On the wall of Kate Hoey’s Westminster office hangs a painting she did of a duck, an apple and a wine bottle. I think this is what they are; she concedes the likenesses aren’t great. Hoey and other MPs took an art class – some wheeze put on by a Sunday newspaper – and while the others were praised by the critic for slavishly replicating the colours and perspective, Hoey’s attempt was singled out for its contrariness. The opinion was that, while she hadn’t followed the others, her attempt “really said something”.

It may be an anecdote rolled out for all her visitors, but it seems to sum up Hoey’s personality – someone with her own view on the world, unwilling to follow others, a Labour MP so often at odds with her party over the years that she has been dogged by rumours she was about to defect to the Conservatives. She has advised Boris Johnson and been praised by the Daily Mail. She grew up on a small farm in County Antrim, idyllic but impoverished, but became MP for an inner-London constituency. A Labour MP who loves the monarchy, opposed the foxhunting ban, and describes Thatcher as “sweet”. Sweet? “She could be kind,” she says, before launching into a story about meeting her in the loo. “Though her policies weren’t kind.”

Interview most politicians and it’s like trying to have a conversation on a bad long-distance phone line – there’s always a slight time delay as they desperately try to calculate how much of what they say will get them into trouble. Hoey, warm with a soft Northern Irish accent, chats away happily, curls springing around her head (her hairstyle, like her politics, has remained constant since she became an MP in 1989). She will turn 70 this year, but there is something childlike about her energy and guilelessness. She must be popular around Westminster – for all her rebelliousness, nobody could accuse her of being self-serving – but she says: “I have very few real friends in here. I’ve got lots of people I like and get on well with, but I’ve always kept a hinterland which has nothing to do with politics.” She hates party-political tribalism, and says her proper friends are not MPs. “Most of them don’t like politicians. Except me.”

Hoey finds herself isolated again, this time over Europe. As a longtime Eurosceptic, she is one of a handful of Labour MPs who find themselves allied with Ukip and some of the most rightwing Conservatives over the upcoming EU referendum. She is in a minority, she says, but claims that “every week we get another [Labour] MP coming and being supportive” of the anti-EU stance, including members of the shadow cabinet.

The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, she says, is relaxed about people having different views, and she can understand why he has said he will campaign against an exit: “He’s trying to keep the shadow cabinet together.” She thinks the existence of the Labour Leave group, of which Hoey is co-chair, is not a problem for Corbyn. “I think it would look ridiculous if the Labour Pparty was united behind what will probably be David Cameron leading a stay campaign. That will not go down well with a lot of our supporters.” Does she think Corbyn will change his position? “I think Jeremy will say a few things nearer the time that will show he is much more of an internationalist than a Little European.”

Kate Hoey MP as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Zimbabwe in 2007. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

There is, she says, “a very strong leftwing case for leaving”. Until the late 80s, she points out, Labour was predominantly wary of Europe. When the Thatcher government started to wear away workers’ rights, “I think the trade union movement saw the EU as being the only way to guarantee protection. There was a very uncritical look at the EU for many years. It’s only when we’ve seen what’s happened to the euro, what’s happened to Greece, and the way workers have been treated and their bargaining rights removed, that people have begun to realise – trade unions particularly – that it’s not this benign organisation.” Furthermore, she says, leftwing dreams such as renationalising the railways would be impossible within the EU. “The EU is an organisation that is actually interested in multinationals and neoliberalising right across the EU. You only have to see it in the TTIP negotiations with the United States. I genuinely can’t understand how, on the left, everyone is against TTIP [secretive trade negotiations between the US and EU] but don’t realise that TTIP is an automatic extension of the way the EU works.”

She doesn’t agree that the economy would suffer, or that the country would lurch to the right. “We would still be able to trade. Germany is not going to stop selling us cars. We will be able to make our own trade deals. We would have stronger workers’ rights because we could do it ourselves. We’re not suddenly going to lose all our rights.”

Doesn’t wanting to leave feed into ugly, anti-immigration feeling? “I think we’re past that now. The idea now that if you challenge anything to do with the numbers of people coming into this country you are racist is just nonsense. It’s a very lazy way of arguing.” The idea, she says, “that anybody in Ukip is a racist is just nonsense.” My eyes widen. Really? “Absolute nonsense. That’s the kind of Guardianista attitude to Ukip which has not done any good up in the northeast or northwest of England, where working-class people have been almost despised by … not everybody in the Guardian. And it’s an attitude that the BBC had as well – the idea that if you could possibly want to leave the EU, you must be some kind of monster.”

Kate Hoey and the Queen in 2012. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The stay campaign wants to paint her and her allies as insular, she says. “They want to present it as being Little Englander, white, older people, and it’s not that.” She points out that in her constituency, “I have very substantial numbers of Afro-Caribbeans, second, third and fourth generation. They have great difficulty bringing in relatives, even for a summer holiday. They see people from Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria coming in and they say: ‘How come they can come here just like that? Our ancestors fought for the British.’ Getting back control of your borders is not a xenophobic argument. I don’t see why anyone from India or Africa shouldn’t have as equal an opportunity to apply to come here as someone from Latvia or Romania.”

There have been calls for Hoey to lead a leave campaign, since she is a more palatable figure than, say, Nigel Farage, but she has ruled it out. She insists she is comfortable sharing a platform with Eurosceptic Tories and, although she has never done a meeting with Farage, “I have [met] some of Ukip’s senior women, who are very good. Women on the whole are so much better at being direct and saying what they think, not hiding behind waffle. Women are much better at seeing where the problem is [and asking:] how do we sort it? Not setting up loads of sub-committees to look at it, which is what happens.”

