Firebrand MP Dennis Skinner has held Bolsover for Labour for 47 years. Now the subject of a revealing documentary, he talks Corbyn, coalmining and an unlikely Billy Elliot moment

I tried to interview Dennis Skinner once before. Twenty-odd years ago, when he was near retirement age and I was starting out at the Observer, I phoned his office at the House of Commons to see if we could arrange something. I was expecting a switchboard or a secretary but the man himself answered the phone. I explained my idea: amazing parliamentary record, now approaching 65, New Labour in power, good moment to take stock – all of that.

There was a short pause when I finished my breathless pitch. And then Skinner asked an incontrovertible question, one to which I had no adequate reply: “Why the bloody hell would I want to do that?”

As Tory MPs of the past five decades will attest, Skinner’s words stay with you. In the years since, every time I’ve phoned anyone on spec with a similar rambling request, I’ve half-imagined an echo of that blunt response. And I’m hearing it now, when I find Skinner in Westminster Hall, 10 minutes late, because I’d been waiting for him in the lobby instead.

He’s dressed in his familiar colour-blindness-test outfit: green shirt, red tie, sports jacket. “What were you waiting up there for?” he grunts, by way of hello. “We’ve a room booked down here.” And he leads the way briskly – he used to be a race walker and, at 85, still moves at a clip – and without conversation through courtyards and down panelled stairs, past a cheery Caroline Lucas with barely a nod, to a basement committee room.

Now that the party knows that Jeremy is acceptable in large parts of the country, then next time we will all join in

Despite this gruff opening, as soon as we sit down, a quite different, affable, talkative Skinner emerges. The occasion for our interview is a film about the Bolsover MP’s life and times, Nature of the Beast, which draws its title from Skinner’s nickname, “The Beast of Bolsover”. He claims not to have watched it, that he can’t bear to see himself on screen – “and anyway, doesn’t a film need a bit of drama?” – but I’ve no doubt he has.

The film is the first made by Liverpudlian director Daniel Draper, 30, who has funded it by working part time as a chef. It is a thoughtful, beautifully constructed portrait of a singular man, made over two years, on a miraculous budget of about £5,000. It roots Skinner in his elements: the confined chamber of the House of Commons, the great outdoors of the Derbyshire countryside, and the home from home of London parks, where he walks every day between parliamentary sessions. Draper knew he had to make the film when Skinner described to him how he used to go out and collect sweet chestnuts in Richmond Park, and couldn’t believe how he always had the crop to himself. When Skinner walks he thinks about lines he might say, or should have said. He has been a source of many memorable parliamentary put-downs (from “Madame Ceaucescu” Thatcher to “Dodgy Dave” Cameron) but he is, he says, haunted by the ones that got away, those he thinks of after the event.

“I’ve never made a perfect speech or a perfect anything,” he says. “I always think after, I should have done it that way or this way.”

I suggest to Skinner that he’s a natural in front of the camera.

“Well,” he says, “I think if I hadn’t been born in a pit village I’d have been part of a dramatic society.”

Wasn’t there one at all in Clay Cross, where he grew up?

“No. There were 22 pubs. If you wanted an audience you sang there.”

Skinner had inherited a decent show-tune voice from his mother, who would sing Gracie Fields tunes around the house while she did the washing she took in. He became part of a group of miners that toured pubs doing fundraisers when there had been an accident.

“One of us, Harry, did Al Jolson, blacked up, with the white gloves, so you can tell how long ago it was,” he says. “If Harry wasn’t there I would do a couple of Jolson songs.” To prove the point he gives me the opening verse of Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody. Mostly he did Frankie Laine numbers, or Guy Mitchell.

His desire to perform subsequently found its outlet in the Commons chamber, most memorably at the state opening of parliament, when he creates an impromptu double act with Black Rod, on the subject of the royals (“Tell her to pay her taxes!” he began in 1992, right up to this year’s “Get your skates on, first race is half-past two” as the Queen’s speech clashed with Royal Ascot). Still, I imagine once you have sung “She wears red feathers and a hooly-hooly skirt” in a miners’ pub, the House of Commons holds few fears.

“It’s theatre,” he says, “the only difference is you are always looking at a sea of angry faces. If I am doing a speech at a Labour party meeting – I think I have done every constituency – I’ll look for a happy face, and talk to that face. In the Commons, with all the anger, I’ll fix on a blank panel above their heads.”

Skinner has, by my calculations, probably spent more time in these corridors and that debating chamber than any other MP in history. He has never accepted ministerial office, suspicious of any kind of patronage, he has always got in early – “not as early as I got in at the pit” – and makes a point of staying late in the chamber to vote, always on the edge of that same front-row seat, on whichever side of the aisle.

