The member for Birmingham Yardley has been tweeting about Donald Trump’s travel ban before I arrive. “Well, you can’t not, can you? It’s fucking ridiculous. Fancy a cup of tea?”

Her husband, Tom, is rootling around in the kitchen, trying to fix the heating, while Jess Phillips goes on: “But then I get quite a lot of, ‘You don’t care when Muslim countries do these things.’ And it’s like, you’ve literally never heard anything I’ve said. Of course I care when Muslim countries do it. Of course I do! It’s not a zero-sum game. You know, I don’t only love one of my children. If I say, ‘I really love you, Harry’, Danny doesn’t say [she adopts a cynical, knowing tone], ‘Well, that’s very telling!’” The kettle hasn’t even boiled and already she is laughing and I’m thinking: if only Hillary Clinton could have been a bit more like Phillips.

To be fair, very few politicians are, which is why Phillips wanted to be one. With her deep, gravelly voice and Birmingham accent, the 35-year-old sounds less like a politician than a standup comedian. She favours big gold hoop earrings and bright red lipstick, and, as Julie Burchill wrote, looks “more like someone you’d see on The X Factor than the Andrew Marr Show”. Only two years ago, Phillips was managing domestic abuse refuges for Women’s Aid, and the terraced house she shares with Tom and their two sons, 11 and seven, is unlikely to be anyone’s idea of how the metropolitan elite live. An old printer, a kid’s bike and a stepladder clutter the hallway; on the stairs are remnants of chocolate coin wrappers, and the room that looks as if it could have been a study has been commandeered by Tom’s virtual reality and online gaming gadgetry. A BBC camera crew came round once, Phillips laughs, and filmed her in front of that ubiquitous domestic backdrop for all political interviews: the book case. But her books live on her Kindle, so what viewers spied was not the customary display of literary erudition, but an extensive graphic novel collection. “Internet goes mad,” was how the Daily Mirror summed up the excitement. “I don’t agree with her politics,” tweeted one of her many new fans, “but she has good taste in Alan Moore graphic novels.”

The comic collector is, in fact, Tom, but by the cultural conventions of the political class, it is arguably even more infra dig to be married to a manga fan than to be one. “Much more working-class than me,” the MP’s husband grew up in a council house and was a lift engineer until he gave up work to look after the family, now that Phillips is in Westminster half the week. Only 23 when they met, Phillips was pregnant within a month; having always lived in the constituency, she would no sooner relocate the family to London than to the moon. “When I’m there, to be honest, the kids couldn’t give a shit. Mostly they are oblivious and uninterested in my career.”

Her brother is a recovering heroin and crack addict. 'I used to think, "You are lower than the lowest of the low"'

As she’s talking, she hunts for her makeup bag – “When did I last put makeup on? Oh, where the hell is it? Fucking kids!” – while I tot up the cardinal rules of political spin she has already broken before we’ve even got past the small talk. Knee-deep in profanity, the MP has mocked the unsayable stupidity of the public (“I enjoy taking people on on Twitter, because often I’m cleverer and funnier”), sworn about her children and been rude about her parliamentary colleagues (“They say, ‘I never hear you speaking about such and such,’” she mimics in a prissy voice. “As if that means I’m not allowed to talk about anything.” Rolling her eyes, she snorts and retorts, “Hmm, well, I never hear you speaking about anything interesting.”). I’m not entirely surprised: when Diane Abbott once unwisely tried to put her down in a meeting with, “You’re not the only feminist in the PLP,” Phillips told her to fuck off. The MP later remarked: “People said to me they had always wanted to say that to her, and I don’t know why they don’t, as the opportunity presents itself every other minute.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Every man sitting in this house is now here because, at some point, his mother had a period.’ Photograph: parliamentlive.tv

She is also startlingly unsentimental when discussing her family. Her brother Luke is a recovering heroin and crack addict whom she evidently adores, but instead of making a meal of how much she loves him, she admits bluntly, “I used to think, ‘You are basically lower than the lowest of the low.’ Yeah, I used to think that. The addict’s mindset, that it’s everybody’s fault but his, that’s the thing that fucks me off. I’ve been good all my life, worked really hard, but I’ve always had to pay my own rent, so why are we paying for his and rewarding him for doing nothing? I was permanently furious with him. So I understand when people get angry about the idea of welfare dependency. But my mother, who was wise beyond the Dalai Lama, used to say: ‘You wouldn’t swap places with him. Do you want his life?’ And I’d be like, no, obviously I don’t want that. But it’s hard. Addicts are a massive pain in the arse.”

