Not until the morning after the night before did Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, realise the remarks she’d made on the 28 January edition of the BBC’s Question Time about the Cologne sex attacks – women, she said, face “similar” levels of harassment on the streets of Birmingham every week – had placed her firmly at the heart of yet another social media storm.

“I woke up to a voicemail from my local radio station,” she says. “At which point I thought: here we go.” There followed a relentless 24 hours of tweets and emails, the majority from men who, having substituted images of their own faces with those of their pit bulls, sought to inform Phillips that her big problem in life is that she simply longs to be raped. “It’s so unoriginal,” she goes on, rolling her eyes. “If I had a pound for every time a man has said: who’s going to rape you?”

Is she as tough as she sounds? I’m not sure I’d be so sanguine. “Yeah, I am.” Before she was an MP, she worked at Women’s Aid, the domestic violence charity. “This is nothing. I used to have to see angry perpetrators off at the door.”

Phillips and I were supposed to meet that week, but in the end she cancelled. Once she’d spoken to the local press – she doesn’t regret what she said, but if she had her time over, she would perhaps have been a bit less geographically specific – she decided to lie low for a while. The public, she observed on Twitter, insists that it wants its politicians to be more honest, and yet the moment any MP shows even the faintest sign of being so, they’re instantly punished for it.

Does this mean she is planning on joining the massed ranks of politicians whose real views have long since disappeared behind the calcified layers of the half-truths they spout on an almost daily basis? She hopes not – though her tone is, for once, cautious. “I’ll be sad if I end up like that. One of the things I want to achieve in the potentially short time I’m in Westminster is to stop people thinking we’re all the same. Because while they believe that, the establishment stays in the same people’s hands. Nothing changes. It is awful to hear people on the doorstep saying: ‘You politicians are all in it for yourselves.’ But that’s nowhere near as bad as hearing that people feel they have no one to represent them. That’s the disaster, not the fact that I have to weather a Twitter storm.”

Can Labour win the next election? ‘The honest answer is: no, absolutely not…’

Phillips, 34, became the MP for Yardley at the last election. We meet at her small and fuggy constituency office, which smells of tea, biscuits and (rather more powerfully at this precise moment) the egg and bacon sandwich she is eating, Ed Miliband-style, in a back room filled with scrolls of leaflets. It is half-term, which means that she is in her beloved Birmingham all week, a bonus for her husband Tom, the man who delivered the sandwich (a former lift engineer she first knew as a teenager, he now works as part of her constituency staff), and their boys Harry, 11, and Danny, 7. Nevertheless, her workload is unrelenting even when parliament isn’t sitting, which is why she must have her lunch now. In a moment a constituent is due to arrive; after that she has to go and inspect a minibus.

“She’s always been a workaholic,” says Tom blithely, sticking his head around the door again. “When she was elected I didn’t notice much of a change.” He has no interest in politics – he isn’t even a member of the party – and can’t plan anything “more than three days ahead”, which is why, they agree now, their relationship works, his preternatural calm a brake on his wife’s somewhat more hectic approach. Well, that and the fact that he makes his own sourdough.

Jess Philips: ‘I thought I could be a politician and a human being. I was wrong’ Guardian

In the six months since she became an MP, the plain-speaking Phillips has made quite a lot of noise – not for her the anonymity of the back benches. The truth-telling began last September. Having made no secret of her disappointment with the new Labour leadership, her irritation peaked when it became clear that Jeremy Corbyn had failed to appoint a woman to any significant position in his first shadow cabinet. When she had the temerity to bring this up during a meeting of the parliamentary party, Diane Abbott warned her not to be sanctimonious. “You’re not the only feminist in the PLP,” said the member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. How did Phillips respond? “I roundly told her to fuck off,” she explained to the Huffington Post afterwards.

