Being a ‘gobby’ woman MP

EVERYWOMAN: ONE WOMAN’S TRUTH ABOUT SPEAKING THE TRUTH by Jess Phillips (£14.99, Hutchinson)

HOW do MPs find time to write so many books? We’ve had Nadine Dorries’ misery lit, Boris Johnson on (and hoping to provoke comparisons with) Winston Churchill, and Iain Duncan Smith’s thriller, The Devil’s Tune — only a penny on Amazon, and about which one reviewer noted: “I only gave it one star as there isn’t an option for none.”

The latest parliamentarian keeping the printing presses whirring is Jess Phillips, the 35-year-old Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. If party members hadn’t been brainwashed by the Corbyn cult, she would be on the shadow frontbench. Instead, she’s written — in her evenings, she stresses — a feminist-polemic-cumcall-to-action. Labour’s loss.

Phillips comes across as great company — not just passing the “Would you go for a drink with her?” test but making sure you’d end the evening having put the world to rights but lost both your shoes and your dignity. She certainly isn’t your typical MP. She’s “gobbier” (her word). Swearier. With a propensity to overshare. She had her first cigarette at 11 and went on to “abuse” her body with “drinking, partying and not eating”. Teenage Phillips thought Courtney Love should play her in a film of her life.

She’s very open about that life. Her brother Luke was a heroin addict (he’s clean now), and she recalls the many trips to A&E, searching her house after he’d been over to find what he had taken and — after she’d been selected as a parliamentary candidate — having to bundle him into a car in the constituency when he was violent and suffering from drug-induced psychosis. She also regales the reader with accounts of the sexism she’s suffered: aged 13, a man assumed she was a prostitute and asked her to get into his car. Aged 19, a man stuck his hand up her skirt in a club. She slapped him in response — but it was she who was thrown out.

On politics, she doesn’t pull any punches, and it’s Jeremy Corbyn who