If Phillips doesn’t sound like a professional politician, this is partly because she never planned on becoming one. On her 14th birthday, her socialist parents (her mother, a healthcare manager, died when she was in her 20s; her father was an English teacher) gave her a Labour party membership card, and she spent much of her childhood in the family garage printing posters and placards. But having come of age under Tony Blair, when things apparently could only get better, she lost interest and resigned from the party after the invasion of Iraq. She decided to rejoin in 2010, and ran for parliament in 2015 not in spite of her patchy political track record, but because of it. Phillips may well be the only MP in Westminster who achieves her primary ambition every day simply by being there.

“I had one goal and purpose when I stood. Premeditated and thought through, definitely. I wanted to be an MP who was normal. I believe in politics, I’m a proud parliamentarian, and I want people to want parliamentarians again. I think the most important thing I can do in my time there, which may well be very short, is for people to say, ‘Oh, look, they are just like us.’ To make people feel like politics is about them again. So I decided I would stand, and just say and do exactly what I actually thought.”

Being normal and telling the truth have turned out to be stunningly successful. The star of the 2015 intake, Phillips has made headlines by making as much feminist noise as she possibly can. On International Women’s Day last year, she read out the names of the 120 women killed by their partners in a year; when a Tory MP called for the house to debate men’s issues on International Men’s Day, she dissolved into voluble giggles. She has publicly condemned her own party’s deep-rooted sexism, and during a Commons speech in a tampon tax debate delivered the memorable line, “Every man sitting in this house is now here because, at some point, his mother had a period.”

Her colleague Stella Creasy calls her the “Rizzo of parliament”, and it has become a cliche to describe her as a breath of fresh air. Twitter trolls call her a man-hater, but in the real world the only criticism I have come across is that she makes too much of her “ordinariness” while ceaselessly attention-seeking.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With fellow MP Yvette Cooper and the staff at Sure Start Palfrey centre in Walsall, on the Remain campaign trail, June 2016. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

If Phillips feels faintly embarrassed about publishing a deeply personal book before she’s even been in parliament two years (and I think she does), she could remind herself why she shouldn’t by rereading it. “To make me feel guilty for getting publicity about the things I care about,” she writes, “is a classic way to shut me up,” and she urges women not to listen, but to “line up every possible platform you have”. Part memoir and part polemic, Everywoman is a joyfully candid and very funny account of growing up in working-class Birmingham, and copping off with thrillingly older men whose casual misogyny she would mistake for desire. Fundamentally, however, it is a feminist manual for women who, just like her younger self, pretend to be feisty and cool, but haven’t a clue how powerful they could be if they learned how to take control.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “Some bits of feminism really, really annoy me.” Endless conventions and high-minded flannel about “women’s empowerment” used to drive her mad, because “nobody in a refuge gives a hoot about any of this”. She cheerfully admits she “used to do this massive thing every year, where I’d get my arse in my hand about how it’s difficult to register women in a refuge to vote. Every year, I’d be banging the table saying, ‘It’s their democratic right!’ And then we’d go to a refuge and I’d be like, is anyone interested in voting? And everyone was like, ‘No, love, fuck off.’” She hoots with laughter.

She recalls how her 17-year-old friend was sold to a bloke in the pub by her own boyfriend for a bag of weed

Her book addresses the less rarefied but more pressing problems of how to give girls the same self-belief boys have always enjoyed, so that they can silence the internal monologue of doubt and stop measuring their worth by how much men fancy them. Phillips knows just what a tall order this is, and my favourite bit of the book is an anecdote about her 17-year-old friend being sold to a bloke in the pub by her own 27-year-old boyfriend for a bag of weed. “Today, I call this sexual exploitation; back then, I swooned over the idea that these edgy men found us so desirable,” Phillips writes. I think I would have, too, and wish more feminists would acknowledge this truth. At the time, Phillips and her friend didn’t object, but simply joked about holding a whip-round in the pub to buy her back. Years later, she heard one of the men was serving a long prison term for rape. “It hurts me deeply to say this,” she writes, “but I’m sure if we had known this at the time, we wouldn’t have thought it anything but glamorous.”

