-Remain areas that fell to Labour’s surprisingly strong showing in the election in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

“No one really thought I could win here,” de Cordova says. “Obviously, Brexit I would say played a role in that I’m a strong Remainer.”

De Cordova increased her majority in 2019 and last year’s general election. She sees strong continuities between serving as an MP and her previous role in the charity sector. She had been working when elected as the engagement and advocacy director for the Thomas Pocklington Trust, which supports blind and partially sighted people.

“I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician,” de Cordova says, of her upbringing in Bristol. “I’ve always had the desire to be making a difference. All of my work before becoming a politician centred around that – being that voice for the voiceless.”

She links her work to her faith. She became a Christian in her late 20s and now attends Holy Trinity Clapham. The church is famous as the spiritual home of William Wilberforce and the “Clapham Sect” of early 19th century campaigners against the slave trade and other social evils.

Her faith has led to her appointment as second church estates commissioner – the liaison between parliament and England’s established church, who answers questions in the Commons on behalf of the church.

“My faith is an integral part of who I am,” de Cordova says. “It really is part of my values, my beliefs, my politics.”

It becomes clear speaking to her that her objections to the policies of the government – and the Assisted Dying Bill, which many of her party colleagues support – are clustered around areas involving challenges to fundamental rights.

She objects to the Assisted Dying Bill because she sees it as part of a steady erosion of disabled people’s rights.

“The issue will have a hugely, hugely disproportionate impact on disabled people,” she says. “That, for me, is a no-no.”

Provision for disabled people was “hollowed out” under the last Conservative government, she says.

“That, for me, will always be the issue,” de Cordova says. “I want to campaign and fight for full equality for us.”

She also views immigration issues through the prism of immigrants’ rights.

Asked if she wishes the government took a less hostile tone on the issue, she replies: “From my perspective, when I think about immigration, I tend to think about it in a compassionate way.”

She calls for the establishment of “safe routes” to ensure people fleeing persecution can claim asylum from outside the UK, without making dangerous Channel crossings. The government has shown no signs of introducing such rights.

“Let’s think about immigration in a positive way,” de Cordova says, adding that her grandparents were immigrants to the UK from the Caribbean. “The Tories and the right have always tried to portray it as a negative. It’s not always a negative.”

For de Cordova, the unglamorous role of church estates commissioner forms part of that pattern of advocating for the voiceless.

The job entails dealing with every aspect of MPs’ questions about church life, including the status of historic buildings and other less obviously morally important questions.

However, de Cordova, who was appointed a month before publication of the Makin Report on the church’s handling of abuse by John Smyth, is clear the church has urgent problems to resolve.

The Makin Report has to be a “turning point”, she says.

“I understand steps are being taken to address the challenges,” de Cordova says. “They need to set out over time how they’ll ensure such abuse never happens again.”

The campaigning approach is part of de Cordova’s wider philosophy. She says she has faced many challenges as a result of her disability and tried to overcome them.

“I want to ensure that I can break down the barriers for people coming after me, so that people don’t have to face those same experiences,” she says.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Article

Art

Culture

10 February 2025

5 min read

Why is religious art still popular?

What looters, curators and today's public find in a genre that survives the centuries.

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A painting depicts a man a prophet pointing skywards while another person sleeps on the ground

Detail from Parmigianino’s The Vision of St Jerome.

The National Gallery.

The museums of Europe and North America are filled with religious art. Why? Certainly, gallery goers of the nineteenth century, when many public museums were founded, were more likely to practice a faith than visitors in today’s global cities, but this does not explain religious art’s continuing appeal. If we are so much more secular than the folks in stiff collars and leg ‘o mutton sleeves who curated and donated to early museum collections, why is the religious art they championed still so popular?

Individual religious paintings’ chequered history, together with the formal elements of their composition, provide two lenses into the genre’s ability to resonate across multiple generations.

Celebrations around the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary, with its reappraisal of the earliest works to enter the collection, offers an ideal time to study the blueprints for public collections, which continue to shape the art we see today. The French Revolution is popularly credited as the genesis of public art institutions, as the art and fine furniture from displaced aristocrat’s palaces was put on display at the Louvre, opened in 1793. But the idea of a semi-public art collections had been present in Italy from the early eighteenth century, as families opened their palazzos and collections of classical art to visitors on the Grand Tour. Rome’s Capitoline Museum opened in 1734, as the papacy saw an opportunity to showcase the heritage of ancient Rome to the city’s wealthy tourists, and position themselves in the role of art patrons.