So how is she feeling now? Better, it seems. “I feel less strongly than I did. I was cross then, not because Jeremy Corbyn had been elected but because the woman thing made me feel as if I’d turned up at my own house to find the locks had been changed and all my stuff was on the drive outside. I’m still cross about it, but I trust the membership to make it right in the long run.”

And what, if anything, is the message coming down to her from on high? Is the leadership in touch with its more vocal MPs? “Oh, there’s no message coming down at all,” she says, mock wide-eyed. “I think Jeremy wants to be the leader. If he didn’t, I don’t imagine he would do it. But I’m not sure he wants to be prime minister. What I worry about is what he hears when people speak. He and the people around him only seem to hear: ‘You’re amazing – can I have a selfie?’ The polls are terrible, aren’t they? But I’d like to hear him raise that. I’d like to hear him say: ‘What are we going to do about them?’ That might give us more confidence that this isn’t just about him and his project, but about the country.”

Phillips despises those who insist that Labour’s politics shouldn’t necessarily be about winning elections, the “purity” argument. “I think that’s utterly disgusting. The idea that anyone has a monopoly on principle is flawed. I’m a staunch socialist, raised singing “The Red Flag”, and I cannot believe the level of indulgence of people who don’t have to worry.” Those who take the purity line, she thinks, are often older, well-off lefties indulging in one last nostalgic roll of the socialist dice. “When people say approvingly: ‘He [Corbyn] hasn’t changed his mind,’ I think: ‘Well, there goes a man who’s probably very arrogant.’ It’s like me saying: ‘I’m going to skateboard until I die.’ It’s just ridiculous. Grow up! I want evidence and need to drive our principles, but God forbid that we would ever base anything on evidence.”

Westminster is totally weird. I should dress as a wench, really. It’s hard not to take the piss out of it

She approves of what she calls Corbyn’s “geography-teacher stare”, but she doesn’t believe that he fights back sufficiently hard – or even at all – when Cameron comes at him during Prime Minister’s Questions. Nor is she impressed by his circle. When John McDonnell and the others finally delivered their latest reshuffle last January – “Oh, the utter agony! Ha ha, it’s still going on, I think!” – she was appalled to see them clap themselves on the back for the 50:50 equality they’d achieved, when all they’d really done was create “a load of junior jobs” and give those to the women instead. “They didn’t hear our [original] criticisms at all. Our point was that at the party’s decision-making heart there were no women, not even one. And it’s the same with them, too. In that room [shuffling the shadow cabinet] were five men, two of whom were related to each other [one of those present was Corbyn’s son Sebastian]. Their celebration of that made me feel like someone was patting me on the head. And if we’re going to argue for a meritocracy, I’d swap Angela Eagle [the shadow business secretary] for John McDonnell [the shadow chancellor] any day. She’s got loads more experience than him.”

Can Labour win the next election? “The honest answer is: no, absolutely not.” She won her own seat with a significant (and, on the night, unusual) swing, but she dare not take it as read that she will do so again in 2020. Much has been made of her ambition – Julie Burchill, having met her, marked her out as a future Labour leader – but that’s irrelevant at this point.

“I am utterly ambitious,” she says. “I’m ambitious for the sake of being so, too. Not enough people are, and I think if you’re in any job, you should damn well believe you should get to the top. But while I can win the ground war [in my constituency], I can’t do anything about the air war.” What job would she like, in the fantasy world in which Labour is restored to power? “Home secretary.” Crikey. What a relief to hear a politician, and a female politician to boot, being honest about what it is that they really want.