If Phillips’ teenage self would have ignored all her advice today, why bother writing a book full of it? “Ah, well, I do think the generation that came after me has changed. I think there is a growing sense that young women should like themselves a bit more. I went to give a talk at the school I went to, and there were all these young women, 15, 16, all sat in front of me and they were like: ‘How did you get into politics? How did you get where you are?’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t stay after school to listen to some woman talking. I was smoking fags in the park and chatting with boys.’ I’m stunned at the amount of young women who get in touch with me every single day, trying to become somebody like me. As a teenager, I would never have done that. And I was someone who was interested in politics. But I wouldn’t have emailed the local MP. I just would have been like, ‘Whatever. I’m going to the pub.’”

The one thing Phillips hopes every reader will take from the book is how frightened she feels, all the time. This came as a surprise to me, and probably will to everyone who knows her: people have been marvelling at her apparent fearlessness for as long as she can remember. Female role models who can inspire confidence by example are pretty thin on the ground, so why disillusion her admirers by telling us she’s secretly terrified?

“Because I am.” But how does it help to say so? “So we all know that we all feel it.”

Phillips’ great fear is that women will put her success down to some miracle gift of freakish self-belief, to which they could never aspire. “That’s why they need to know that I’m scared shitless, too, just like them.” Another important theme of her book is the importance of “bigging yourself up”. Men do it all the time, she repeatedly points out, and women have to stop being so squeamish about saying they deserve what they want. Everywoman is a masterclass in unapologetic self-congratulation, and Phillips thinks the biggest risk she took was committing to print “that you like yourself. Yeah. Having to actually say it is hard. But it feels like an obligation to do it, because women don’t do it enough. I can’t be all like, ‘Oh, this all happened to me by accident’, because it plays into that whole geisha thing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest As a prospective parliamentary candidate, alongside the then Labour leader Ed Miliband, in London, July 2013. Photograph: Jordan Mansfield/Getty Images

One unsurprising consequence of her refusal to doubt herself is the torrent of abuse she receives every day. “It’s not like I didn’t have a difficult job before [with Women’s Aid], with risk and threats involved. But I never felt scared and worried, never once. I never felt like, I’m going to go into work today and everyone’s going to hate me and somebody might try and attack me. Whereas being an MP, I feel like that every day. Or certainly every day that I’m in my constituency office.” The Yorkshire MP Jo Cox was a close friend, and her murder traumatised the whole family. “Obviously, when it happened my kids were very frightened, but we see Jo’s kids a lot, and that helps.” At least once a month, Phillips receives something worrying enough to report to the police, and her house has had to be fitted with high-security locks, which upset her children.

She voted to trigger article 50 because 'I worry about the reaction if we did stop it. I think we are on a precipice'

Phillips has also been shaken by the extremity of online abuse from members of her own party. An outspoken critic of Jeremy Corbyn, she has been screamed at and trolled by his supporters, and is now resigned to being led into a 2020 election Labour cannot win. “I think in a vote of no confidence, he’d still get less than 20 votes on his side. But with Brexit and Trump, there’s so much other stuff going on, so people are just getting on with it.” Last week, she voted to trigger article 50 not out of party loyalty, but because, “I worry about the reaction it would cause if we did stop it. I think we are on a precipice. Brexit was a sign of revolution for the people who voted leave. Definitely. It was naff all to do with Europe: it was definitely because people felt no one listens to them. And I feel like it would potentially cause unrest if parliament went against them. Politics is so derided, it would only make things worse. And the people who lose out when politicians are derided are not politicians. They crack on, doing exactly what they were doing before. It’s the people who rely on politicians who lose out.”

