MAN UP, JESS!
Bully boys in the Commons? Do stop whining, veteran tells MP, and DO something about it
IT’S difficult to fill the BBC’s daily news programmes in August when everyone’s gone away to sit in traffic jams outside Dover or climb mountains in Switzerland and politics has gone to sleep – except for the Labour leadership contest, which has all the excitement of predestination.
Yet it still seems odd that I’ve just listened on Radio Four’s World At One to an extraordinarily long, almost reverential interview with diffident and self-effacing Labour MP Jess Phillips about the agonies she has endured for her modest salary, a mere £75,000 a year. Inter- viewer Martha Kearney took on a sympathetic tone – totally unlike the John Humphrys school of aggressive interviewing or the Andrew Neil system of chucking in another question before the first has been answered.
Martha saw her job as putting pennies in and letting the jukebox play while she oozed sympathy for Jess on the lines of ‘how awful it must be having to work with all those callous and brutal men’.
Jolly Jess responded as bravely and modestly as square-jawed British actor Jack Hawkins playing the skipper of a beleaguered British battleship in the Second World War.
Yes, it had been bad, but the Dunkirk spirit was keeping her going – despite the fact she’d had to put her husband on the public payroll to protect her, then have Parliament put new locks on her home and fix up a panic room in her office.
Not a word of sympathy for the way that another woman, Angela Eagle, had been elbowed aside by men after bravely opening the way to Labour’s leadership contest.
Now I have to admit Jess didn’t exactly have me singing: ‘Tell me pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?’ But nor did it prompt me to say: ‘If you can’t stand the heat go back into the kitchen.’
Here was a woman driven to the point of considering her future in politics: ‘I can’t imagine why I would want to stay somewhere I am so obviously not welcome… Every single day I receive messages saying I am not good enough, I should lose my job.’
Having always believed we need more women in Parliament, I was worried Jess’s agonies would put other women off taking a job as MP.
Members of Parliament used to be respected, even a subject of awe, but are now treated like one of those inflatable dummies in Japanese factories that the workforce are encouraged to kick, punch and generally take it out on.
You don’t feminise Parliament by portraying it as a purgatory for women with the words: ‘Abandon home (and children) all ye who enter here.’ Sorry, Jess, but it’s not a new phenomenon. I remember in one lorry drivers’ strike, militants picketed my house and terrified my kids.
On another occasion my secretary was chased around the office by a bully so we had to put in an alarm. And once my entire staff were threatened with death as they could not get an alcoholic access to his grandchildren.
I remember more vividly the abuse I got in the expenses row – and the demands to use my toilet which had been renovated (for use of my staff) by the officials who oversee expenses claims. It’s probably the case that women are more vulnerable, though I don’t rate anyone’s prospects of bullying such a shrinking violet as Jess.
It is true Labour MP Jo Cox was killed by a deranged man, though that seems more a problem of inadequate mental health services than a political threat. Two other MPs have been stabbed at surgeries in recent parliaments – and we should not forget the assassination of Tory MP Airey Neave in the Commons car park in 1979. But let’s keep things in proportion.
No one condones violence or should be happy when things turn sour. Yet much as MPs want to be loved – I certainly did – it is, sadly, part of the job and there’s no way of eliminating it.
As long as MPs are distant from the people; as long as Labour MPs would rather fight like mad ferrets in a sack than hold the Government to account; as long as Ministers impose painful sacrifices on the people, and as long as no Government appears able to tackle anything from immigration to irresponsible bankers and dodgy scams, then people will be upset.
A system that declares itself open to business but is less open to the complaints of the people deserves all that’s coming to it. Whatever it is will certainly hit MPs, the accessible part of Government and the link between Westminster and the constituencies, first and hardest.
Better to do something about it than whinge and whine like Jess.
‘MPs used to be respected, even a subject of awe’