From lurid tabloid coverage of his marriage to winning respect for his child abuse campaign, to taking a hoax selfie with Ukip’s Douglas Carswell – and endless sniping at the leadership – the Rochdale MP for Labour defies easy characterisation. Is he a fearless campaigner or a latterday Lembit Öpik?

The group in the back room of the Briton’s Protection pub in Manchester was, to use the local parlance, a rum bunch. Drinking a pint at one end of the table was Tristram Hunt, the aristocratic MP for Stoke. Once tipped to soar to the top of the Labour party, he was now despondent, his wings clipped after Jeremy Corbyn became leader. Beside him, on a Coke, was Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s sole MP. To his right, with a beer: Simon Danczuk, a factory worker from Hapton in Lancashire, who had become Rochdale’s rabble-rousing Labour parliamentarian. Opposite him: Seumas Milne, yet to take leave from the Guardian to become Corbyn’s spin doctor – or to be called, by Danczuk, in a column for the Mail on Sunday no less, an apologist for terrorism and a cheerleader for communism.

All except Danczuk had been debating at a Guardian-sponsored event at Manchester Central Library. Danczuk had been in the audience and tagged along to the pub afterwards. He soon sensed the opportunity for mischief. “Here,” said the 49-year-old, handing over his iPhone, “take a picture of me and Douglas, will you?” Within seconds the shot was on Danczuk’s Twitter.

It had the intended effect. The pair were soon bombarded with bile from gullible Corbyn supporters who assumed Danczuk was, as one poet put it, “fucking off to Ukip”. You could see why they might have been suspicious. In the run-up to Corbyn’s landslide win, Danczuk had been telling every man and his dog that he felt no loyalty to a man who had rebelled against his own party almost 500 times – prompting a warning from one senior Unite activist that Danczuk, along with Hunt, was in their “crosshairs” and would be ousted from the party after Corbyn triumphed.

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Six weeks on, 2,500 people have signed a petition entitled “Deselect Simon Danczuk MP”. The target himself doesn’t give a monkeys. “I’m not worried about it at all,” he says breezily when we meet in a smart Manchester hotel this week, having recently offered his services as a “stalking horse” to force yet another leadership contest. He insists he would never cross the floor: “I’ll never leave the Labour party.”

Few MPs seem to attract as much trouble as Danczuk – or to take such delight in it. It was while touring Rochdale with him in 2010 that Gordon Brown came a cropper after a chance encounter with immigration-sceptic pensioner Gillian Duffy – “that bigoted woman” as Brown fatefully dubbed her, forgetting he was still wearing a Sky TV microphone. Brown lost the election and stepped down as leader. Danczuk took Rochdale from the Liberal Democrats by 889 votes, and struck up such a friendship with Duffy that she opened his constituency office. A plaque commemorates the occasion.

For his first two years in office, Danczuk kept a fairly low profile. Then, in May 2012, he ignored the advice of his neighbouring MP, the late Jim Dobbin, and spoke out about the racial element of a series of sex-grooming cases in Rochdale, in which gangs of Asian men were found guilty of exploiting vulnerable white girls. In November that year, he gave a speech in parliament in which he outed Cyril Smith, Rochdale’s Liberal MP for 20 years, as a prolific paedophile. He also managed to effectively put a living Lib Dem in jail, reporting Chris Huhne to the police following rumours that he had asked his estranged wife, Vicky Pryce, to take his speeding points.

But it was when Danczuk’s second wife, Karen, 17 years his junior, started posting provocative selfies that Danczuk really began to have a public profile. Then a sitting Labour councillor as well as a case worker in his constituency office, she was soon hogging the headlines, to the extent that a Sun exposé of his former drug use, courtesy of his first wife, Sonia, was headlined: “Boob pics MP: I took ecstasy”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Danczuk and second wife Karen split earlier in the year. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer/Gary Calton

When we meet, Danczuk looks fit and well, but isn’t his usual sweary self, seemingly on a mission not to be rude about Corbyn. We’ve met many times before, but he admits he’s nervous, and has brought along his new parliamentary assistant, Nasreen Nazir, to help field tricky questions. A stickler for smartness – one of his complaints about Corbyn has been that he looks like a scruff-bag – he’s wearing an immaculate suit and arrives in a cloud of aftershave, offering two rather metropolitan kisses as a hello. He’s not very loud for someone famed for shooting his mouth off, occasionally losing confidence as he struggles to find his words, getting muddled between “monogamous” and “homogenous” when he tries to describe what Rochdale isn’t. Five years in Westminster haven’t dulled his east Lancashire speech patterns, which always turn “was” into “were” (“I were quite perplexed”; “There were a debate on child abuse” etc) and often ends sentences with “intit?”, the northern version of “innit”.