I’ve seldom met anyone who seems more comfortable in her own skin, so when I watch Phillips apply makeup with studious care before having her photograph taken, I ask why she bothers. She stares at me as if I’ve gone mad. Her book contains a poignant anecdote about Phillips overhearing two young women on a train asking their male colleagues to appraise and score their appearance. I imagine the women might have taken offence had Phillips spoken up, and she agrees.

“They very well might. I might have sounded judgey. Look, I’m not going to stop women obsessing about the way they look. I don’t stop obsessing about the way I look. I’m drinking black tea because I’m on a fast day, and I can’t have milk. So I am the embodiment of those young women on the train. And no one can stop me. No matter how much my husband says, ‘It’s insane when you do those weird diets. We all hate it. No one wants you to look like that.’ My son said to me yesterday, ‘You look most beautiful when you’re asleep.’ So I’m as guilty as those teenage girls. I wish we could say, ‘Fuck it, I’ve got a massive arse.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Having to actually say you like yourself is hard… women don’t do it enough’: Phillips in her constituency. Photograph: Fabio de Paolo/The Guardian

Are all these wishes futile? “Yes, there is an element of futility – there’s no two ways about that. It’s a power thing, it’s about power and control – so in that conversation on the train, the power was on one side. I wanted those women to judge the men and go, ‘You: terrible bandy legs.’ Domestic violence is all about power and control. The way that women won’t put themselves forward is all about power and control. So I’m not saying, you don’t want to have your tits done and don’t want to look pretty and wear high heels – or a burqa. I’m saying, just make sure that it is you who wants those things, and that the power is shared.”

Perhaps the most winning thing about Phillips is her readiness to acknowledge the flaws in her own feminism. People are already talking of her as a future leader, so I ask if she will run. “Well, to be honest,” she admits, “at the moment I don’t know whether I don’t put myself forward for the leadership because I don’t see myself in that role and don’t want it. Or because everywhere I look, it’s always been a man. I can’t tell. So we just have to try and push ourselves. I’m saying, ‘Speak up, try it out, let’s try and share around the power.’”

Does she want to be leader? She pulls a face. “I’m just not sure it’s a great job. I like going out dancing to R&B with my mates, without a security force with me. My ambition is to make people feel like the Labour party represents them again. If that’s being leader – or just being loud and out there – I’m not sure.” My vote would be for her to be both.

‘I made a promise to help Jeremy Corbyn. But I demanded he help Labour women, too’

Exclusive extract from Jess Phillips’ new book

When you enter Westminster after working at Women’s Aid, it is a sharp shock how few women roam the halls. When you enter Westminster after growing up in Birmingham, where half the people are from an ethnic minority, it is another shock. In my first week I expressed to a more seasoned MP my disquiet about how samey the staff drinking coffee in Portcullis House seemed. She joked, “It’s great if you don’t know someone’s name here. You can just guess at Will, Tom or Ben, and you have a 90% chance of being right.” On one occasion, a researcher for a fellow MP asked to meet me for a coffee in one of the cafes. I said, “How will I know who you are?” in the hope that he was going to suggest he carry a carnation tucked into a copy of a classic novel. He replied, “I’m a 25-year-old white man in a suit and a red tie.” Oh, you’ll stand out like a sore thumb here then, mate.

In the secondary lobby area that leads from the vaulted and magnificent central lobby up to the committee rooms of parliament, there are ornate carvings depicting both men and women as gargoyles. The men are depicted open-mouthed in speech; the women, meanwhile, are gagged, their mouths covered with stone muzzles. I have no idea if this was a less than subtle comment on gender equality by the architects of yesteryear, or a helpful suggestion. I hope it was the former, but sometimes I have my doubts.



Positive discrimination is a thorny subject. I have made no secret of the fact that I was selected on an all-women shortlist. People often use this to assert that I was not the best person for the job, merely the best woman. I wonder if Jessica Ennis-Hill was ever told this? “Er, sorry, Jess, your Olympic gold medal isn’t a real one, because you only competed against other women. Instead, we’ve given you this medal we call girlie gold.”

Tory women are not fond of positive discrimination when it comes to selecting their candidates. (As an aside, however, there is something they are really fond of, and that is shortening their first names to bullet-like single syllables. We have a Flick and a Mims, and on hearing Thérèse Coffey referred to as Tizz, I decided I wanted a short name, too. On reflection, mine would be Jizz, which I think we can all agree is not a good look.)