Isn’t division over Europe the last thing a fragile Labour party needs right now? She gives a small smile. “I think there are a lot more issues within the party at the moment than the European Union.” Hoey supported Andy Burnham in the leadership campaign, and there are lots of things Hoey doesn’t agree with Corbyn on – of course – but she likes him. “He has mobilised people who have not shown much interest in the Labour party. He’s brought back into the party people who left because of the Iraq war. He’s been proved right on a number of things, and he deserves the opportunity to lead without all the backstabbing that’s going on at the moment. There were people who, halfway through Ed Miliband’s leadership, wanted to try and remove him. That didn’t happen, but it certainly aroused a feeling among MPs that if you think it’s not going to work out then you have to do something about it, but you can’t do that after a few months. I think Jeremy deserves a good spell of loyalty from his shadow cabinet.” She would be appalled, she says, by a coup. Removing him “would have to be done properly and openly, not little cliques in backrooms and briefing the Guardian”.

I wonder if, when faced with a politician such as Hoey, who seems so willing to isolate herself, we view it as something suspicious in her psychology, rather than what we should expect of our elected representatives. “I don’t think I’ve changed much since I first got elected,” she says. “I’ve always been very blunt and say what I think. I’ve seen people who were around when I first came into politics moving way to the right, or way to the left, and moving back again depending on who’s in power and machinations within the party. I just feel I’m the way I am, and if the party goes off in one direction, I don’t have to do that if I don’t think it’s right. I’m not a great team player, I can’t go along with something if I don’t agree with it.”

Hoey famously voted against the foxhunting ban (becoming chair of the Countryside Alliance in the process), and against the Iraq war. She was sacked by John Smith, Tony Blair’s predecessor as Labour leader, for voting against the Maastricht treaty in 1992. He called her after 11pm to tell her she had to go from his shadow team. In the retelling, she sounds more annoyed that he interrupted the Arsenal game she was watching than by losing her job.

Blair, she says, never explicitly told her off, although she would have disputes with him and Alastair Campbell when she was sports minister, particularly over football and the power of the FA (Blair did later sack her though). And Corbyn hasn’t told her off either, not even when she said the party was “extremely unpatriotic”. “No, nobody said anything. I think we lost a lot of votes because we weren’t proud of being British and people out there are. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

Kate Hoey at the state opening of parliament in May. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images

Anyway, she says, “I didn’t come into politics for a ‘career’. When I came in, there were all these amazing older MPs, mainly men, obviously, who had been in the mines and worked in industries in the north-east. They were great: there was real debate and discussion. All that has changed. [Now] it’s much more management speak, it’s about ticking boxes and the finance department.”

Hoey’s roots inform everything she does: her family had little money, which means she places huge importance on social justice, and the freedom of a childhood roaming the fields and riding bareback must have fuelled her libertarian streak. And the foxes? Well, she’s a farmer’s daughter. “I was always brought up to be independent-minded, and the whole feeling of the countryside of people not being dictated to was important to me,” she says.

Her parents were Protestant, and Hoey considers herself a Christian, but she says there wasn’t much sectarianism where she grew up: “We lived in the country, where people helped each other whether they were Catholic or Protestant.” But they were proud of being British – her father had been in the home guard during the war – and Hoey is the same.

“We didn’t go round barefoot, but they made huge sacrifices,” she says of her parents. They weren’t educated, but they read a lot and loved music. Hoey read voraciously, too. She remembers there was only a small bookshelf at her primary school, but every month the local library would come and replenish it with different books. She became interested in politics at school, in debating, and joined the Northern Ireland Labour party as a teenager. She was a sporty child – at one point, Northern Ireland’s high-jump champion – and went on to the Ulster College of Physical Education, where she qualified as a PE teacher. She also became vice-president of the National Union of Students, and was briefly was a member of the International Marxist Group, because it “probably had better-looking young men” than other radical-left groups.

She came to London out of patriotism – she wanted to be in the capital city. There she did a degree in economics, paid for by part-time PE teaching. “I remember going to my first Labour conference as a delegate from Hackney North, which is where I was living.” It was the first time she met MPs: in the flesh, they weren’t as clever or important as she had thought, nor were they superior to her. “I remember thinking: ‘I could do that.’ There was that gap between what I thought they were like and the reality.”

There were few women, but that didn’t put her off. “I’ve never counted myself as a feminist, but I’ve always felt that women should be able to do whatever they want to do.” Is that not being a feminist? She smiles. “Well, yes, but I don’t like the word because it’s got this connotation of, you know … I suppose for Guardian readers it hasn’t.” She became a councillor, then was elected as MP for Vauxhall in a 1989 byelection (she had fought Dulwich in 1983 and 1987).

She insists she didn’t experience discrimination. If people (men, I think she means) commented on her clothes or hair, she says she didn’t mind. “I remember having a long chat with Betty Boothroyd, and she had a very similar attitude – we got there because we were right [for the job], we don’t need special treatment. I never voted for women-only shortlists. I would have hated to have been elected on one.” Did she not feel excluded from the male bar culture, where networks and careers were boosted? “No, there was the tea room. I never went to the bar and I don’t like that whole culture of drinking that goes on here, but it’s not as much as it used to be.”

Hoey says she has no plans to retire and will stand in the next election. “I think people should go when they feel they’re not able to do the job properly. I know I’m getting older, but I don’t feel any older.” She remains a busy and popular constituency MP. An aide comes in to tell her she has got an adjournment debate and she almost punches the air. “They’re trying to demolish Vauxhall bus station, which is ridiculous – TfL and Lambeth [council] in cahoots.” She raises an eyebrow. “I spend quite a lot of my time criticising my local council too.”