Jade Botterill: meet the 'unapolagetically Northern' new MP for Ossett and Denby Dale
When I meet Jade Botterill, the MP for Ossett and Denby Dale, she’s busy tackling some of the challenges of becoming a new parliamentarian.
She explains she’s got an inbox overflowing with casework, a tricky decision on where to hold constituency surgeries and she’s left her toothbrush in West Yorkshire.
“There’s a few challenges, but still what a great honour to be doing this role,” she says. “The hardest thing for me has been thinking where I can have my constituency office, with public transport issues.
“I’m really excited to start getting my foot on the gas and making a difference for people in my constituency.”
Ms Botterill is another of the new intake of MPs that did not take a conventional route to the House of Commons. She got her first job at the age of 13 and then worked at River Island in Wakefield and later at Wakefield Trinity.
Although she comes from a public service family - her father works as a prison officer and her mother works in care - Ms Botterill admits that at the time she didn’t even know you could become a Labour Party member.
She then met Yvette Cooper as part of a campaign to save the Sure Start Centre in Normanton, and more than a decade later finds herself sitting next to the Home Secretary in the House of Commons.
She won a majority of 4,542 in the newly created constituency, which runs from Kirkburton to south Wakefield.
“I’m so proud to be standing in the place where I call home,” Ms Botterill tells the Yorkshire Post.
“I couldn’t even say I’m going to stand in Sheffield, even though it’s Yorkshire it’s not home.”
She continues: “I think it’s great we’ve got politicians from all different kinds of backgrounds now, rather than people whose parents were politicians or went to Oxford and Cambridge and studied PPE,” Ms Botterill says.
“I think people are fed up of just the same old, same old. People want people with lived experience.
“There’s a lot of people who are in the same boat as me in the new intake - I’ve got a lot of life experience.”
After working for Wakefield Trinity, Ms Botterill headed up a number of campaigns with the organisation 38 Degrees, including around the sewage crisis.
“We don’t have as many opportunities and I think that’s very unfair.
“The way the economy has changed and the way the world of work has changed - jobs don’t need to be concentrated in the cities anymore - we can have them in the North.”
Ms Botterill says she wants to be “a big champion of towns and rural villages”.
Most importantly, Ms Botterill comes across as someone who is straight talking.
“People just want some honesty,” she says.
“For 14 years, particularly in the North, we got promised a lot of stuff which frankly didn’t materialise.
“I want to be very open and honest about what we can achieve.”