Leadership talk as Phillips vows to help rebuild
BIRMINGHAM MP Jess Phillips said she was “exhausted and devastated” after Labour was hammered by the Tories at the General Election.
She retained her Birmingham Yardley seat with 23,379 votes and a diminished majority of just over 10,000.
Her name has now been linked with a possible run for the leadership of the party after Corbyn’s departure
“I’m exhausted and devastated that this is a reality,” she said. “I honestly didn’t expect the Labour Party to win this election.
“But I wasn’t expecting this level of devastation, this level of gutting pain. It’s heartbreaking – for my community and for my party.
“When I face the people of Yardley who need me, I will again give them hope that we can make it better.
“I have to tell them that this is going to hurt – and hurt people like them – but it’s not the end.
“They won’t be cross with me but with the world. But I will tell them it is going to be okay.”
So what was to blame for Labour’s electoral collapse?
“So many reasons,” admitted Ms Phillips. “People will say there is Jeremy Corbyn.
“There are issues with the way the party is run, with our messages on Brexit. But there is no quick solution.
“We are going to have to do a shed-load of work and listening and acting and learning – and it sounds so trite when I reel that off, but the Labour Party has been going wrong now for four elections. The party needs to rebuild the coalition that has always existed when we were in power.”
On the leadership question Ms Phillips said: “What I will commit to is that somewhere I will be at the helm. I feel a bit tired now and haven’t had time to put up the Christmas tree yet, so I’ll do that first.”
She added: “I am not going to let the Labour party go down without a fight. I am not going to hold back.”
Ms Phillips first won the seat previously held by the Liberal Democrats in 2015.
By 2017 she had a 16,574 majority and had secured more than half of the votes cast.
But she was uneasy, and her doorstep encounters fed her concerns.
Yardley is a Leave-voting constituency and Ms Phillips, who was a staunch advocate for a new People’s Vote, knew she was up against it to convince Leave voters to support her.
“What I hear a lot on the doorstep is ‘We like you, but...’,” she revealed.
That ‘but’, she said, was often followed by reference to Corbyn’s leadership, to her party’s apparent ambivalence on Brexit, or her own remainer credentials.
This is an area that voted for Leave overwhelmingly by 60 per cent to 40 per cent.
“Oh yes, it’s definitely on people’s minds. They are fed up with us,” she said.
In the two years since the last election Ms Phillips has graced magazine covers and TV settees galore, won Celebrity Bake Off with her ‘feminist cake’ and penned two bestselling books. She has endured death and rape threats which, rather than cow her into silence, have had the effect of magnifying her stand against misogyny and hate.
The Labour Party has been going wrong now for four elections
Yardley MP Jess Phillips