I have heard many a Tory woman dismiss the idea of quotas in politics, and indeed in all industries. One female Tory MP said to me, with some sadness, “We couldn’t have women-only elections, because it would only add to an already long list of reasons some of our male colleagues don’t think we are good enough.” For many of the men in parliament, and I am sure the country, my place in the House of Commons represents the lowest standard in the building.

Prior to the 2015 election, I attended one of the regular Labour party briefings for parliamentary candidates in London. A male MP at the heart of the election campaign strategy team stood up to talk. As he ran through a list of the MPs in his team, only one woman’s name came up. I questioned why, in a team of eight or so people, only one was female. He snapped back at me, “The Labour party has a mountain to climb in winning men’s votes. If as many men voted Labour as women did, we would win the election.” To which I replied, “Are you suggesting that a woman can’t be part of a team that wins men’s votes?”



The party of workers seems to have failed to notice that women are workers, too. Our ability to communicate with our brothers in arms is not bleeding rocket science.

A woman in Jeremy Corbyn’s team once sent me a message about her frustrations with the leadership’s approach to gender equality, saying, “The current power advisers of the left basically learned their politics through the prism of class.” I think the leadership looks down on women as a group of patronised poor people who need the big important clever men to come and save them. Women’s equality makes good copy when talking about pay and/or domestic violence, but when they close their eyes and think of great leaders, I bet it’s some bloke who pops into their heads.

At the 2016 Labour party conference, Corbyn walked over to the conference centre to give his speech surrounded by a crowd of women. Politicians of all stripes stage this performance for the media. Hell, I’ve been one of the people drafted in to walk that path myself, in the days of Ed Miliband. The fact that pretty much all UK party leaders in the past have been white men means that very often young, ethnically diverse women have to act as their chaperones. I think it is naff, but then again, they might look a bit lonely walking all by themselves.

Corbyn was flanked by eight women as he walked the 100 yards to give his conference speech. It was designed to send a message: “See, I don’t have a woman problem. Please try to forget that time when I gave all the top jobs in my shadow cabinet to men. Look, all my friends are women.” Except what I saw was a stunt. It screamed: “Look how bad the Labour party’s woman problem is.” I don’t think the suffragettes starved themselves in prison cells so that male politicians could one day look good with a crowd of women.



There is a growing demand for women to be visible in public life, business and industries across the world. Every time I visit a business in my constituency, I ask, “Where are the women?” Every group that lobbies me, I ask, “How many women are involved, and what are the pay scales of these women?” I refuse to attend events unless there are going to be other women there. Never again will I allow people to take my photo flanked only by men.



People constantly roll their eyes at me when I make these demands, but they are learning that if they want me to fight their corner, they bloody well have to fight mine, too.

At the very same Labour conference where Corbyn was adorned with young, ethnically diverse women, I sat in a very cold hotel room with him and told him that I was willing to do all I could to make him look good. I was willing to organise events for women and roll him out. I was willing to help boost his feminist credentials. But only if he guaranteed me a 50/50 cabinet, with women represented equally in every stratum of his shadow ministerial team. I told him I would look out for areas where he was going wrong and try to get in front of them, rather than criticising the howling, sexist gaffes afterwards. I made a promise to help him with his image, but I bloody well demanded he did stuff for Labour women, too. If he does, I will sing his praises. If he doesn’t, I shall make sure everybody knows it.



In a world where how you appear matters so much, we women have got to wake up to the fact that they need us more than we need them. We must sweat our assets; let’s go full-on Tyra Banks and get finger-snapping demanding.



Jeremy agreed, and so far so good. We have found a way to work together, to set up events to help women get involved, stand as mayors or local candidates. We have got to a place that, if it’s about women, they give me a call. We are getting there, slowly but surely.



I am not grateful to the quota system that meant I made it to parliament; I bloody well deserve to be there. Frankly, I’m annoyed that it still has to exist. If people are pissed off with a system for getting talented women into parliament, or on to management boards, then it’s because they just plain and simple don’t think women are good enough to be there.