Play Video 1:49 Dennis Skinner breaks into song during interview – video

The librarians told him recently he had voted more often than anyone else, he admits, but he keeps it quiet because he lives in mortal fear of becoming father of the house, with any pomp and ceremony that might involve. He says the phrase in a plummy voice and shakes his head, gravely: “That’s not for me.” The honour passed recently on the death of Sir Gerald Kaufman to Skinner’s near neighbour in the east Midlands, Ken Clarke. Both he and Clarke were elected first in the 1970 election and have served ever since. “Fortunately he got sworn in before me the first day,” Skinner says, so the danger of the honorific has for the time being been avoided.

Have he and Clarke become friends in their 47 years of sparring?

“No, not at all,” he says, quickly. “I’ve never done any cross-party stuff. I’ve no interest in sitting down discussing pensions or whatever with Tories.”

Does it never occur to him there is room for the middle ground and compromise?

“With that lot? I can’t see it. Take education. Free schools? You want me to sit and talk with them about that? I can’t even contemplate it. And I can’t think of any area of policy where you would.”

Having spent 20 years under governments aiming to be centrist, Skinner is back in a national debate that seems to be reverting to class-warrior type. I put to him the shortening odds of Jacob Rees-Mogg, “the honourable member for the 18th century”, as a potential prime minister.

“Rees-Mogg? Even Tories can see he’s a joke, can’t they? Boris Johnson the same. These are just comedy people.”

I wonder if, in 47 years, there has been a Tory he admires?

He racks his brains for a bit. “The best I saw was probably John Biffen,” he says. “But he is the only one.”

Faced with the current crop, in opposition, I wonder how he avoids getting bitter and maintains his sense of humour.

“Temperamentally I tend to feel that I am right in what I say,” he says. “And I don’t allow the fact that they think what I say is crazy get to me. Some MPs go on these ‘fact-finding’ trips with each other. They are all pallsy-wallsy. I wouldn’t go to the theatre with a Tory. I mean if one came and knocked on this door I wouldn’t say ‘piss off’. I would say ‘good morning’, but that would be it…”

Skinner’s mantra in the film and to me, the formulation he returns to all the time, is that he has been formed by the pit and the war. Rarely can a man have been so determinedly moulded by his formative years, and not have been altered by anything that followed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Skinner chats to Neil Kinnock in the Commons, where both MPs had remained during the Queen’s speech in 1977. Photograph: Getty Images

Class loyalty set in early. Having passed his 11-plus and gone to the grammar school from his Derbyshire pit village, he had a big choice at 16 to either go on to sixth form, or go down the mine with the mates with whom he played football. It says everything about his character that he chose the latter. His father had been blacklisted during the 1926 general strike as an agitator and until the prospect of war allowed him back, prevented from working in the mine. Even so, when he told his old man his decision, his father was disappointed: “You’ve done what?” he said, of the pit Skinner had signed up for. “Do you know there’s no baths there? I don’t agree with what you are doing, but at least get a pit with a bath.”

Memories of his father punctuate Skinner’s conversation. He recalls, grinning, at one point, a “Billy Elliot” moment, when he had been out secretly training for his race walking. “My dad took me aside and said, ‘Ey-up Dennis, what the bloody hell are you doing? Tommy Lund says you passed his house twice last week waggling your bloody arse…’”

Was he a tough man to live up to?

“He was certainly tough,” Skinner says. “I can hear him now saying to the bosses: ‘I’ll tell you now. If you don’t give us that money, that pit wheel stops!’ By and large they did.”

For all Skinner’s undoubted integrity there is, in some of these stories, scope for central casting. It’s hard not to be struck by the sitcom potential in the 15 years in which Skinner shared a seamens’ union flat with the young John Prescott, a relationship that ended when Margaret Thatcher sequestered the union’s funds. How was the Hull MP as a flatmate?

They are talking about HS2 producing all these wonderful things. I don’t see how

“Jim Callaghan had sent him to Brussels so I wouldn’t see him for several days a week,” Skinner says. “We had separate rooms but we shared a kitchen. He would be up all night writing speeches. He was meticulous. I’d go to the toilet and he’d be there, writing. ‘John,’ I’d say, ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning! What are you doing writing?’ And he’d say, ‘I’ve got this big speech to do on transport.’ I’d tell him, ‘Get to bed, you know transport like the back of your hand.’ But he hadn’t the confidence to do it.”

Skinner himself, a formidable orator when the spirit moves him, has never written any speech down beyond a couple of notes. “I stand up and it all comes into my head.” To prove the point he gets out a bit of Commons paper on which he has written three lines of prep for our interview. “The ragged trousered philanthropist,” it says, and “rural community” and “bluebell wood”. The first is reference to his initial meeting with film-maker Daniel Draper, who was trying to make a short documentary about Robert Tressell’s book (“I told him it’s never gone away – austerity has brought that world back,” Skinner says), the second apparently a reference to something I’d written in the Observer the week before. And the third, the place he walks in Derbyshire, to get some peace.

