‘ I CARRY JO’S SPIRIT WITH ME’
The murder of her close friend JoCox affectedJessPhillips deeply but despite facing persistent death threats herself, theLabourMP isn’t goinganywhere. Chris Burn reports.
Jo has become this thing in my head and in the public that is so untouchable that sometimes she slips away from me. So sometimes I try and remember the annoying things she did. Jess Phillips, speaking about her friend and colleague, the late Yorkshire MP Jo Cox.
“WHEN SHE died was the first time I was literally dumbstruck,” says Jess Phillips of that terrible day in June 2016 where her close friend and fellow Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered. “I literally didn’t speak and I just couldn’t speak. I have never ever known grief like it.”
Phillips, who is speaking to The Yorkshire Post ahead of a virtual appearance at Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival this weekend, had been with Cox the night before she was killed in Birstall where the Batley and Spen MP had been due to hold a constituency surgery the week before the Brexit referendum.
“I couldn’t believe it when it happened,” recalls Phillips. “It was on the breaking news banner on television and I somehow thought in my head this must be some sort of dummy news page. Twelve hours before I had been in her house, I had literally just seen her. I was in Spain when it happened and I had left for the airport from her house.”
The 39- year- old Birmingham Yardley MP, who is Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding, has gained something of a reputation for brushing off internet trolls sending her abuse and threats on Twitter but says the reality is more challenging.
In June this year, a man named Rakeem Malik from Birmingham was sent to jail for five years after threatening to kill Phillips and her family, as well as sending similar threats to Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Rosie Cooper.
Phillips watched his sentencing via a live stream from court and says the impact of the case hit her shortly afterwards. “It was on Zoom and afterwards I literally just closed the laptop. Then I went to the supermarket and literally collapsed. I didn’t feel scared but sometimes it gets on top of you.”
Phillips, who previously managed refuges for victims of domestic abuse for the charity Women’s Aid before moving into politics, says the ongoing impact on her family can be hard to take. “Sometimes if we are out in a busy place, I can see my children are hyperalert and it reminds me of the children I worked with in refuges being hyperalert to things because of what they have been through.”
In her recent book Truth to Power, which she is discussing at Saturday’s event, Phillips cites both Jo Cox and Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist murdered while investigating corruption in Malta, as examples of why she is determined not be scared out of public life by such threats.
“Jo and Daphne were both incredibly normal people and if they had been asked if they were willing to die for what they believed in, inevitably both would have thought about their children and loved ones and answered that they were not. But if they had been asked, ‘ Are you willing to stop speaking up in case you die because of it?’, the answer would have been a resounding, ‘ No’,” the book explains.
Nevertheless, Phillips says the death of Cox and other attacks and threats towards fellow MPs brings home the genuine level of risk. “It totally makes it into a reality. I’m afraid it is also a reality to the people who threaten you because they often invoke Jo and say ‘ what happened to Jo Cox will happen to you’. It is not just Jo but there was the plot to kill Rosie Cooper and Stephen Timms was stabbed in his surgery.
“It is very real. I can’t just brush it off as easily as I would have done. If Jo was still here, she would still carry on. I keep her spirit with me all the time.”
When I ask her what Cox was like, Phillips gives something of an unexpected – if very honest – answer.
“She was a massive pain in the a*** sometimes and I feel that has sometimes been lost,” she laughs. “She has become this thing in my head and in the public imagination that is so untouchable that sometimes she slips away from me. So sometimes I try and remember the annoying things she sometimes did.
“It was never awful but she would run into any campaign literally headfirst and you would be like, ‘ let’s think about a strategy for five minutes’. I wish I still had the message but I remember when it was in the news a woman had been sent home from work for wearing high heels, she left me this 10- minute garbled voicemail message saying ‘ We are going to turn up to Parliament in massive platform shoes and I’m going to ring Laura Kuenssberg and going to get all the women in the lobby to do it’. Before I had got through everything, she sent me a message saying, ‘ Forget it, we are not in work on Monday!’
“We became very good friends. I often say to my children that friendship is active, not passive and you work at them. She was a worker and she made the effort. She had a family home in London and I didn’t and she made a real effort to cook me dinner once a month. She didn’t just do that for me, she did it for lots of women. We both felt at times we were failing at being an MP or being a mother. She worked hard to try and make it so we always amplified each others’ voices. There is a photo of her talking about Syria and I’m sat next to her looking at her with total admiration and love. If one of us was speaking in the Chamber, we would be there for each other.”
Phillips, the daughter of a teacher and an NHS executive, has often been condemned by the left- wing of the Labour party both for her criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn when he was leading the party and her belief that pragmatism should come before principles when it comes to politics making a difference in people’s lives.
She says that outlook was partly forged when she was at university in Yorkshire. “I couldn’t give a toss about any over- arching political theory. I studied politics at Leeds University – it was all about political theory and I quit and started studying social policy instead. That was about single mums who live on benefits and I thought, ‘ I have met some of them, I have never met John Stuart Mill’. Now I’m much more interested in political theory just because I am older. But the fundamental for me is about making a shift around someone’s dinner table so they can afford to do more than before or aren’t worried about x, y or z.”
Phillips, who was elected as an MP in 2015, says one of her proudest achievements was her part in getting the Government to propose that councils across the country would be legally required to provide secure accommodation for survivors of domestic abuse and their children – an issue she campaigned on for several years before Theresa May announced a consultationonthechangelast year. The move is yet to be made law but Phillips says knowing you have contributed to potentially life- saving legislation is one of the best parts of being an MP.
“It is the greatest thing in the whole world. There is nothing better than when you change something and you know it will make a difference in people’s lives. There have been occasions where Ministers have rung up and basically said, ‘ you have won’ and it is better than anything.”