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When Jess Phillips said that the misogyny she received from left-wing men was the “absolute worst” they quickly proved her point. Last week the Labour MP’s Twitter feed flowed with “men telling me I didn’t understand sexism, that I deserved it, that I was fat, ugly, that I was probably on my period”.
It’s easy to counter rightwingers who believe that women ask for domestic violence or do not deserve equal pay: Ms Phillips told Jacob Rees-Mogg that she would divorce him for never changing a nappy. “But it’s much harder when people think they are the ‘goodies’,” she says. She means the “brocialists” who “if they’re accused of sexism, compare me to other women they love. And these are always women who support their man.”
“Their man”, of course, is Jeremy Corbyn. The hard left is pressing for MPs who doubted the Labour leader’s electoral prospects to apologise. But Ms Phillips, who voted for Yvette Cooper in 2015, refuses. “No, I don’t feel sorry for saying what I did. I wouldn’t ask Jeremy to say sorry for all those years when he said what he thought. But he did much better than I expected, and I must take that on board.” When the exit poll came in she was returning from her Birmingham Yardley campaign HQ: “I nearly drove off the road!” She expected to lose her seat but increased her majority. “We’d just bought a house and I kept holding the walls . . . saying, ‘Bye house.’ I told the kids not to unpack.”
But it is her rented south London flat that has an unloved, unlived-in air: bare walls apart from a kitsch picture of a half-naked woman she found in a skip. There is a mess of kids’ stuff belonging to her sons, Harry and Danny, aged 13 and 11, who are out with their father, Tom. She feels an outsider in London and thinks the water makes her hair lank.
With her broad Midlands accent, unguarded warmth and sense of humour Ms Phillips, 36, is a star of the 2015 intake. She’s already published her autobiography/manifesto, Everywoman, and makes no secret that she wants to be prime minister: “Yes, I am ambitious.”
The biggest question is why Ms Phillips — who left the Labour Party because of the Iraq war and is “a proper leftwinger, I believe in nationalising your mum sort of thing” — is not behind Mr Corbyn. Her father, a teacher, always says: “How is it that ‘straight-talking, honest politics’ was a tagline and you ended up on the wrong side of the tent?”
The reason, she says, is because she is an outspoken feminist, her outlook and politics forged by a career running domestic violence refuges for Women’s Aid. When Mr Corbyn was elected in 2015 she was appalled that he only gave top jobs to men. “In his very first PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] meeting, I stood up and said what it felt like that weekend to be a woman in the Labour Party, where not a single woman appeared on stage — like I’d arrived home and been locked out.” This speech, she says, “shut me out for ever”. Although she gets on well with Mr Corbyn personally — “I text him” — his hardline circle regard her as a traitor.
She will not bow to the uncritical Corbyn cult, because she was brought up by leftie parents (her late mother chaired an NHS mental health trust) “never to worship anybody . . . and I don’t like the way his supporters behave”. Last year she received 600 rape threats in a single day in a “dog pile” attack. “Now I’m at peak block, peak mute,” she says. “For example, I would never see anything including the word ‘rape’.”
The British Pakistani-Bangladeshi community, certainly where I am, has issues about women’s roles in a family, in society. That’s the truth
I ask what Mr Corbyn could do to end abuse against MPs. Ms Phillips says that he could read out abuse, naming the individuals, and say that “this is totally unacceptable”. Also, she adds, he “should lead with love and understanding, and talk about MPs in a way that people only do when they’re dead”.
For example, when the MP Stella Creasy forced the government to fund abortions of Northern Irish women, Ms Phillips was astounded that Mr Corbyn didn’t offer praise. “It should have been a fanfare. It should have been like, ‘Woo! This is what the Labour women do!’ ”
So would she accept a job from Mr Corbyn? “The only one I’d take is leading our policy on domestic violence. But [she whispers] I’m doing that anyway.” The official brief had belonged to Sarah Champion, who quit as shadow equalities minister after writing in The Sun about Pakistani Muslim men abusing white girls. Does she think that Ms Champion was right to resign?
Ms Phillips believes the piece was crudely phrased: “I can understand why Naz Shah [a Labour MP] was like, ‘Hang on a minute, you’re talking about my sons here.’ ” But she also thinks Mr Corbyn’s statement that exploitation happens in all communities was useless, failing to address specific forms of abuse, including the Pakistani Muslim grooming model seen in towns such as Rotherham.
“Well, sorry, the British Pakistani-Bangladeshi community, certainly where I am, has issues about women’s roles in a family, in society. That’s the truth. Not all of them, obviously. But I have lots of cases on my books. The acceptability of going and getting a wife from abroad if your son is disabled, for example. As if he deserves to have a wife and we’ll just get one from Pakistan. That’s not OK in my book.”
