Nadia Whittome, Britain’s youngest MP, on race, Rees-Mogg – and taking a massive pay cut
When Nadia Whittome was growing up, her mother told her that, as a workingclass girl of colour, she had to be twice as good as others to be judged half as good. Evidently, it was a lesson that the youngest MP to enter parliament at after last month’s general election took to heart. After all, not every 23-yearold’s nights out clubbing end with them trying diligently to unionise the staff. “Sometimes in the club toilets there are women selling deodorants or sweets. And I’ll go up to them and have a chat and just get to know them and ask whether they’re in a union,” explains the new Labour MP for Nottingham East, grinning. “My friends are always like: ‘Nadia, we’re going to get the shots in ...’ But politics is life, isn’t it? We live it every day.”
She is living it very differently these days, however. Almost overnight, Whittome went from living at home with her mum in Nottingham to representing her city in parliament and being grilled on the Today programme. Her election victory was a light on an otherwise dark night for the radical left. But it is a lot to take in for someone selected only 24 hours before the election was called and who had never lived away from home before she was elected (although she now has a flat in London for weeknights, she is still under her mother’s roof in her constituency). “People keep asking me how I feel, and the truth is there’s no time to process how I feel. I’m just getting on with the job,” she says. “It does feel really odd that, not very long ago, I was looking for Christmas temp work – got rejected from a lot of Christmas temp work – and now I’m a member of parliament.”
The so-called baby of the house has a certain steel about her. “I don’t want to start to feel comfortable in that place,” she says of parliament. “I’m not here to become part of the fabric of Westminster; I’m here to change it.”
If she seems unusually self-possessed for her age, perhaps it is because Whittome had to grow up faster than some. She turned to activism as a teenager, she says, after watching friends on her estate struggle to cope under Tory austerity measures. Before long, this daughter of immigrants – her mother, who raised her as a single parent, is British-Indian; her father is of Punjabi heritage – was protesting against the bedroom tax alongside Tony Benn and organising with Deliveroo riders against gig economy working practices.
Whittome says she joined Labour under Ed Miliband because she wanted it to be an anti-austerity party; in 2015, she was an early cheerleader for Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to succeed him. Having run unsuccessfully for a local council seat, she beat stiff competition to be selected as the party’s candidate for the safe seat of Nottingham East after the incumbent Labour MP, the Corbyn critic Chris Leslie, defected to