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On Saturday, Jack Monroe woke up at 2am, sat bolt upright and said: “What the f*** am I doing?” The writer, cook and anti-austerity campaigner was panicking about adding “politician” to her CV. She — although the 29-year-old come out as transgender in 2015, Monroe tells me female pronouns are fine — is standing as an independent candidate in her home of Southend.

Monroe greets me at the door of her house in Leigh in ripped jeans, willow- pattern Dr Martens and an apron, her tattoos spilling out from a sweatshirt. Behind her is a happy chaos. It’s cluttered and there’s a rabbit hopping around. “He’s a d***head,” says Monroe. “He took a chunk out of one of our guinea pigs and chewed my DMs.” In the kitchen, recipes are scrawled on the tiles, and a line of tape on the floor marks where her seven-year-old son Jonny isn’t supposed to cross while Monroe is cooking. As Monroe makes lunch (pasta with Waitrose cast-off mushrooms), he repeatedly trespasses and keeps interrupting his mother’s train of thought. (“Do you want more kids?” Monroe jokes later, imitating the many people who’ve asked her that. “No, my maternal instincts are stretched thin already.”)

She is standing for election because she has exhausted excuses not to. “I’ve been asked for five years and it was ‘the boy’s too young’ or ‘I’m too busy’. It’s time. A lot of people don’t feel heard. I want to take their concerns to MPs. If I have to stand seven times before I’m elected, I will. Call me Jack Farage.”

Declamatory proclamations are Monroe’s MO. She says she knows she won’t get elected in June, and doesn’t want to be. “It would be embarrassing if I won. I’d suddenly be thrust into a job I’ve never done before.” But it nonetheless irks her that critics have questioned what she’d contribute. “There’s a Venn diagram of people who complain that there aren’t enough ordinary people in politics, and those who complain when an ordinary person goes into politics. It’s probably one circle.”

Self-described as “working-class, sweary, with four-and-a-half GCSEs and dropped ‘t’s”, Monroe isn’t your PPE-ist ex-SPAD. “I’m trying to prove anyone can run. There’s a guy standing as a fish-finger in this election. You shouldn’t have to be loaded either. I had to crowdfund my rent this month. On a Bootstrap is my book brand, so this is democracy on a bootstrap.”

Despite routinely being described as Left-wing, she considers herself a centrist. “Politics has become so polarised. We’re stuck between the Ukip-lite Tories and Jeremy Corbyn. How is that a choice?”

Jack Monroe - in pictures 10 show all Jack Monroe - in pictures 1/10 Adrian Lourie 2/10 3/10 Adrian Lourie 4/10 Adrian Lourie 5/10 Adrian Lourie 6/10 7/10 Adrian Lourie 8/10 Adrian Lourie 9/10 Adrian Lourie 10/10 Jack Monroe and ex-partner Allegra McEvedy in Blackfoot, at Exmouth Market Rebecca Reid 1/10 Adrian Lourie 2/10 3/10 Adrian Lourie 4/10 Adrian Lourie 5/10 Adrian Lourie 6/10 7/10 Adrian Lourie 8/10 Adrian Lourie 9/10 Adrian Lourie 10/10 Jack Monroe and ex-partner Allegra McEvedy in Blackfoot, at Exmouth Market Rebecca Reid

She criticises Theresa May’s Cabinet for being out of touch — “they’ve never had to go to a food bank or apply to a job with 3,000 other people” (although Monroe and May have weirdly similar wardrobes — the leopard-print shoes, the red dress. “I thought my look was punk but it turns out it was Tory PM”). But Monroe is harder on “divisive, ineffectual, inconsistent and arrogant” Corbyn. “The more people deify him, the more he believes his fan club. It’s not democracy if you can’t question the Dear Leader.”

She found Corbyn’s volte face on the EU especially galling, an interesting criticism since Monroe changed sides too — starting out Remain and eventually spoiling her ballot. “I was saying I’m not qualified to make this decision. Unlike Corbyn, I stopped campaigning when I didn’t believe in it.” So what did she write on the ballot paper? She goes all coy. “Not my circus, not my f***ing monkeys.”

Officially, Monroe hasn’t decided whether to run in David Amess’s seat, Southend West — where she lives — or James Duddridge’s, Rochford and Southend East, where she grew up. But the stories she tells about the two hint at an answer. She wrote to Duddridge when her housing benefit was suspended, and “he put his neck out for someone who would be considered the enemy”. It was reinstated the next day. Amess, Monroe claims, refused to clap at the YMCA awards when she won a prize and received a standing ovation.