Afer a noisy few months, he seems to be trying to rebrand himself as a more considered politician, rather than the go-to-guy for reporters needing someone to slag off the Labour party on deadline. He has just turned down an offer to go into the jungle for the forthcoming series of I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! “The time wasn’t right,” he says. “There’s too much to do in Rochdale in terms of turning the town around. And there’s a job to be done in terms of national politics, in terms of making sure the Labour party is going in the right direction, and I will try to make a difference there.” But he’s not ruling out a future appearance: “I do genuinely believe it’s a great way of bringing politics and political discussion to a wider audience. That’s why I had the initial conversations with ITV producers.” It’s not yet clear whether Karen is jungle-bound.

I got to know Danczuk about a year ago, when he became one of the first Labour MPs to really question Ed Miliband’s electoral appeal as Labour leader. We went doorknocking in one of Rochdale’s gloomy tower blocks. Everyone who answered that afternoon knew who he was, however out of it some of them appeared. On another occasion I had a hotpot he had cooked at Danczuk’s Deli, the Rochdale cafe Karen ran before she decided it was easier to make money in the media and quit both the caff and her council seat.

In March I had a night out with both Danczuks at the Regal Moon, Rochdale’s cavernous Wetherspoon’s. Karen, over several proseccos, complained she was misrepresented by the press, which was always recycling the same old busty shots she’d only rarely posted online. The following Monday she had changed her Twitter banner to a paparazzi shot of her lying on her back on a sun lounger, her magnificent breasts rising up from her peach bikini like two gleaming bowling balls. I noted, in a perhaps unsisterly manner, that she appeared to be contradicting herself. She responded by digging out an old picture I’d posted of myself testing a cycling jersey, zipped up to the neck. “@HelenPidd wants to give me lessons in selfies,” she tweeted, asking her followers to choose which photo they liked: the one of me or her in a gym with her cleavage on show. She’s quite a handful, is Karen.

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She and Simon split in the summer, six weeks after he increased his majority by a spectacular 11,500 votes. It’s still not clear what happened in their relationship. Normally very candid, he stumbles when I ask. Nazir chips in to rescue him: “I think you just became two different people.” For a while Simon thought Karen had been having as affair with her personal trainer; he now thinks she wasn’t. He gave an interview to ITV’s This Morning in which he claimed he wanted to get back together – an interview for which he seems to have been paid £3,000, unless parliament’s register of interest misleads.

Two weeks before the breakup, the pair had given a bizarre interview to Camilla Long in the Sunday Times, during which both apparently ended up in tears. Shortly after its publication, a payment for £10,000 from the Sunday Times’ parent company appeared on Simon’s register of outside earnings. When he refuses to confirm this week what the money was for I tell him he is the only sitting MP to ask me if he would be paid for granting an interview. (The Guardian never pays for access.)

The split only served to raise the profile of both parties. When Simon snogged a young Labour councillor, 32-year-old Claire Hamilton, on the dancefloor at Labour party conference in September, the kiss ended up on the front page of the London Evening Standard. History is now repeating itself as the new couple post selfies online. Why do you do it, Simon, I ask. He thinks he’s behaving like any other newly single fella with a hot young catch. “I’m an ordinary guy who happens to do politics, aren’t I?”

Inside the parliamentary Labour party (PLP), opinion is split on Danczuk. Some think he is a publicity-seeking rentagob more concerned with his own media profile than the future of his party. At a recent PLP meeting, one peer arrived apoplectic, waving a copy of Danczuk’s latest column in the Mail on Sunday, which was headlined: “Embarrassing? No, Labour’s leadership is a laughable SHAMBLES.” Danczuk, spat Lord Dale Campbell-Savours, was unforgiveably “disloyal”. That was before Danczuk’s epistle the following week, in which he recounted in rather treacherous detail an air-clearing meeting he’d had over green tea with Corbyn.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Danczuk with Gillian Duffy, the woman Gordon Brown called ‘that bigoted woman’, who the Rochdale MP had open his constituency office. Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA

But Danczuk denies allegations of disloyalty. “I think it’s all part of the new politics,” he says, with admirable chutzpah. “I get the impression Jeremy is relaxed about it. Tony Blair as leader never disciplined Jeremy for the attacks that he made on Tony. Why would Jeremy want to discipline me for speaking out and sharing my constructive comments on his leadership?” He insists he quietly receives a lot of support from other MPs. “I think what has been written is generally well received actually. They say: ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, it’s important.’”

