The pub is empty when we arrive. “Can you fit us in?” Jess Phillips asks the barman, followed by the familiar smirk. She can’t help herself. Phillips has never been your regular MP. She’s a warm, wise-cracking, potty-mouthed, deeply serious showoff. She’s political Marmite. Lots of people love her, while a fair few hate her with a passion. At least half a dozen men have been convicted of abuse, death and rape threats.
She orders half a lager, then mocks herself for being such a wuss. “Half a lager!” she parrots, as if she can’t quite believe that it’s come to this. But Phillips is exhausted. It’s six days since the most remarkable British general election in decades, with Labour transforming the 2019 trouncing into a landslide victory. On a night of memorable moments (the unseating of Liz Truss, Jeremy Corbyn winning as an independent, Nigel Farage becoming an MP at his eighth attempt, and on it goes), the most memorable might well belong to Phillips – and not in a good way. She had started the day with a majority of 10,659 and only just held on to her Birmingham Yardley seat by 693 votes, with George Galloway’s Workers party of Great Britain, standing on a pro-Palestine platform, finishing a close second. When she began her victory speech, she was heckled by Workers party supporters. She looked both distraught and furious.
In the end it was the fury that won out with an astonishingly pugnacious speech. She asked officials to remove the hecklers, called it “the worst election I have ever stood in”, reporting that a Labour activist was filmed on the street and had her tyres slashed, while a young woman on her own delivering leaflets was filmed and screamed at by a much older man. Phillips said the family of Jo Cox, the former MP murdered by a far-right extremist in the runup to the Brexit referendum, had been due to campaign with her that day, but she wouldn’t allow them to see the “aggression and violence in our democracy”.
Phillips, 42, grew into her anger as the boos continued. “I will continue with my speech. I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence,” she said. She triumphed over the toxicity, but it made for uncomfortable and upsetting viewing. Her speech was then weaponised by campaigners on the right who suggested Phillips had been solely addressing Muslim men. Three days after the election, she told LBC: “The fact that they were Muslim is not significant, because the Muslim men in my constituency did not behave like this. They did it because they were idiots, not because they were Muslims.” The count represented all that is ugly in contemporary British politics – and how much work the Labour government has to do to restore civility and trust.
“The right will always try to find some rhetoric to hang their hat on,” she says today. “Loads of Muslim people have been writing to me from my constituency saying they had to tell me they thought what happened was abhorrent. And I’m like: it’s not your responsibility.”
Was she more worried about losing her job as an MP, or losing to the Workers party? The latter, she says. “Losing to opponents is the game we play, but I didn’t want to lose to them because they’d been so vile. The thing that frightens me about losing is they would have used it as a scalp of feminism. It’s the takedown of your ideals that I find difficult more than losing. I’d get another job, wouldn’t I?”
As well as being an MP, Phillips is a regular guest on satirical TV shows such as Have I Got News for You and The Last Leg, has starred in the weekly podcast Electoral Dysfunction alongside political journalist Beth Rigby and former Scottish Conservative party leader Ruth Davidson, and is about to publish her fourth book. Let’s Be Honest is a plea and manifesto for decent politics. A recent report revealed that Phillips was the second-highest earner outside parliament among Labour MPs. You are highly employable, I say. “Yeaaaah!” she says, like a cat lapping the milk. “I’d say so, but luckily it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
The irony is that Phillips resigned from her shadow minister role last November in protest at her party’s failure to support a ceasefire in Gaza. She tells me it was a mix of principle and self-interest – she wanted to make a stance and knew that if she didn’t she would almost certainly lose her seat in the general election anyway. She is still devastated by the campaign. “The idea that people could shout at me saying I was harming the children of Gaza when I was literally helping children get out of Gaza … ” She trails off.
Does she think Keir Starmer’s initial response to Gaza, when he said Israel “had the right” to withhold power and water from Gaza, almost cost her her seat? “Yep. Yeah, no doubt about it. The original response was bad.” She insists he was so determined to stick to the line that Israel had a right to defend itself that he went too far. “It was a mistake. He did clarify later, but it was too late.”
