The Tories are nicer to me than my own party
Outspoken MP Jess Phillips – who once told Diane Abbott to eff off – tells Bryony Gordon it’s time for some straight talking
Jess Phillips is typically forthright when I text to ask her about the political events of last week, and what they mean for her party. “The Copeland result is a historic catastrophe,” she replies on Saturday morning, in between moving house and trying to organise her two young children.
“Those alleged to be all about ‘straight-talking honest politics’ are spinning like ballerinas, trying to make out it is just a blip. The voting public are not stupid. They see through this. As with the Richmond by-election before it, this is a fundamental rejection of the sitting party by people who made an informed choice.
“If the Labour Party and its leaders don’t wake up, this catastrophic result will be the first of many and we’d have done little more than collude with Tory success.”
In typical Phillips style, she signs off the message with a cheery kiss.
Jess Phillips is the 35-year-old Member of Parliament for Birmingham Yardley who infamously told Diane Abbott to f--- off. Corbynites called this racist (actually, Abbott had called the young MP “sanctimonious” for daring to question the lack of women appointments in Labour’s front bench and, as Phillips says now, “I’ll tell anyone to f--- off if they’re rude to me”).
Phillips is sparky, bolshie, a “proud parliamentarian” who got pregnant at 23, a month after getting together with Tom, a lift engineer who has since given up work to look after the children. (“We’d known each other for ages,” she says, in between sucks on an e-cigarette).
She worked for Women’s Aid before becoming an MP in 2015, and has continued to bang her feminist drum in the Commons – she chairs the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party, and on International Women’s Day last year she stood up in the Commons and read out the names of 120 women who had been killed by men in the previous 12 months.
Last autumn, she successfully campaigned for extra funding to be ring-fenced for women’s refuges. Damian Green, the Work and Pensions Secretary, congratulated her on her achievements, but her own party seemed less keen to pat her on the back. One Corbynite blog accused her of only ever having been a business manager at Women’s Aid (she managed the refuges).
She is not backwards in coming forwards, and has now written a funny, frank book called Everywoman, all about finding the courage to speak the truth. “The Labour Party needs to sit in a corner and have a word with itself,” she tells me. “It needs a smack about the face. A serious wet fish to the chops. A shaking.”
I make the observation that, to my mind, the party is behaving like a petulant teenager and she agrees. “Oh, a terrible petulant teenager – like a child who is saying ‘I’m going to get what I want and if not I’m going to cry about it.’ I think they are waking up to the fact that we are electorally in a disaster.”
Phillips has great friends within Labour, such as Alison McGovern, the MP for Wirral South, and she was close to Jo Cox, who was murdered by neo-Nazi Thomas Mair in her Batley and Spen constituency last June.
But Phillips seems to have a far jollier relationship with the Tories, writing in her book about eating a packet of sandwiches in a Co-op café with Jacob Rees-Mogg, “and I can confirm he did not ask for swan on wholemeal… although it is true he was the only person in a double-breasted pinstriped suit”.
Are the Tories nicer to her? “Oh yeah, no doubt about it. They call me Aunt Pol [after Aunt Pol from Peaky Blinders] because she’s always smoking a fag like she’s running the joint.” She is particularly fond of Sir Nicholas Soames. “He gave me genuine dieting advice the other day. He’s half the man he was.”
By contrast, she has only spoken to shadow chancellor John McDonnell “about twice – I just don’t move in the same circles”.
Her parents – her mother was an NHS manager and her father an English teacher – gave her membership of the Labour Party when she was 14. Her “mom”, as she calls her (this, she says, is what mums are called in Birmingham), died of cancer when Jess was about to turn 30, but the MP does not touch on her death in the book.
“When I think about her, I don’t ever think about her dying. She had cancer, sarcoma, but she had it in her leg, and she was being treated here in the UK for a deep-vein thrombosis. So she was given blood thinners and stuff.”
Phillips seems keen not to dwell on the darker details.
“Then she went to France on holiday, was bitten by a mosquito and her whole leg swelled up, and then she went to a French hospital and they diagnosed her as having this massive tumour in her leg. And she had it removed within a day on the French health service. Bear in mind my mum was an NHS manager, so if she couldn’t get the right care, God only knows what hope there is for the rest of us.”
The cancer had spread to her lungs; she was told she had just six months to live, but paid for pioneering treatment in Germany that kept her alive for another two-and-a-half years.
“I went into proper mourning when she was diagnosed, but I think by [the time she died] I’d come to terms with it,” she says.
The book is dedicated to her, and to Jo Cox. Phillips finds it disturbing that Jo’s death seems to have changed nothing.
“On the day of Jo’s special memorial, I was interviewed on Channel 4 alongside Alastair Campbell and I was saying, ‘This will change people’s attitudes.’ He said, ‘It won’t make the blindest bit of difference.’ Turns out he does know what he’s talking about, Alastair.”
For Jess, Jo will always embody the idea of what a good politician is.
“She was an exception to the rule. But I would caveat that by saying that the people who think politicians are all in it for ourselves… well, politicians are ultimately quite private people and really nice people, they just don’t come across that way. We have to get better at appearing normal.”
And Phillips is certainly a good starting point.
‘Sir Nicholas Soames gave me genuine dieting advice the other day’