Show caption Jess Phillips says she has consistently encountered election fatigue already while campaigning. Photograph: Fabio de Paolo/The Guardian ‘May says this is about stability. She should meet my constituents’ Jess Phillips On the doorsteps of Yardley, Brexit barely gets a mention Sun 30 Apr 2017 00.05 BST Share on Facebook

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“Hello – my name is Jess and I’m your local MP.” The opening of hundreds of conversations I have had this week. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had taken to shouting this out in my sleep. My husband can neither confirm nor deny this as mostly I am not sleeping. Instead, I get up in the middle of the night and retire to another room to write down things I absolutely have to remember, which seem not to matter a jot when the sun rises. Leaflet text and inspiring soundbites whirr in my brain until the cogs seize up.

In an election campaign, sleep is for the weak. I don’t expect pity. I don’t need it because this is my natural habitat – the eye of the storm. I am at my best in the fray. At my happiest when I am at home chewing the fat with people who sound like me. Knocking on doors in Yardley, Birmingham, and listening to the singsong lilt of a familiar vernacular is like putting on my comfiest pyjamas.

What is happening nationally has passed me by, and I can’t say any of it is reaching my constituents, either. Every day my team takes to the doorsteps and hits the phones. The views from the streets so far are exactly as they have been every week since I was elected – local and still relatively tribal. At the beginning of the week, I and a team of canvassers were out dealing with the issues that always arise.

You might be really surprised to hear that no one barked Tory buzzwords “strong” or “stable” at me – but then I was talking to actual people, not weird, possessed drones plugged in to a mainframe. Susan in Tyseley said: “Oh, hello Jess – I was going to pop in to the office this week with my housing form for some help.” She did not say: “Bab, I’m ever so concerned about this coalition of chaos you’ve got mixed up with.” This is because Susan is not an imbecile.

In the early part of the week the main response I got to my mantra was: “You do realise it is snowing? You must be freezing.” Because no springtime election campaign is quite complete without a heavy smattering of ridiculously inclement weather. When we look forlorn in the rain, Keith, a party activist, parrots: “It’s only rain – it won’t kill you.” How very British.

It was Wednesday before Brexit got its first mention. So much for this being the Brexit election. I’ve been pounding the pavements and hitting the phones and I think it has come up only four or five times. The view of the people who have mentioned the issue is that Theresa May has called this election because she wants to get out of Brexit. Not the message she was hoping for, methinks.

People are drawing all sorts of conclusions because they mistrust her reasons for having the election. Just like me, they cannot seem to find a single sensible answer as to why she is bothering. If there was any one thing that has come up again and again this week – at pensioners’ lunch club, in the local schools and on every street I have walked down – it is election fatigue. Here in Birmingham Yardley, “Strong and stable blah blah” is replaced with “Get on with your jobs and stop all this constant faffing”.

This week, like every week, my office has remained open to the public who need help with their lives. But getting on with my job has been hampered by the election. I explain to residents that while I can act on their behalf as an MP for the moment, next week I’ll just be Jess and the wheels will turn a little more slowly. No biggy, you might think. But if your kid had gone missing with an ex-partner to another country you might not feel the same. You might want an MP working with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

This is one of many complex and detailed cases I have handled this week. Similarly, months and months of work securing funding for a local community centre, due to start activity in mid-May, is slammed by purdah.

We scramble for a plan to keep it going. I spend time on the phone consoling victims of domestic violence whom I have worked with for the past year to change family court regulations. Our bill, which was going through parliament, stalls because parliament stopped. Politics is not the Bake Off. You can’t just stop people’s needs, hopes and dreams because someone calls time.

Still, I love a campaign. I’m never happier than when I’m fighting shoulder to shoulder with our growing army of foot soldiers. But I had a job to do and people here wish I could just get on with it. So do I. If Theresa May wanted people to think this election was about stability and security, as with so many other things, she has failed.