Jess Phillips begins her interview with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh Fringe with a meandering homage to her hometown, Birmingham, which is still in mourning for Ozzy Osborne.
‘Birmingham is like a village. I can link anyone in my family to someone in your family in three steps. Barbara Cartland is from Birmingham. Lawn tennis was invented on the Cartland estate. I grew up around Ozzy Osbourne’s first son, Louis. I count them as good friends. My son went to the funeral procession. And Sharon is a lovely, lovely woman.’
‘There were fireworks thrown, tyres slashed and constituents threatened at polling stations. And they were almost exclusively men’
Phillips makes a promise to her host. She offers to recruit Sharon as part of his All Talk line-up at next year’s festival.
‘We could do a double header,’ she says.
Phillips seems to prefer the company of her family and her old social circle to her political allies. After entering parliament, she told her best friend, Amy, that she’d appeared on Question Time. ‘Did you win?’ said Amy who assumed that Question Time was Mastermind. Phillips jokes about her popularity. ‘In Birmingham, I am quite beloved. I’m like Birmingham royalty. But it’s a very low bar, isn’t it?’
Then they get down to politics. Dale asks about Phillips’s resignation from the shadow front bench in November 2023 over a motion tabled by the SNP calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. She couldn’t support the motion without returning to the back benches which she found agonising. ‘I had to stake my life’s work on it.’ But she faced loud calls from her constituents to support the ceasefire. ‘The clamour got considerably strong. And the pressure.’
Dale asked her to specify. ‘Pressure? What do you mean?’
She chooses her words carefully and doesn’t mention that her constituency is 45 per cent Muslim (according to the 2021 census.)
‘I’ve always known it mattered greatly to my constituents. Some are of Kashmiri heritage. And there are Irish communities and I’m Irish myself. And both communities understand the idea of annexation. They understand that lines drawn on a map can lead to violence. … The pressure was in no way aggressive,’ she adds, ‘in no way aggressive.’
A moment later, she qualifies this and admits to ‘a smattering of aggression.’ She explains that passions are likely to run high when controversial issues are aired.
She praises the Labour whips who helped her to manage her departure. ‘I didn’t peacock about it.’ And she was rewarded with a return to the front bench when Labour won power last July. Keir Starmer expressed his support for her in public.
‘He made a bee-line towards me across a very busy room and gave me a cuddle.’
She needed that cuddle. The battle for her seat in 2024 was mired in controversy. ‘I’ve never known a breakdown of democracy like it.’
She says that her opponent, ‘the independent candidate,’ brought in external canvassers. ‘From London,’ she believes. ‘We couldn’t advertise where we were going. They were haranguing voters. There were fireworks thrown, tyres slashed and constituents threatened at polling stations. And I have to say they were almost exclusively men.’
She told her sons, aged 16 and 20, to keep away from the count. ‘I thought, I’m being controlled by aggression and violence.’
She won by 693 votes but her opponent asked for a recount. The returning officer refused. ‘She was incredibly professional,’ says Phillips. ‘And absolutely tiny. About five-foot nothing. And she was encircled by men, shouting at her. It made me fucking furious.’
After the count, Phillips exchanged a handshake with each of her defeated opponents.
‘The independent candidate refused to shake my hand. Petty little idiot.’
Jonathan Ashworth had a similar experience in Leicester South where he narrowly lost to the independent, Shockat Adam. Phillips now regrets her decision not to publicise her opponent’s tactics for fear of tarnishing the image of her constituency. ‘Lots of journalists came and I kept them away. I didn’t want the people who live there to look bad.’
Dale moves to lighter matters and asks about her experience with civil servants.
‘You have to be careful what you say [inside the department.] If you say “tag all men” someone will draft a paper about it.’
On her first day, she was asked if she preferred the stairs or the lift. She chose the stairs and a note was duly entered in an official file. ‘Minister likes to use the stairs.’ Now she can’t enter the building without being ushered away from the lift and towards the stairs. ‘But I don’t like to use the stairs!’
Dale suggests that she might be offered a job at the foreign office.
‘I don’t think so. And diplomacy needs to change,’ she says. ‘It should be more about doing down the pub together.’
He asks her if she’s met Nigel Farage. She hasn’t but she praises the Reform member, Nora Kamberi, who stood against her last year. ‘Lovely woman.’ Encouraged by Dale, she goes off on a tangent about Boris Johnson. ‘He’s nothing like he is on TV. Nothing like that. He’s nervous and awkward, like a shy boy. He wasn’t unpleasant or anything but he was like a kid. Kicking his feet.’
Phillips briefly stood for the Labour leadership in 2020. Does she still dream of forming her own administration?
‘It’s a hard job, being prime minister. I wouldn’t boss it. I absolutely wouldn’t boss it. I think I’d be a basket-case after about 15 minutes. And I’d drink a lot. But it would be entertaining.’
Dale asks her to name her favourite Tory MP. ‘Simon Hoare,’ she says, ‘and Priti Patel.’
The second name elicits a gasp of horror from the Edinburgh crowd. Phillips explains that Patel was deeply affected by the assassination of David Amess who represented an Essex constituency close to her own. After Amess’s death, Patel telephoned Phillips every Sunday evening ‘to see if I was all right.’ Patel was home secretary at the time. This gesture meant a lot to a safeguarding minister who believes her job should not exist.
‘I hate that there’s someone with the words “violence against women and girls” in their title.’
Dale ends with the ‘Angela Rayner question.’ It’s a challenge rather than a query. Earlier in the day, Dale tried it with Rachel Reeves by innocently asking her to name the most outstanding member of the Labour cabinet. Reeves stayed loyal to Starmer and nominated the colourless environment secretary, Simon Reed. Dale frames the question differently and asks Phillips if Labour has a successor to Barbara Castle. Phillips spots the trap and steps over it deftly.
‘We’ve had numerous successors,’ she says. ‘Margaret Beckett, Margaret Hodge, Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper.’
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