Phillips admits she thought she had blown her chance of a ministerial role in the new government. When her 15-year-old son, Danny, asked if she thought she would be given a cabinet job, she replied that seeing as she was sat next to him in her pyjamas as the chosen few were walking into No 10, it seemed unlikely.
A couple of days later, she got the call from Labour’s chief of staff, Sue Gray: would she join the Home Office as an undersecretary with her old responsibilities for domestic abuse and safeguarding. Would she ever! To say she is thrilled is putting it mildly. In Let’s Be Honest she talks about holding this post in the shadow cabinet. “Had I held this job in government, it would have been the realisation of my life’s work,” she writes. When I remind her, she smiles. “Yeah, that’s how I feel. It’s overwhelming. Overwhelming. Actually, the realisation of my life’s work will be once I’ve done it for five years and made some difference. But, yes, it’s the first day of the realisation of my life’s work.”
As she finishes the sentence, her phone beeps with a text message. She looks at it and goes pale, and continues staring at the phone. Eventually she turns back to me, and reads it out. “The three women killed in the crossbow attack were the wife and two daughters of BBC racing commentator John Hunt. So his wife and two daughters have been murdered. Beggars belief, doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t beggar belief. My husband sometimes says to me, ‘Your ability to be shocked by these things is a phenomenon to me, Jess.’ People say you have to have a thick skin in politics. Well, actually, I don’t want to have a thick skin. I want it to be pierced by these things.” She looks floored.
What’s your first reaction when you hear about something like this? “You feel horrified for the loss and you feel tired. And you immediately go to what happened preceding it that could have stopped it. There may be none, so I wouldn’t speculate in this case. But in 50% of femicide cases there have been at least 10 opportunities presented to stop it.”
Your skin is thick in some ways, I say. “Oh, I’m nails, don’t get me wrong.” Phillips has a distinctive way of talking – thick Brummie accent, and when she wants to emphasise a point, her pitch rises and she elongates the final word. You’re like a kid in the schoolyard, I say. She nods. “I am like a schoolkid. I was thinking, with all the new MPs I’d be like a year 11 girl with big hoop earrings and a short skirt.” She takes a rare pause. “I’m actually being very nice to them all, even though I don’t know who they all are and which are Tory and which are Labour. They all just look like very lovely, clean people.”
Were you a fighter at school? “Not at school. But I have three older brothers and used to have physical fights with them at home. I was raised to believe I was tougher than them. I’m tough in most situations and I’m not afraid to speak back at people if they’re having a pop at me. That’s what I mean by being nails. But I’d be dreadful in a physical fight now. I’ve got very weak arms. I wouldn’t know how to punch somebody.”
Phillips is the youngest of four siblings. She was brought up as a socialist in a formidable line of socialists. Her father, a retired English teacher who went on to be a teacher trainer, has always been more of a firebrand than her mother. “Though he would never appreciate being referred to as a Trot. He’s not a Trot or a Tankie. He’s a very pure socialist.” Her mother, who died 13 years ago, was an NHS administrator who rose to become deputy chief executive of the NHS Confederation and chair of South Birmingham mental health trust.
Her maternal grandfather was a commercial cartoonist who also drew for the newspaper of the leftwing Labour group Campaign and was friends with Tony Benn, whom she cites as her hero. Her maternal great-grandfather was a founder of the Independent Labour party in Birmingham. For her 14th birthday, her parents bought her party membership. “It wasn’t an option. If you were a member of our house, you were a member of the Labour party when you turned 14.” She looks at me, lest I’ve misunderstood. “I did get other birthday presents as well!”