But even those MPs who support him behind closed doors think he should pipe down now, arguing his attacks lose currency with every outing (“Isn’t he junk bonds now?” said one political reporter this week after I told them I was profiling Danczuk). Given that Corbyn gave him the opportunity to share his thoughts in private, it’s hard to see what he thinks he will achieve for the Labour party by repeating the slaggings publicly in the rightwing media. Danczuk disagrees. “The readership might read it and think: ‘There’s a Labour representative who is talking sense.’ And that surely must be good for Labour.” He is adamant that what he calls his “constructive criticism” is already working. “I have a genuine desire to help Jeremy win elections, both next year and in the run-up to and including 2020. I think he’s listened to some of the things I’ve been saying ... I raised the issue about him not wearing a white poppy, wearing a red one [at Corbyn’s first PLP meeting]. And that’s what he now does. I’ve raised the point about singing the national anthem. That’s what he now does. I’ve raised the point about his relationship with the queen and I think he’s modified that. I genuinely think this is a new kind of politics that is genuinely welcome. There’s much more openness. Much more debate. Jeremy is a breath of fresh air in allowing that debate to take place, in terms of reinvigorating the party.”

The curious thing about Danczuk’s columns in the Mail on Sunday is that he is now writing for the paper that essentially accused him of being a wife-beater this summer. The paper aired allegations long circulating in Rochdale that he had ditched Karen and their first son at Alicante airport in 2008. The story quoted Karen’s dad, Martin Burke, alleging that his daughter had called from the airport, distraught. “She told me, ‘He’s drunk, he’s very angry, he’s beaten me up, he’s threatening to kill me,’” the paper quoted him as saying. But both Karen and Simon denied the argument was violent. An internal Labour party investigation found in Simon’s favour, and resulted in the expulsion of five party members for damaging the party and his campaign to win the next general election.

Has he ever laid a finger on Karen? “No. Honestly,” he says, complaining that he had warned me in advance he didn’t want to do too much “personal stuff”. Why do you write for a paper suggested you did, then? “This is the nature of politics. This is the nature of public life. And lots of allegations about my life and everybody’s life in public life get thrown about. But it’s no good me throwing my toys out of the pram in terms of newspapers and having a relationship with them. I have some important messages to get across, and if I can do that through the Mail on Sunday, which is a very well-read newspaper, why wouldn’t I do that?”

For all the criticisms, Danczuk has arguably been one of the most successful backbenchers of any party for getting things done. Even those who despise him admit he was instrumental in pushing for what has become the Goddard inquiry, the judge-led investigation into child sex abuse in state institutions. Having come from humble beginnings, leaving school with no qualifications to work in a gas fire factory, and then bettering himself at night school and Lancaster University as a mature student, he has also proved himself to be much more in touch with Labour’s working-class core than most. For at least a year before the general election he was warning that the party needed a tougher immigration policy, pointing out that towns such as Rochdale were struggling to cope with a disproportionate number of refugees and asylum seekers. Shortly after Labour lost the election, a survey identified immigration as the issue that worried voters most.

Putting his head above the parapet has taken its toll. This summer he announced he was stepping back from his campaigning on child abuse, having begun to see a therapist for depression and burgeoning alcohol abuse. He insists he was never an alcoholic, but could see he was beginning to drink too much as a coping mechanism. He has modified his behaviour: “I have days where I don’t drink anything. Some days I have a few glasses of wine ... the other thing that’s really helped is exercise, so I run a lot. I’m up to doing 12k and that’s really good. I’ve been doing that for about 12 months. I also do stuff around mindfulness, sort of like meditation, on a regular basis.” He looks well, having lost several stone in the past year and gained a Tommy Sheridan-style perma-tan. Though currently lodging with friends after Karen stayed in their family bungalow, he says he is in a “happy place”. He has a “good” relationship with Karen and has regular access to their two sons, aged 7 and 5 – though he no longer really sees the 18-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter he had with Sonia.

There’s an irony in hearing Danczuk talk about the benefits of mindfulness as he sips a green tea, given his repeated criticisms of the Labour party under Ed Miliband as being trapped in a middle-class metropolitan bubble. But it’s hard to pigeonhole Danczuk: is he a big-mouthed champion of the vulnerable? A fearless speaker of truth to power? An attention seeker who doesn’t know when to button it? Or all of the above?

• This article was amended on 5 January 2016. An earlier version said that five members of the Labour party were expelled for circulating “false and malicious rumours” about Simon Danczuk. This has been corrected.



• Simon Danczuk appears at the Guardian’s Alternative Party Conference at the Soho Theatre, London W1, from 10am on 7 November.