Ms Phillips laments that Mr Corbyn did not broker a deal so that Ms Champion could stay because “it makes it look like we sweep this stuff under the carpet and it gives more power to people who go, ‘It’s political correctness gone mad’ and that people like me are trying to protect the perpetrators.”
This accusation hurts Ms Phillips, who has spent her career fighting for victims. Indeed she attributes her parliamentary success to the insight Women’s Aid gave her into troubled lives. It also made her — in contrast to Corbynite ideologues — a pragmatist. “Of course a rape crisis counselling service for children should be funded by the state,” she says. “But if I have to accept lottery money or go into partnership with G4S, who now have the sexual violence clinical evidence-gathering contract in Birmingham, I’ll do that. I won’t say, ‘I want to feel better about my morality so I can sleep tonight.’ I’d rather the women and children slept well.”
Unlike the Corbynite MP Laura Pidcock, who describes all Tory women as “the enemy”, Ms Phillips is happy to work with opponents. She fears the government is trying to rebrand domestic violence as a non-gender crime, although the vast majority of victims are women abused by men. But she does not blame the home secretary. “Amber Rudd’s a feminist. The whole feeling of her is basically sticking two fingers up at the boys. She strikes me as a laugh.”
Is Ms Rudd her favourite Tory? “My favourite Tory was Flick Drummond [Portsmouth South] who just lost her seat. We did lots of work together. Apart from the economy she was essentially Labour, as far as I could tell.” Given her Women’s Aid role and that she was part of the Tory MP Maria Miller’s consultation, I ask how she feels about proposals on transgender rights, which go to further consultation this autumn; such as enshrining gender self-identity — you are whatever gender you feel yourself to be — as a protected legal characteristic. Or ending the exemption for women’s refuges to exclude those born male.
Ms Phillips notes that everyone entering a refuge is assessed on whether they endanger vulnerable, abused women. “Any risk at all, you can refuse. If a man turned up with a beard, dressed like a bloke, and said, ‘I want to come into your refuge’, I would take on the lawyers! Every single time we used to advertise a job at Women’s Aid, some bloody libertarian bloke would apply for it and then try and take us to court. We’ve been dealing with this shit for decades. So there is no way that person would ever get into a refuge that I was running.”
She was shocked that Ms Miller refused to hear from women’s sector groups, and she told Mr Corbyn not to support legal change until after the second consultation. He ignored her advice. “What this whole issue has brought up concerns what it feels like to be a woman, to grow up as a woman and understand all the cues, that you get a smaller piece of cake.”
Ms Phillips, who has three brothers, learnt to hold her own. Her household subverts gender norms. Her husband, Tom, a former lift engineer, works in her office: he is also chief child wrangler, cook, domestic god and handyman.
“Well, he’s an engineer — he builds everything. I flick through interiors magazines and say, ‘Look, I really want this’, and he’s like, ‘£5,000? I’ll make it for you for £20, love’. And then knocks it up. I took him, as a treat, to the plywood exhibition at the V&A.”
He respects her long hours and is furiously loyal if she is attacked: “He’s never, ever once made me feel guilty. The only thing he hates is when I thank him all the time. I have to say, he’s as near as dammit to perfect, my husband.”
Moreover, since she had her children so young, Ms Phillips will be only 40 when her oldest is 18. At present she loves leaving London on Wednesday for her constituency, picking her kids up from school, “getting hammered with my mates”. But in five years, if the leadership comes up, you can see her leaning in.
She felt “deeply ashamed” for Labour when the Tories appointed their second woman leader in Theresa May. Labour women find it harder, she says, because they do not just aspire to lead but to improve lives of other women, which rankles men.
So would she stand? “Only if I thought I was genuinely the answer to the question,” she says. “And I think that most men in politics think that they are, that’s the trouble.”
Jessica Rose Phillips: Curriculum vitae
Born October 9, 1981, in Birmingham.
Education Studied economic and social history at the University of Leeds and a postgraduate diploma in public sector management at the University of Birmingham.
Career Worked as the business development manager for the domestic sexual abuse charity Women’s Aid. Elected as a Labour councillor for the Longbridge ward, in Birmingham, in 2012. Became the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley in 2015. She was made parliamentary private secretary to Lucy Powell, the shadow education secretary, in September 2015; she relinquished her position, like Ms Powell, in defiance of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In September she became chairwoman of the women’s parliamentary Labour Party and in the 2017 general election she held her seat, increasing her majority to 16,574.