And yet for many on the left she is a bete noire. Why? “I suppose the Jeremy Corbyn thing.” She was vocal in her criticism of Corbyn and said she would find it “incredibly difficult” to continue as a Labour MP if he remained leader. “I hate that people on the left think I’m not leftwing because I didn’t like their man. Who gets to define leftwingness? I am pragmatic, but I’m leftwing. My mum used to say, ‘The only trouble with socialists is that they have bad connotations for me of shouty men looking after each other.’” And she says, that’s what Labour felt like to her in the Corbyn years. “Anything offered with a false prophet gets a bit shouty. Anything where you’re certain that you are right without exception, your certainty stinks. Always open yourself up for nuance.”
Did she fall out with her dad over Corbyn? “No. My dad is a kind socialist, not an angry one, and they were attacking me, and he was like: ‘Hold on, she might be more rightwing than you lot but she’s mine.’ I think me and my father are about to start disagreeing! I can sense the ‘I’m not sure this is the Labour party I joined’ in the air already. My dad is not keen on a slick Labour party.”
According to research published earlier this month, Phillips’ constituency is one of the top five in the country adversely affected by the two-child benefit cap, which has been shown to have a strong correlation to child poverty. Does she want to get rid of the cap? “Yes, of course I want to get rid of it. And so does Keir Starmer – the idea that anyone in the Labour party wouldn’t want to get rid of it … nobody wants it ideologically!” So Labour will get rid of it? “I think we probably will at such a time as it’s affordable.”
On Tuesday, a couple of weeks after we last met, Labour suspended seven “leftwing” MPs, including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, for supporting an amendment to scrap the two-child benefit limit. It’s a controversial move – critics described it as autocratic - and pointless, because the amendment failed by 260 votes anyway.
“I’m good friends with some of these people, but I think Keir did the right thing, if I’m honest,” Phillips tells me on the phone. “When I was first elected to parliament, just after Ed Miliband stood down, it felt like anybody could do whatever they liked on anything. And that is the politics I’ve lived with for the last decade. We’ve got all these new MPs who’ve started and this was one of the first votes and I think Keir had to show leadership. If you’re going to deliver a government programme, you have to show strength. Also it felt like a game was being played rather than changing anything to do with child poverty.”
Her tensions with Labour’s left go back to her earliest days in parliament. Ed Miliband had resigned as Labour leader after losing the 2015 election, Corbyn had won the race to succeed him, and there was an infamous spat with Diane Abbott. “I think it was the third parliamentary Labour party meeting I’d attended. I stood up and said, ‘Every person who was elected to the four great [shadow] offices of state was a man, and I need assurances that this is not how you are going to govern.’”
At the end of the meeting, she went to tell Corbyn there was nothing personal in her comments. “I’d never spoken to the man before, and I said, ‘I hope you don’t take this as anything but the constructive criticism I intended it to be’, and he was like, ‘Oh no, I understand.’ He was being perfectly reasonable – I never found him anything but perfectly reasonable. But his people were considerably less forgiving than he was. And Diane came over and said, ‘You’re not the only feminist in the Labour party.’ And I was just like, ‘Oh, fuck off.’”
It’s funny the way she tells it – as if to say: how could Abbott possibly have taken offence. With the benefit of hindsight, would she have reacted differently? Phillips thinks about it, and says probably not. “It really was nothing. It was, ‘Oh, fuck off’, it’s just the way I speak. It wasn’t like, ‘Fuck you, bitch!’”
So many of Phillips’ stories start or end with a “fuck off”. A couple of weeks before the general election, she did Keir Starmer’s reputation the world of good when she revealed on Have I Got News For You that he’d just told her to fuck off. She had been chatting with him after being on the same train as Rishi Sunak and his team, who had locked themselves away in first class. “I was like, God, he really doesn’t want to be around the public, and I would hate that. I saw Keir that weekend and I said I was starting to feel a bit sorry for him, and Keir was like, ‘Oh, fuck off, Jess!’” And? “I said to him, ‘You’re right!’”
