If you want to make yourself depressed about the state of politics, go on Twitter and search for Jess Phillips. Last Monday, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley stood up in the House of Commons during the immigration bill debate. The House was largely empty – “The reason I got to speak for so long is that there weren’t that many people down to speak,” she says several days later – and gave a speech that was witty, commonsense to the point of being self-evident, and yet principled in a way that made you ache for a time when it was normal for MPs to give a straightforward defence of Labour values.

She started by puncturing the absurd new Conservative “skills” yardstick, which characterises everyone earning less than 30 grand as “unskilled labour”; that would be news, she said dispassionately, to the nurses, care workers and teachers in her constituency, and across the country. To show how disconnected the Tories are, she went on to talk about class: “I thought I had met posh people before I came here, but I had actually just met people who eat olives.” Since her election in 2015, she said that she had encountered true wealth, people on salaries beyond imagination, “with literally no discernible skills, not even one”. People she wouldn’t trust to hold her pint because they wouldn’t do it right.

The politics of what she was saying was deeply important: one of the striking features of the past 10 years of political discourse is that it has become routine to elide wealth and worth, to classify people in poverty as on a spectrum between “vulnerable” and “feckless”, and rich people as superior by definition. But what was immediately striking was how funny it was; I can’t remember a time I have laughed out loud during a parliamentary debate. She takes this, talking to me down the line from her constituency office in Birmingham, without false modesty. “There are quite a lot of staid jokes that have been workshopped to death before PMQs and the autumn statement – every chancellor seems to want to quip as if the economy’s top bantz. But it’s not usually humour.”

The line about the olives is so good, it sounds as if it must have been scripted, but that is not her way: she had just three bullet points scribbled on the back of a piece of paper. What made her speech really powerful though, rather than merely droll, was the passion that informed it; the raw outrage at a bill that ends freedom of movement and restricts visas for EU citizens to those earning more than £30,000, excluding many key workers.

Play Video 2:49 Jess Phillips : I've met high earners with 'literally no discernible skills'

It was the speech that the country had been waiting to hear, quickly reaching 2m hits and covered by everyone from the satirical website the Poke to Elle. “The reason it had all those views is because people, even if they don’t agree with it, would think it’s good that people are saying what they think. Rather than never saying migration is good, in case you get abuse. Any MP who deals with immigration a huge amount, which I do, is going to worry about giving powers to the executive to change immigration law without scrutiny.”

Phillips, 37, has always been deeply unpopular with the Corbyn wing of Labour, for reasons that are obvious without necessarily being clear. She has criticised him in public, in the strongest terms: she was comfortable sitting on a sofa in a TV studio, saying she didn’t think he should be leader. Her stance was that she was a pragmatist, and he simply wasn’t a practical choice. It was irritating because it had that circular logic of the classic centrist position: “Why isn’t he a practical choice? Because people won’t vote for him. Why won’t they vote for him? Because he isn’t practical.”

Yet Phillips is not, politically, a “centrist” – even if we could all somehow agree on what that meant. “I do find it funny, actually, why I’m not more of a Corbyn fan. I am a classic Corbyn fan, really. Not so much on the foreign policy, but I’m leftwing, pro-immigration, pro-welfare spending, there’s very little that we wouldn’t agree on.” She has friends across various cliques of the Labour party, on both sides – not the leader of the opposition’s inner circle, but from the soft-left to the soft-right. But she would say herself, and others say it of her, that she is not really a member of any of these factions. She has never been behind any coup, never been at the vanguard of any serious movement against Corbyn. And yet she has become a lightning rod for criticism of this type of Labour MP, who will stop at nothing to undermine its member-mandated leader. She says other MPs invite her to speak with members at their constituency meetings because her presence is so toxic to Corbyn-loyalists, they won’t turn up – and so there won’t be any fighting. “I’m like one of those blue rings in a fish and chip shop that attracts the flies. I will keep away people who are going to be angry.”

But Phillips doesn’t actually typify anyone but herself. “Honestly, I think part of that is because I’m a working-class woman. I’m called a class traitor, but the people saying it are largely not working class. I was never a ringleader, but I was willing, when asked questions, to give my opinion. And when you say things quite bluntly, it’s very easy for people to hang their hats on that.”

I’m a working-class woman. I’m called a class traitor – but the people saying it are largely not working class

On this issue of class, as she alluded to with the olives, parliament has been quite a challenge for her. She now sometimes calls herself working-class, which she never would have done before. “I thought I’d made it. Because I sometimes shopped in Waitrose, I thought I was actually quite posh. I’ve realised that I’m basically a scullery maid. Even the middle-class people who I meet in parliament, people who live in London – which I think is remarkable because how can anybody afford to live there – seem much, much more middle class than me.”

To go back to this knotty immigration debate: why was her speech taken as treachery, when it is nothing you wouldn’t expect to hear from Corbyn himself? Why was the house so empty, for that matter, when the bill is so consequential? “We weren’t whipped to be there, and a lot of MPs don’t even leave their constituencies on a Monday if they’re not whipped.” Labour’s position, originally, in a move that blankly horrified its left outriders, was to abstain on the bill. They had some technical reasoning – they would abstain on the second reading, put in amendments later – but it was stunningly reminiscent of the time Harriet Harman, as acting leader after Ed Miliband stepped down, abstained on the welfare bill: it felt like a complete abnegation of responsibility, a failure of values.

