Gloria De Piero is one of Labour’s most confident performers: a former television presenter who is well-liked in her party for speaking ‘normal’, she rarely seems ruffled. But when we meet in her Westminster office, the MP for Ashfield seems oddly anxious. Her party has been behaving in a similarly unsettled way ever since it started facing up to the fact that it was about to elect a backbencher as its leader, so perhaps it’s not all that surprising. But De Piero has agreed to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet in the rather nebulous-sounding ‘Young People and Voter Registration’ brief, so she can’t be as unsettled by his victory as some of her moderate colleagues, who have fled to the backbenches. So what’s up?
‘I feel guilty,’ she says, taking a draw on an e-cigarette. Why? ‘Because I just think the Labour party, if it’s not in government it’s not changing people’s lives, and if I can make that more personal, actually, because this is not the first time we’ve not been in government, but growing up I actually feel the Labour party let me down in the 80s as well. As a child in poverty, the Labour party decided to have a fight with itself – no meal on the table for me, no resoling of my shoes and I think anybody who wants and desperately needs a Labour government, then the only thing that matters is one purpose and you can’t do anything unless you’re in government.’
She turns back to this theme throughout our interview, repeatedly mentioning her utter horror that Labour lost an election ‘that was ours to win’. ‘God, I’d do anything to have a bit of government-itis’, she says at one point as she’s trying to explain how the government machine constricts politicians and stops them saying what they think. She remembers a conversation with a woman in Skegby on polling day who had voted Labour all her life, but who turned around to her MP and said ‘I now own a sandwich shop and I think you are going to destroy my business’.
The defeat and those conversations with voters who were turning away from Labour weigh heavily on De Piero, who worries that children growing up in similar circumstances as she did will suffer from not having her party in government. She was born in Bradford and grew up in poverty there. ‘You’re not aware of it at the time but you are very aware that you’re poor,’ she says, adding that ‘just being a have-not is absolutely miserable’. She stayed at home when her school held ‘wear your own clothes’ days, because she didn’t have anything nice to wear, and her family went hungry for the last few days before benefits were paid again.
‘We didn’t live in a council house because my parents worked till I was about 10, but then my dad got ill and he stopped working and then my mum stopped working and then you realise the problems with the benefits system.
‘So those things when you grow up poor, they stay with your forever, they stay with you. The day before benefit day – it was every two weeks from memory that you got the benefit and it was all right for the first few days, but the last few days, you’re hungry.’
De Piero was the first in her family to go to university, and her parents ‘were absolutely secure in the belief that if they got me a good decent education that I would be able to prosper’.
And she did prosper: moving from university into broadcast journalism. But in between, she tried to get jobs in the Labour movement, after joining the party aged 17. She applied to trade unions, think tanks, MPs, ‘and no-one would give me a job… I don’t know if I was a bit chippy, but I thought, I didn’t recognise that many people that sounded like me… I didn’t go to Oxbridge and I thought that you had to.
‘So all those times when you’ve felt like an outsider, I suppose that’s a big driver as well, all my values, everything I stand for.’
But she thinks that getting involved in the Labour party at least gave her the contacts to work in television and radio, which she did, starting off as a researcher for Jonathan Dimbleby and ending up as the political correspondent and newsreader for GMTV. Then she became an MP, elected in 2010 to replace Geoff Hoon. When she started applying for selections, her mother said ‘but you’ve got a really good job, why would you do that?’
More than that, De Piero seems far too normal to find Westminster that appealing. Why did she want to leave her job to become an MP? ‘I am so passionate about this party and this amazing movement and what we have done throughout for people.’
It’s the same answer she gives when I ask why she’s serving under Jeremy Corbyn, a man who she clearly likes but is rather different to politically. ‘I love this party, not just because of the party for its own sake but because so many millions of people need a Labour government and I’m their servant and that’s why if there’s a job to be done I am absolutely up for doing it.’
She talks more about her loyalty to Labour than to Corbyn specifically. ‘He’s the leader and with a whopping mandate,’ De Piero says repeatedly. That’s her answer to whether she’s loyal to him, to whether her colleagues will try to get rid of him, and to whether he’ll be in place at the 2020 election.