‘I’d only ever have taken a seat in the Midlands’: at home in Birmingham, where she lives with her family. Photograph: Phil Fisk for the Observer

Phillips, the youngest of four, comes from a family of Brummie socialists. “Growing up with my father was like growing up with Jeremy Corbyn,” she says. “He still hasn’t rejoined the party; it’s not left wing enough for him.” Both her parents had working-class backgrounds. Her father was a (bearded) English teacher, her mother worked in the NHS, and it was part of everyday life to argue about stuff – a situation that persists. These days family dinners quickly “descend into my dad taking the piss out of me, defending Jeremy to wind me up”. She received her Labour Party membership for her birthday at the age of 14 – “the worst present ever” – and spent many a teenage evening leafleting, not out of choice but because this was what her parents expected. Thanks to all this, perhaps, her own politics waxed and waned. A precocious child who insisted, against the wishes of her parents, on attending the local grammar school, she thought she’d be “prime minister one day, no doubt about it”. But under Tony Blair, for whom she was too young to vote in 1997, she left the party. “My parents left over Iraq, and they were probably still paying my direct debit,” she jokes. “I didn’t rejoin until after the 2010 election.”

She went to Leeds University, where she read economics and social history, but she missed Birmingham and soon came back. She had her first baby at 22 and started working for Women’s Aid in 2010, when her second child was eight months old. “The writing was already on the wall. My job involved re-designing the structure of the organisation, so that we ran government contracts as opposed to taking grants.” The experience made her “utterly pragmatic… I learned that my principles don’t matter as much as people lives.”

When someone asked her in 2012 if she would consider being a local councillor, she agreed because by now she knew she wanted to be an MP. She was selected to fight Yardley the following year. “I would only ever have accepted a seat in the Midlands, and they were all taken apart from this one,” she says. “I went to every member’s house 10 times, and because I’m from here I was able to talk fluently about local things. To me it was just like having tea with my nan. They believed I was one of them, and I won [the selection process] easily.”

I like trashy TV. Tattoo Fixers is best. It’s basically people getting their dodgy tattoos covered up

The general election was rather less of a foregone conclusion. Lord Ashcroft, the Tory poller, believed she would squeak home with a majority of about 300. In the end, however, she took it from the Liberal Democrats with a majority of 6,595. “It was amazing, the best feeling ever.”

What does she make of Westminster? Is it lonely? “I don’t find it anywhere near as lonely as I thought I would. I rent a flat in Brixton, and an old friend lives in the same building; sometimes he comes up to watch TV with me when I get in at 10pm. It is totally weird and fake, of course, like working at Warwick Castle. I should dress as some variety of wench, really. It’s hard not to take the piss out of it.” She knew no one when she arrived but has since made many friends and allies. On her own side, there is Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North and Kidsgrove), Holly Lynch (Halifax) and her “Westminster husband”, Wes Streeting (Ilford North). On the other side of the House she is much taken with Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) – “charming and funny, kind, mad and totally himself” – and gets on well with Maria Miller (Basingstoke), who chairs the Women and Equalities select committee of which Phillips is also a member. What about her good pal, Ms Abbott? She snorts. “We’re on the same terms as before, which is that I’ve never spoken to her save for that once, and that remains a state of grace.”

What does she do in those scant moments when she is neither working nor with her family? “I like trashy telly,” she says, clapping her hands. “At the moment, it’s Tattoo Fixers, which is the best. It’s basically people getting their dodgy tattoos covered up.” Her own tattoos – “several of them have migrated from where they started,” she says, gazing mournfully at her stomach – are easily hidden, though she wouldn’t give a damn if they weren’t, and in the summer fully intends to pad the corridors of power in sandals that will reveal those on her feet. “Also, I’ve got this core group of about eight women, and any time I can, I’ll spend with them. We do what all women in their 30s do when they’re together.” And what’s that? “We drink too much prosecco, dance to bad tunes from the 90s and gossip about Justin Bieber, Kanye West and people we were at school with.”

As she says this, she sounds gleeful, instantly girlish – and perhaps because of this it is suddenly just that extra bit pleasing that by the time you read this she’ll be back in Westminster watching one old Etonian bash another from the safety (or not) of the dispatch box. In the likes of Phillips, it seems to me, there is hope. Perhaps it really is possible for our legislators to look, sound and even act like us, and yet still have our best interests at heart.