This time around, Diane Abbott, who has fought for the rights of immigrants all her life, stood up and gave Labour’s intention to abstain. “As I was walking in, somebody said, we’re not voting against this, and I was like, what? But my attention to detail, as to what our whip is, is that I usually find out as the bell rings.” Whether it was anger from Labour MPs, or a broader storm raging on social media, but something changed Labour’s position, so that by the time Anna Soubry stood up, an hour into the debate, they were whipping against the bill.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Labour’s Women In For Britain Campaign team (Phillips, fourth from right), June 2016. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

“Morally, I would have really struggled to abstain,” says Phillips. (In the background, I can hear the surgery happening in her constituency office and there is a surprising amount of shouting.) “This is not Jeremy Corbyn of old. And it is not Diane Abbott of old, yet presumably they were the two people who made this decision. Diane would never have voted for this bill. I felt really sad for her. I felt really sad that she had been put in that position. This is not to suggest she’s being steamrollered by the leadership. But I think maybe they have lost their way.”

Ever since Phillips said she had told Abbott to fuck off in 2015, and Abbott said it was a fiction, there has been no love lost between the two. But Phillips bears no obvious animus towards Corbyn. “I can’t even really answer how I feel about him now, because the worst of it is, I don’t really feel anything.”

The atmosphere of uncharacteristic and uncomfortable compromise, of confusion as the party flips between principles and tactics, goes further than this one bill. “Being really honest was what sold Jeremy Corbyn to quite a lot of people. And there is a feeling of a slight dishonesty about what he might actually think. Because he can’t have not wanted to vote against the immigration bill, let’s be honest. It’s sad … and a product of a hung parliament. Everybody becomes a bit of a freelancer. So you’ve got 650 freelance MPs, and it doesn’t feel like a team going over the wall together.”

I can’t even really answer how I feel about Corbyn now, because the worst of it is, I don’t really feel anything

You have to take this with a pinch of salt, of course; Phillips has never had any observable loyalty to Corbyn’s leadership. But senior sources in Labour and Momentum suggest that there is an active strategy of soft whipping, so that backbenchers can go their own way, and nothing that proceeds from it will ever be pinned on Corbyn. Which, of course, is more about Brexit than it is about a hung parliament. The policy to push for a general election or, if that fails, to campaign for a referendum with a remain option, looks as though it is unspooling, with the most vocal members of the Labour frontbench speaking out against a second vote. In its absence – and taking a general election as unlikely – some variant of either May’s Brexit or a no-deal Brexit becomes inevitable. Given that those choices range from unpopular to catastrophic, nobody really wants their fingerprints on any of it.

Phillips is in favour of a final say, though characteristically she is not actually part of the People’s Vote team. “I’m no zealot. I didn’t come to the People’s Vote literally the day after the referendum. It’s only been in the past six months, when we started to get into real deadlock in parliament. I realised that there was no path through. Once we had her deal, Theresa May really did unite the country against the deal. And I trust the people who live in my constituency more than the people I sit among, at the moment. They genuinely are more sensible and pragmatic. MPs like to project on to them, as if they’re an angry mob. And they’re really not. I’m saying that in a leave seat. People aren’t impassioned about it. They don’t really talk to me about it, they just cover it like the weather and move on.” She says that in the thousands of conversations she and her colleagues had in her constituency before the 2017 election, Brexit came up only 12 times unprompted.

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Phillips is not sanguine about what that vote would look like: she worries about “dark forces stirring up dissent”. She fantasises instead about a perfect election, which would happen in a fortnight, with Facebook shut down: “In fact, turn the internet off and just send everyone a list of facts that are true.”

And she can hardly be blind to the risks, that are so often mentioned, of the outrage of the far-right – Jo Cox was a friend of hers and Phillips is the target of a huge amount of abuse online. She flips between waving it off as nothing – “I don’t see the blanket aggression that people keep telling me exists” – and voicing genuine anxiety: “When my resilience is low, personal safety becomes ever present in my mind. But, notwithstanding that Jo was killed in her constituency, I feel differently when I’m in Birmingham. People know me; I grew up here, I feel protected.”

I have heard it floated that the reason so many remain Labour MPs don’t want a second referendum is due to the sheer nastiness of the first one. The murder of a colleague is no trivial thing. Phillips is impatient with arguments about national division. “I think it’s rubbish to say: ‘This is difficult, we should only do easy things.’” She opposes Brexit because of the car industry, which has already taken an incredible hit, and because of its implications for immigration. But it would take more than this crisis to prise her away from her pragmatism. “If it was 28 March, and the option was a deal or no deal, then yes, I would vote for a deal. I would have to.” It would be a sad place to land, however. “I wish that there was both an impassioned and dispassionate approach, to look at the data, listen to the different opinions.”

Wondering if this is a long-range leadership bid, I ask who she fancies as the next leader. She is resolute, and believably so, that she doesn’t want the job; it looks too hard on the soul. And the candidacy is solidifying around Angela Rayner or Emily Thornberry – between the two, she would pick Rayner: “She let me sleep on her floor for the first three weeks I was in parliament, and that has to count for something.”

For all that Phillips is a hate figure for the left, she still seems to me to be on the left. And if there is one thing to be said for blunt people, it is that you don’t have to ceaselessly interpret them. When the day comes, she will back a woman to be leader – and it won’t be her.