At the National Gallery, Parmigianino’s The Vision of St Jerome, 1526-1527, (reunited for the first time with rare preparatory drawings until 9 March) pulls on many of the threads that makes religious art, even in a secular age, enduringly powerful.

Painted when Parmigianino was only 24, and already being hailed as ‘Raphael reborn’, the painting is reputed to have stopped looting soldier in their tracks, when they saw it in the artist’s studio during the 1527 Sack of Rome. The painting itself had an adventurous life, spending far longer in secular surroundings than it ever did in the religious settings it was intended for.

Commissioned as an altarpiece for a funerary chapel in Rome, the upheaval of the city’s occupation by the troops of Charles V saw The Vision of St Jerome stored, but not publicly displayed, in the refectory of a nearby church. Somehow during the terror and mayhem, the 3.5 metres high altarpiece, weighing nearly 100 kilograms, was transported from the artist’s studio across the city to safety.

Thirty years later a great nephew of the original woman patron, Maria Bufalini, took the altarpiece from Rome to the family’s Umbrian hometown of Citta di Castello. Had it instead gone to its intended Roman church San Salvatore in Lauro, it would have been destroyed by the church fire of 1591. The Vision of St Jerome stayed in the family chapel of Sant’Agostino, inspiring artists from the region, until around 1772 when Cardinal Giovanni Bufalini moved the altarpiece to the restored Palazzo Bufalini, placing a copy in Sant’Agostino. If the original stayed in the church it would have been ruined by an earthquake in 1789.

Having spent just over 200 years in a sacred setting, the painting was sold by the Bufalini heirs to an English art agent in Rome, setting sail from Livorno in December 1791 for its new life in England.

After inheriting Parmigianino’s Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene (1535-40), George Watson Taylor, with his heiress wife Anna, added The Vision of Saint Jerome to the significant private art collection, displayed at their London Townhouse in Cavendish Square. In 1819 the painting was exhibited publicly in England for the first time when Watson Taylor lent it the British Institution, the forerunner of the National Gallery.

Four years later the painting fetched £3,202 at the sale of Watson Taylor’s collection, securing a higher price than Rubens’ Rainbow Landscape. It was purchased by the Reverend William Holwell Carr on behalf of the British Institution. The Vision of Saint Jerome hung in the National Gallery within two years of the institution’s foundation.

Once part of the nation’s collection, the mannerist style of Parmigianino, with its elongated limbs, twisted torsos, classical drapery and foreshortened perspective, provided a context to discuss the Biblical figures depicted in the work. A loosely draped, seated Virgin Mary holds a tussle haired child between her knees, who kicks one leg out, as if to step away. Beneath them John the Baptist points a massive arm towards the heavens, while a smaller scale St Jerome sleeps clutching a crucifix. Regency and Victorian Christians such as Howell Carr, and popular art historians Anna Jameson and Elizabeth Eastlake, wife of the Gallery’s first director Charles, saw the potential of art created 400 years ago to speak to the spiritual questions of their day. Shorn of a traditional religious setting, the message, and missional potential, of the work came across as powerfully as ever.

After surviving war, fire and earthquakes, The Vision of Saint Jerome was relocated to Manod Quarry in Wales from 1941 until the end of World War Two to escape the bombing of London. During this period, the National Gallery brought one painting out of storage to view in the empty Trafalgar Square landmark, the war weary public’s Picture of the Month. The tradition continues today.

For sleep -deprived, food -rationed, scared wartime Londoners Noli me Tangere offered a message of love, loss, transcendence and protection.

The first Picture of the Month, in 1942, was Titian’s Noli me Tangere, c. 1514. In a rather Italianate Garden of Gethsemane, with glowing sun and tumbling hills, Mary reaches out her hand to Christ. Having tended Christ’s crucified body in the tomb, Mary is grieving, and at first believes the figure before her is a gardener. To her astonishment he reveals himself to be the Christ, resurrected from the dead. Titian portrays the bittersweet moment after Christ’s miraculous return, when Mary comprehends that although Christ is present, she can no longer have any human contact with him, represented by her rebuffed gesture of touch. In common with all Christ’s followers, it is time to relinquish his earthly presence. While the kneeling Mary is bound to the earth, the standing Christ figure forms an arc over her, representing his protection of humanity.