Jo Cox was an MP for just over a year but in that short time she marked herself out as a committed campaigner and rising star.

Before she came to Westminster the mother-of two had spent years working in war zones and as the head of policy for Oxfam, roles that would later inform her stance on refugees and their rights.

In Parliament she launched and became the chair of the all-party Parliamentary Friends of Syria group.

And she was unafraid to argue against her party leader Jeremy Corbyn on the need for action in the region.

She even joint authored an article with Andrew Mitchell, the former Conservative international development secretary, describing the international community’s response as “woefully inadequate".

The daughter of a school secretary and a factory worker, it was at Cambridge university in the mid-1990s that she became politicised.

She said that was while she was there she had realised “that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered, who you knew mattered.

“I didn’t really speak right or knew the right people. I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory working where my dad worked and everyone else had gone on a gap year! To be honest my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years.”

She was elected last May, for her home seat of Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire.

While working during the week at Westminster she lived with her husband Brendan, a former Downing Street adviser to Gordon Brown, and their young children in a converted barge on the Thames.

Her fellow MPs described her as "a lovely person and a hugely hard worker".

Her colleagues praised her work as the chair of the Labour Women’s Network, saying she had been an inspirational figure to many within her own party.

In recent weeks she had been a staunch campaigner for the Remain campaign in the upcoming EU referendum.

The day before she died she tweeted a picture of her husband and children taking part in a procession of boats down the Thames calling for the UK to stay in the EU.

One of the 36 MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn for the party leadership, she later voted for his rival Liz Kendall.

And she recently spoke out to warn her party leader that the local election results had been “not good enough”.

“The clock is ticking, “ she told him.

She had a sense of fun as well and just a few days ago took part taking part in the annual Parliamentary tug of war contest, raising awareness for Macmillan Cancer Support

She told her local paper the Yorkshire Post that in her former career she had “been in some horrific situations where women have been raped repeatedly in Darfur, I’ve been with child soldiers who have been given Kalashnikovs and kill members of their own family in Uganda.”

She did not expect to be killed in a sleepy street in West Yorkshire, while doing what she had done all her life, public service.