When I speak to Draper subsequently, he mentions both the first and the last as reference points. I tell him I’m intrigued by what his generation, the Momentum generation of Labour supporters who can’t remember the struggles of the 70s and 80s, makes of Skinner. “I came across Dennis on YouTube, like most of us,” Draper explains. “And I thought he not only speaks to me, he seems to speak for me, for us – in an almost rock’n’roll way: he’s loud, he’s to the point and he’s got a big following. He speaks for my class.”

In a political climate in which tribalism and “authenticity” is all – forget about evidence-based policy – Skinner, with the lowest expense claims and the highest attendance record, is an undoubted hero. “He’s got that little bit more than everyone else,” Draper says, “because of that mining background, he knows what it is to work, like I have in labouring jobs and that, on low pay…”

His film brilliantly captures that clannish emotional pull of Skinner’s politics, not least in the shots of the MP’s four surviving brothers (he was the third of nine children) sitting in a row with mugs of tea in front of them. Two of the Skinners were on the Clay Cross council that held out alone against the Heath government in 1971, when it tried to impose housing rent increases on local authorities (the first time central government got involved in housing policy, starting a line of interference and sell-off that ends, in Skinner’s view, in the current housing crisis). His brothers and the Clay Cross council refused to back down and were, as a result, removed, prevented from working in local government for 40 years, and bankrupted. “The brothers are all corkers, too,” Draper says. “Mini‑Dennises.”

“The Tories even came for my brother Graham’s car,” Skinner recalls of the dispute. “He said, ‘They’ll not have that’.” Graham took the wheels off, had it up on bricks, but they took it anyway.

The most moving parts of the film are those in which Skinner recalls his late mother, who in her last years declined into dementia. When he talks about her, as now, he accompanies those memories with snatches of song. The songs themselves have a resonance because they were how they communicated when his mother no longer knew who her children were. “It all started with me,” Skinner says. “I couldn’t understand why people who stuttered didn’t stutter when they sang. I thought it must come from a different part of the brain. One time when I was out with my mother in the park and there was nobody around for a hundred yards, I tested that out.” He sang one of his mother’s favourites, an old tearjerker sung in the voice of a widower to a portrait of his late wife: “If those lips could only speak, and those eyes could only see…” He sings it now again, in lilting full voice. “My mother knew the lot,” he says, “every verse: ‘He stood in a beautiful mansion surrounded by riches untold’. That song was really saying, here’s a bloke who has got a lot of money, but it makes no difference. It’s not going to bring back his wife. I think that is why my mother liked it. It was a class thing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Burnham during a rally for the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign outside the Houses of Parliament in London. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA

All of that sentiment for family and for what is lost feeds directly into Skinner’s feelings for the community and solidarity they had known in Clay Cross growing up. He can’t separate it from his 22 years as a miner, but is he nostalgic for the mines themselves?

“The solidarity in the pits, you couldn’t measure it,” he says. “But it was slavery. No other word. Tony Benn used to talk to me romantically about the pits. I’d tell him I did 20-odd years, there wasn’t much romantic about it. I finished up at a deep pit, 800 yards down. It was red hot down there. Within an hour your cheese had melted into your bread. By the time you had snap at 11 o’clock it was just a soggy mess.”

Was he ever scared?

“There were times you would hear a rumble like thunder on the coal face. Your heart’s beating fast. But you got used to it. The Cresswell miners in Derbyshire, 80 died, with a fire in the pit, when I was only 17. You knew how dangerous it was.”

Talk of those years sets him recalling the struggles that began with the 1971 Industrial Relations Act of the Heath government and ended with Orgreave and the collapse of the miners’ strike. He remembers the “electricity in the air” on those marches, the times he climbed rickety ladders on to makeshift platforms to address the crowds, dwelling more on battles won than battles lost.

If the union had carried on winning in the 80s, where does he think we would be now?

“For a start we would still have had some pits left,” he says. “We haven’t had a pit in Derbyshire since 1992, though there is tons of coal.”

And the economy would have continued to be based on heavy industry and coal?

“Yeah.”

Until now?

“There would have been jobs. You know, they are talking about HS2 producing all these wonderful things. I don’t see how. I think we would have lasted at least another 20 years, and we would have kept those skills.”

We talk about what young men in Clay Cross do now. How he got a motorway junction built – 29A on the M1 – to give the industrial estate built on the old pit site at Markham Vale a chance. “I was just persistent. Saying to Gordon Brown, we need a bit more money. That’s how I played it during those years.” Skinner was an unlikely confidant of Tony Blair – Blair does a fine impression – but still, I guess he must feel more at home with Jeremy Corbyn in charge…

“I’m glad he won,” he says. “And he is getting more competent with each day that passes. One of the things that is most amazing, which I could never have contemplated, is that he goes to the Durham Miners’ Gala and 200,000 people turn out. They are there far as the eye can see. Face after face, head after head, stretching all the way to the fairground!”