‘How would I know?’ she says in reply to that last question. ‘He certainly has got a strong mandate to be there and no matter what you read in the newspapers, genuinely there is no sense of anybody setting out to unwind it.’
But does she want someone who takes such a different stance on foreign policy and on the economy to be Prime Minister? ‘I will do anything I can to get a Labour Prime Minister.’
She does like the way he runs the Shadow Cabinet, saying ‘certainly I’ve only had five years of experience and a couple of those in the Shadow Cabinet but when you talk to people from over the years, there has been a view that the leader presents something as a tablet of stone and that’s the end of it. You go all right, I need to learn those lines and then give them. It’s not a particularly good way of doing politics and so I welcome that we’ve had a Shadow Cabinet this morning and it’s like we had open discussions and I will always say what I think.’
Saying what you think as a politician is something De Piero seems almost as passionate about as she is about the Labour party itself. In the last Parliament, she ran a project called ‘Why Do People Hate Me?’ where she tried to find out what lay behind disaffection with politics. Then she tried to work out why people don’t vote.
Perhaps it’s her background on a television programme watched largely by swing voters and non-voters that gives her such an interest and insight into why people don’t really get Westminster. I’m not sure she’s really caught the SW1 bug, either. As we talk, I notice that her office is the most sparsely furnished of any I’ve visited. It has just one picture hanging forlornly in the corner, one that De Piero flings a rather baffled look at when I mention, as though she’s only just noticed it too. Her window seat has no cushion, there are no pictures or cards from constituents: just a very neat desk in the middle of the room. You don’t like spending time here, do you, I ask.
‘I’m not here as often as others,’ she replies. ‘You can spend days here and think, what was today about? was it about getting a line in the newspaper or was it about going, you’re wrong Minister?’
She doesn’t seem that enamoured with the Chamber, either, saying:
’There’s that quote, isn’t there, “If you want to keep a secret in Westminster, say it in the House of Commons”. You know, however marvellous my speech might be most people are not going to change their mind and similarly, however fantastic a speech on the other side might be I’m not going to go, bloody good point, I think I’ll vote with the Tories!’
She thought last week’s PMQs was a ‘triumph’, but wants Jeremy Corbyn to spend as much time away from Westminster as possible. And she wants her colleagues to ‘just talk like normal people. God, that just shows how far the product is if that even needs to be said.’
Talking like normal people will help those she met when working on ‘Why Do People Hate Me?’ who were passionate about issues but utterly disconnected from politics. Corbyn’s supporters believe that their leader will be so good at bridging this gap that those who have previously felt too fed up with politics to turn out will finally walk into a polling station. Isn’t it wiser to focus on those who did vote, but who turned to the Tories?
‘You have to do both but I did see a figure which said if you exclusively focus on non-voters then turnout would have to be up to 82 per cent and the last time it was 82 per cent was when Britain was kicking out Clement Attlee sadly. Of course the Labour party is the people’s party and you never turn your back on people who have turned their back on politics, the work starts now but it’s hard.’
She won’t call herself moderate or Blairite or anything else, but the reasonably centrist wing of the Labour party from which De Piero hails has got a lot of hard work, too, given its candidate Liz Kendall only got 4.5 per cent of the vote in the leadership contest. ‘I think we all need a bit of courage and a bit of vision and be inspiring and not be afraid of our own shadows,’ she says.
‘I just think that sometimes the movement, it hasn’t felt like a movement, it’s felt like you could be listening to IPPR or a think tank. We’re not experts, we’re on a mission to change Britain, that’s pretty moving stuff – or it should be.’
Given she speaks human, is passionate about her party, and is desperate to work out how it can win again, would De Piero ever want to be leader of the Labour party? Her answer isn’t a politician’s answer, winding its way around so that it avoids committing or ruling anything out. She just says: ‘No. We’ve all got to know our own limitations.’
So she’d never run? Why not?
‘Oh God, the strains and stresses of the world, 24/7, I want a life. I know this sounds selfish but I actually would like a life, to see my friends but everything I can give, I will give to this party.’
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