Politics has become so full of certainties, says Phillips. Partly because of people screaming at each other on social media. Take the culture wars, she says – in the real world, most people don’t spend their life ranting about migrants, Brexit and gender. “The truth is immigration had fallen right down the list of people’s concerns until about a year ago. One of the things I talk about in the book is the disease election cycles can bring to politics. Not that I’m suggesting we get rid of democracy!” Another pause. “Though my husband is sometimes like: universal suffrage, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
She is always quoting Tom, a former lift engineer who now does something to do with virtual reality that she doesn’t understand. “My husband says near daily, ‘Your perception is not real, nobody’s talking about this where I work, Jess.’” Tom, whom she met at school and is three years older than her, is the first cousin of former England footballer Kevin Phillips. Is Tom a good footballer? “No, he hates football. I don’t think he’s ever played in his life. Doesn’t even watch the England matches.” Phillips calls him “the best person on Earth”.
You’re going to have to write a book of Tom’s quotes, I say. “Yeah. He said to me, ‘99% of what you say is just stuff I’ve said’, and I said, ‘That’s because you’re better than me, it’s just that you’re shy – and a bit rude.’” In what way rude? She changes her mind. “My husband is not rude, but he’s very upfront. So if we were to bump into somebody in the street and they were to invite us for dinner and we didn’t particularly want to go, I would say, ‘Oh, we’ll try but I think I’ve got a work thing’, and he’d just be like, ‘Oh, we don’t want to!’”
Does that cause social difficulties? “When we were first together I did find it a bit jarring. Tom came home about a year ago and said, ‘I’ve just read this thing and think I might be neurodivergent.’ And everyone went, ‘No shit, mate.’”
What clarified the need for more nuance in politics was a debate about chocolate she recently had with the family. Living in a household of males, she says, lots of conversations are centred on lists – best movies, best bands, etc. This time they were ranking the best chocolate. “Somebody put forward Twirl and I really love a Twirl so I was fighting for it, and my son Danny went, ‘You know what, I’ve no strong feelings!’ And I thought, in that moment, I’m going to admit when I have no strong feelings about things. There are so many things I have to vote on where I don’t have strong feelings.”
We’ve run out of time and she has got to get back to Birmingham. There is so much more to talk about, so we agree to reconvene there tomorrow.
* * *
Tom is sick, so we meet at a cafe in New Street station instead of her home. In the middle of the night, she dropped Danny off for a school trip to Flanders. “I tweeted something saying, ‘I’m not grateful for 4am coach dropoffs on the week you become a minister.’ The amount of people who commented saying, ‘It’s so nice that there are now people in government who are doing the shit we have to do, like dropping our kids off at 4.30am to go on a coach trip.’”
She chats to the woman who brings over our coffees, and a passing man stops to congratulate her on the election. It’s obvious how easily she relates to people from different backgrounds. Phillips herself went to an academic grammar school and always considered herself middle class until she got to parliament and discovered a different type of middle class. But her childhood was hardly cushioned. Her brother Luke was a drug addict by the age of 14 and turned family life upside down. “I hated him for years. It’s traumatic living with someone with a terrible addiction. When you love somebody, it’s a horrible realisation when you think it would be better if they weren’t there. I used to hate the level of sympathy my parents gave him.”
Did he steal stuff from them? “Oh, Jesus, yeah. I remember when the Milibands were fighting over who got to be the leader of the Labour party, I did think, ‘Your diamond shoes are too tight for you. This morning I went to get all my belongings back from Cash Converters.’ This is a nice problem to have as siblings. Hahahaha!”
Luke has made a remarkable recovery. He left school without qualifications, eventually went to university and graduated with a first, is now studying for a PhD, and runs the only university campus-based recovery community for students in the country, in Birmingham.
After going to university in Leeds, Phillips worked with vulnerable people, mainly women – asylum seekers, victims of domestic abuse and rape, drug addicts who were in and out of prison.