Leigh, she adds, is quite a Lib-Dem area, “but I can’t, having been a member of the Greens, Labour and the Women’s Equality Party, stand as a Lib-Dem”. She guffaws. “I don’t think anyone would take that seriously. I am sad not to be running as a Labour candidate but I’m not allowed because I haven’t been a member for 12 consecutive months. I was ‘purged’ last year.” Why? “Because I said mean things about Corbyn on Twitter, basically.”

Monroe wishes the libel money she won from Katie Hopkins would come through so she could spend it on her campaign but Hopkins is appealing, “an ironic description”, she notes wryly. “Remember how she said about Brexit ‘you lost, get over it?’. Er, you lost, get over it, Katie.”

The trial in March — over a defamatory tweet sent in 2015 which suggested Monroe approved of defacing a war memorial — was gruelling. “I hope never to be cross-examined again. I was in the witness box, being character assassinated by someone calling me a liar.” She told her lawyer afterwards that she couldn’t face going back to court “but if I pulled out, I had to pay my own legal fees, so I had to see it through”. Hopkins refused to provide a witness statement and didn’t turn up to court. “It wasn’t me versus Hopkins, it was me versus Hopkins’s lawyers. I suspect she thought it was like saying it was beneath her.”

Monroe sees Hopkins in a similar light to how she thinks of trolls on Twitter (where she says she gets only “psychopaths and sycophants” messaging her). “She’s someone who tried for Sandhurst. Her health was a setback. There’s got to be a part of you that’s a bit ‘why me?’ She’s created this character — a pantomime witch — and has to put that costume on every day because it pays for her life.”

I tell Monroe that Hopkins called her a “victim” in a recent interview. “I think you’ll find I was the victor. I have never portrayed myself as a victim. I’ve had some real shit happen, and I’ve picked myself up and carried on.”

Monroe is certainly emerging from a torrid period. First she had a breakdown. Then there was a stalker so threatening that she “had to move house in two weeks” and now keeps a six-iron golf club by her bed. Then there was her arthritis diagnosis; when it flares up, she struggles to write — “I can’t bang out a book in four months any more” — and has had to use a walking stick.

More recently she has given up alcohol, admitting that she was previously necking a bottle of whisky a night. “I started drinking in 2012 when I was on the dole — Sainsbury’s basics lager — and I never quite stopped. Jonny had no idea.”

She hid it from everyone. “No one wants to put their hands up and go ‘I’m an alcoholic! My liver’s failing!’” But earlier this year, a GP asked her to record how much she consumed — 122 units in a week. “I said, ‘I’m a journalist, doctor!’ He said: ‘You’re a drunk.’ I couldn’t speak and then it was ‘yes, I am’.”

She had convinced herself she was just a “good-time girl”. “The Groucho rang me last week to find out if I was OK because I hadn’t been in. I was like, ‘Are your profits suffering?’”

There’s been one almost lapse — when she was getting abuse over admitting she didn’t vote Remain. “I poured myself a whisky, looked at it for about two hours, then went to bed. In the morning I poured it down the sink.”

She feels she could do with “some care, though not a carer”. She’s single currently but has a long list of mostly political crushes, including on some “humongously” Tory men. “I’ve been terrible at being a lesbian recently.” She’s also “a bit in love” with Anna Soubry MP and says: “I fancied Dan Jarvis because it was cool.”

What is she looking for in a partner? “Someone who will listen to me rant on, carry me up to bed when my knee gives out, and is not an arse. My romantic parameters are quite short.”

She went on a “disastrous” Tinder date recently. “When I turned up, he was really off and said, ‘I didn’t realise you had a walking stick’. I said, ‘I didn’t realise you were a nob’.” Jonny, who is now listening intently, giggles and parrots: “I’m a nob, I’m a nob.”

The arthritis has dented Monroe’s confidence in dating. “I’m not the spring chicken everyone wants. I’ve got a debilitating illness. The brave face is ‘I’m busy with work’ but I’ve sort of chucked myself on the scrapheap. That’s why I’m single. I’ve resigned myself to being a difficult woman.”

But difficult women change the world, I say. “They do.” She smirks and then makes an addendum you could never imagine coming from the mouth of a typical politician: “But they need to get laid too.”