I don’t suppose he has seen that since the 70s?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Addressing the Labour party conference in Brighton in 2005. Photograph: Dan Chung/The Guardian

“I haven’t seen it ever! In the election, Jeremy came to Matlock, a Tory town. There’s a pretty park there, very nice, pitch-and-putt and tennis courts and all that. I know it well. And Jeremy Corbyn filled the park!” He laughs broadly at the thought. “The whole of Matlock park!”

Having seen what Skinner has seen, Labour’s return to socialism must feel like a very unexpected late act in his parliamentary career…

“The thing is,” he says, “now that the party knows that Jeremy is acceptable in large parts of the country, and in Scotland, then next time we will all join in. Even Tony Blair is saying he can win. The Tories are scared stiff.”

On his walks in the park, when he is turning things over in his head, does he allow himself a smile occasionally, at how things turn out?

“Mainly I smile and say to myself, you lucky so and so,” he says. “Fate has been very kind to me.”

It would be a brave person to say that Skinner is mellowing in any way, but you do get a sense of gratitude at his longevity and the blessings of family. He has no inclination to discuss his private life: his wife of 29 years, Mary (they separated in 1989) and his current partner (and former researcher) Lois Blasenheim, get only one mention each in his autobiographical memoir, Sailing Close to the Wind, and his three children – who all attended his old school, and graduated from Manchester University – get a couple of sentences. But he will talk of a big turning point in his life, at around the turn of the millennium. Towards the end of 1999 he was diagnosed with advanced bladder cancer and subsequently had surgery. “As they were wheeling me back to the ward,” he says, “I could see my blood dripping out into a bag at the side of the bed, and the surgeon leaned in close to me and whispered: ‘Dennis, I think we got it all.’ He was right. I saw him two weeks later and he put the camera into my bladder and his face lit up, and he gave the all-clear.”

Skinner’s own face lights up when he recalls that moment. Did it make him appreciate what he had?

“You just can’t buy that feeling,” he says. “It was May time and there was all this blossom on those cherry trees outside Chelsea hospital and it was absolutely the blossomest blossom I had ever seen. I was on such a high I walked straight past South Ken underground station, I was flying, floating. I just kept going and walked all the way to parliament.”

Was it about then that he decided not to retire?

“There were a few things, but I did think, well I have survived this, why not carry on?”

It must, I suggest, have even made him love this place all the more.

He winces a bit at the idea.

“No, I just think I landed on my feet. Compared to working in the pit.” He pauses, reverts to Skinner. “You know what my dad said to me when I was first elected in 1970? ‘At least you’ll not have to test the roof each morning down there at Westminster, lad.’” Forty-seven years on, for better and worse, not a morning goes past when he doesn’t look up and remind himself of that fact.

Dennis Skinner: Nature of the Beast is released in UK cinemas from 8 September. See dennisskinnerfilm.co.uk; #DennisSkinnerFilm

A brief history

1932 Dennis Edward Skinner is born in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, to cleaner Lucy and coalminer Edward Skinner. He is the third of nine children.

1942 Wins a scholarship to attend Tupton grammar school aged 10.

1949 Rather than take up study, he follows his father down the pit at Parkhouse colliery until its closure in 1962. He then works at Glapwell colliery near Chesterfield.

1956 Joins the Labour party.

1960 Marries Mary Parker, with whom he has three children. They later separate in 1989.

1964 Becomes the youngest-ever president of the Derbyshire region of the National Union of Miners (NUM); also works as a councillor on Derbyshire county council and for Clay Cross.

1967 Attends Ruskin College, Oxford, after completing a course run by the NUM at the University of Sheffield.

1970 Elected MP for Bolsover with a majority of more than 20,000. Soon referred to as the “Beast of Bolsover”, he is a fierce supporter of leftwing struggles, particularly supporting the NUM during the 1984‑85 strike.

1988 Serves as chairman of the Labour party for a year.

1999 Has surgery to remove a malignant tumour from his bladder.

2003 Recovers from a double heart bypass operation.

2014 Voted off Labour’s national executive committee. Pays tribute to long-time friend Tony Benn, who died 14 March.

2015 Re-elected MP for Bolsover with 51.2% of the vote (two years later he keeps his seat with a majority of 52%). Appeals to save the remaining deep mine pits from closing.

2017 Opposes Donald Trump’s state visit, saying: “I hid under the stairs as two fascist dictators – Hitler and Mussolini – rained bombs on Britain. Now this government is hand in hand with another fascist: Trump. Do the decent thing and ban the visit.”

Jade Cuttle