I ask if the way her political opponents treated her during the campaign could mirror patterns of domestic abuse. “I wouldn’t put it on the same level, but, yes, fundamentally it is based on the same model. What happens is there’s a slow and steady buildup to control a woman – you have to be very negative about them, bring them down, groom them to a position of weakness, isolate them from people by threatening to embarrass them at work. You close them in, and then when all those bits of control are done, you escalate to violence. That’s the usual pattern.” She says of the campaign: “They were very negative about me, constantly driving me down. Then hunting you so you can no longer go out to talk to people in public, because they’re going to turn up and scream at the person you’re talking to.” How did they hunt you? “If we advertised any door-knocking sessions they’d turn up and film the people we were speaking to, screaming about us being genocidal baby killers, that sort of thing. The people behind the doors don’t want to be filmed, so they have isolated you from being able to talk to the people you represent. I couldn’t go to hustings because they’d have people shouting at me so they could film it.”
We are talking two days before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. She is appalled by the lack of civility in modern political discourse, exemplified by Trump himself and the Brexit campaign that resulted in the assassination of Cox, a close friend, in 2016, just a year after both women had become MPs. Parliament had gone into recess because of Brexit, and Phillips went on a short holiday to Spain with her girlfriends. “I’d been at Jo’s houseboat 24 hours before. She was the last person I saw on British soil.” Cox lived on a houseboat on the Thames in London. Phillips didn’t have family in London, so Cox would often invite her and Anna Turley, another new Labour MP, over for supper. “The last thing I told Jo was I loved her. The last thing she said to me was, ‘I’m frightened, I’m scared of what’s going to happen.’ Her political antennae were better than most. I thought remain would win, but she was flagging up it might not.” She describes Cox with such tenderness – her kindness, wisdom and determination to make sure they all looked out for each other as young female MPs. When she talks about her murder, the trauma feels fresh.
How did she feel when she heard about the attack on Cox? “The very first thing I felt before I knew she’d died was that it was an attack on all of us. It felt personal, like I was being hunted, which is a selfish thing to think, but that’s the truth.” Phillips later received a call to say Cox had died, and she went into denial. “I just sat in silence, staring. And my friend Ruth, who is a nurse, sat next to me quietly for 12 hours. I couldn’t process it. I left Jo voice messages and text messages after I’d been told she’d died. I knew she was dead.” What did you say? “‘I love you and I’ll speak to you when you get better.’ I properly disassociated from what was happening. Total and utter delusion. So, yes, it had a pretty bad effect on me.”
Did she think of quitting after Cox’s murder or the many threats to herself? “No. But Danny said to me I don’t want you to do the job, it’s not worth it. I said the trouble is it is worth it. To quit in the face of threats and violence is to allow threats and violence to win.”
Today, hard right or extremist views appear to be on the rise in Britain. While the general election was a landslide for Labour in terms of seats (412 out of 650), it only won 33.8% of the vote share. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s rightwing populist Reform UK party secured 14% of the vote share (but only five seats). Does she find it … ? She completes the question for me. “Terrifying? Yes.” She calls it a broad but shallow victory. How does Labour turn that into a more meaningful victory? “You have to deliver. People think the upset in my constituency was all strictly Gaza. It wasn’t. Gaza was the catalyst for years and years of everything being shit. Reform and the Workers party are just against things. The policies of grievance are very easy to sell; easiest trick in the book. Any fucker can do it. Building something based on hope is much harder. But you have to be honest about delivery. You can’t just go to the places where the Labour party did badly and whack a youth centre in there. That won’t work, either. It has to be based on genuine delivery and being honest about how long improvement will take. That is how you take a loveless landslide into a second term of a Labour government.”
She is convinced Farage will be hopeless as a constituency MP and as a performer in the Commons. “It’s like with George Galloway. His whole power is in the hat. He’s been in parliament recently and he’s not allowed to wear the hat, and he just looks like a shuffling man who stands up and speaks for three minutes. I’m like, oh my God, you’re like Samson. You’ve got no hat, you’ve got no sparkle. I think Farage is going to be the same. Parliament crushes people. It crushed Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson never managed to land a moment of bombast in parliament, because it’s a bigger institution than you. I am better in parliament than Boris Johnson and I’ll be better than Nigel Farage.”
It’s approaching 3.30pm, another cut-off point for Phillips. This time she’s returning to the airport to collect her older son, Harry, who has been on holiday with his friends. She suggests that I travel with her so we can finish the interview.
“I’m not good at driving, but I’m very confident,” she says. “Just like my politics!” She addresses her satnav. “Navigate to Birmingham airport,” she says in a brusque voice, before adding “please” apologetically. “Have to be polite to AI!”
In 2020, Phillips was one of six candidates who stood in the race to succeed Corbyn – won by Starmer at a canter. How much did she want it? “Not at all.” Why stand then? “It was out of loyalty to the Labour party, actually. I hated every moment of the process. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done. It turned me into a shell of a person because I’m not good having loads of people around me going, ‘Don’t say this, don’t do that.’ All these people up in your grill. I would never do it again.”
I ask her what she means about doing it for the party. “In my life and in the lives of my family the Labour party has been the greatest vehicle for social change that benefits the masses. It’s the only vehicle that has ever done that, as far as I’m concerned. And I desperately wanted to rebuild it.” She comes to a sudden stop. “It sounds really noble now. I’m not sure that’s the way I felt about it at the time.”
How much of her is nobility and how much is ego? “Ooh, 50-50.” How big is your ego? “Massive. Of course, I’ve got a massive ego!” Has it always been massive? “Yes, 100%. I was told I was clever from an early age and that sticks. I was singled out. I was the cleverest girl in my class from the age of four. You get an ego about it.” She calls herself “a bombastic attention-seeking sort”, and says if everybody was like her in politics it would be chaos. In what way is she bombastic? “Well, I’m loud, aren’t I? And I’ll crack jokes. And I’ll say things that some people will go, ‘Oooof! I can’t believe you said that!’” She says she used to feel nervous before making speeches to the point of taking beta blockers to calm herself down. “Now I don’t feel nervous before, I feel nervous after. Because I think, shit, what did I just say? What’s coming back to bite me?”
Do you always like yourself? “No. I think I’m awful sometimes. I’m usually awful when I’m not very well in my head. I suffer from anxiety. And when that is at a peak, I don’t like myself very much then, but that is clinical.” She says she can be “mean” to people. “My nan’s favourite saying was, ‘Go in the corner and have a word with yourself.’ I have to have a word with myself all the time.”
You can come across as someone who’s a little in love with yourself, I say. “No, no, no. Not at all. My protective characteristic is to grow into a monstrous manic thing. And that’s much less understood than people who shrink away and are nervous and quiet. People don’t feel any sympathy for it. And why should they, because it normally means I’m being an arse.”
We reach the airport. Harry calls on her phone to say he has just got through security. I ask her a few quick-fire questions before leaving. Who’s the most moral MP you’ve worked with? “Ooh, that’s a good question. I would say Diana Johnson. D’you know what? Keir Starmer’s not far off it.” The funniest? “This never comes across on the television, but Rachel Reeves is a hoot in private, particularly when she’s pissed off about something. And, let me tell you, Wes Streeting is an almost perfect mimic. His Emily Thornberry is second to none.”
Who’s the worst? “I’m going to have to say Farage at the moment.” A couple of drivers are beeping away for all they’re worth. “Why are people beeping at me? Maybe it’s not me. Why do I assume it’s me? It’s because I’m an egomaniac! Right, I’m going to have to kick you out because four people are about to get in the car.”
As I leave, I ask if she still has a plaque on her desk saying: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” She nods. Does she think she’ll be better behaved now she’s a minister? “Probably. But I’ll never ever be truly well behaved, will I?”
Let’s Be Honest by Jess Phillips (Simon & Schuster, £20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
