Jess Phillips: “I keep Jo’s spirit with me all the time”

“When she died was the first time I was literally dumbstruck,” says Jess Phillips of that terrible day in June 2016 where her close friend and fellow Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered. “I literally didn’t speak and I just couldn’t speak. I have never ever known grief like it.”

Phillips, who is speaking to The Yorkshire Post ahead of a virtual appearance at Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival this weekend, had been with Cox the night before she was killed in Birstall where the Batley and Spen MP had been due to hold a constituency surgery the week before the Brexit referendum.

“I couldn’t believe it when it happened,” recalls Phillips. “It was on the breaking news banner on television and I somehow thought in my head this must be some sort of dummy news page. Twelve hours before I had been in her house, I had literally just seen her. I was in Spain when it happened and I had left for the airport from her house. It was just so unexpected - I see it all the time with people who have suffered a severe trauma, you disassociate from the reality.”

The 39-year-old Birmingham Yardley MP, who is Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding, has gained something of a reputation for brushing off internet trolls sending her abuse and threats on Twitter but says the reality is more challenging.

“Those people on are not very bright, I’m funnier and cleverer than them and it is quite easy for me to run rings around them. The deaths threats that are credible I find harder to deal with. I can be flippant but sometimes I think I’m fine with it until it isn’t. Then it is heartbreaking.”

In June this year, a man named Rakeem Malik from Birmingham was jailed for five years after threatening to kill Phillips and her family, as well as sending similar threats to Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Rosie Cooper.

Phillips watched his sentencing via a live stream from court and says the impact of the case hit her shortly afterwards. “It was on Zoom and afterwards I literally just closed the laptop. Then I went to the supermarket and totally collapsed. I didn’t feel scared but sometimes it gets on top of you.”

Phillips, who previously managed refuges for victims of domestic abuse for the charity Women’s Aid before moving into politics, says the ongoing impact on her family can be hard to take. “Sometimes if we are out in a busy place, I can see my children are hyper-alert and it reminds me of the children I worked with in refuges being hyper-alert to things because of what they have been through.”

In her recent book Truth to Power, which she is discussing at Saturday’s event, Phillips cites both Jo Cox and Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist murdered while investigating corruption in Malta, as examples of why she is determined not be scared out of public life by such threats.

“Jo and Daphne were both incredibly normal people and if they had been asked if they were willing to die for what they believed in, inevitably both would have thought about their children and loved ones and answered that they were not. But if they had been asked, ‘Are you willing to stop speaking up in case you die because of it?’, the answer would have been a resounding, ‘No’,” the book explains.

Nevertheless, Phillips says the death of Cox and other attacks and threats towards fellow MPs brings home the genuine level of risk. “It totally makes it into a reality. I’m afraid it is also a reality to the people who threaten you because they often invoke Jo and say ‘what happened to Jo Cox will happen to you’. It is not just Jo but there was the plot to kill Rosie Cooper and Stephen Timms was stabbed in his surgery.

“It is very real. I can’t just brush it off as easily as I would have done. If Jo was still here, she would still carry on. I keep her spirit with me all the time.”

When I ask her what Cox was like, Phillips gives something of an unexpected – if very honest – answer.

“She was a massive pain in the a*** sometimes and I feel that has sometimes been lost,” she laughs. “She has become this thing in my head and in the public imagination that is so untouchable that sometimes she slips away from me. So sometimes I try and remember the annoying things she sometimes did.

“It was never awful but she would run into any campaign literally headfirst and you would be like, ‘let’s think about a strategy for five minutes’. I wish I still had the message but I remember when it was in the news a woman had been sent home from work for wearing high heels, she left me this 10-minute garbled voicemail message saying ‘We are going to turn up to Parliament in massive platform shoes and I’m going to ring Laura Kuenssberg and going to get all the women in the Lobby to do it’. Before I had got through everything, she sent me a message saying, ‘Forget it, we are not in work on Monday!’

“We became very good friends. I often say to my children that friendship is active, not passive and you work at them. She was a worker and she made the effort. She had a family home in London and I didn’t and she made a real effort to cook me dinner once a month. She didn’t just do that for me, she did it for lots of women. We both felt at times we were failing at being an MP or being a mother. She worked hard to try and make it so we always amplified each others’ voices.

“There is a photo of her talking about Syria and I’m sat next to her looking at her with total admiration and love. If one of us was speaking in the Chamber, we would be there for each other.”

Phillips, the daughter of a teacher and an NHS executive, has often been condemned by the left-wing of the Labour party both for her criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn when he was leading the party and her belief that pragmatism should come before principles when it comes to politics making a difference in people’s lives.

She says while working for Women’s Aid and seeking Lottery funding to help pay for counselling services that otherwise wouldn’t have been affordable taught her the value of what she sees as a practical approach - but adds that outlook was partly forged when she was at university in Yorkshire.

“I was raised by a man like Jeremy Corbyn who believed the lottery was a poor man’s tax. I believe that too but if I had stuck to that principle above the desire to help people we wouldn’t have got the money.

“I couldn’t give a toss about any over-arching political theory. I studied politics at Leeds University – it was all about political theory and I quit and started studying social policy instead. That was about single mums who live on benefits and I thought, ‘I have met some of them, I have never met John Stuart Mill’. Now I’m much more interested in political theory just because I am older. But the fundamental for me is about making a shift around someone’s dinner table so they can afford to do more than before or aren’t worried about x, y or z.”

She says her motivation to go into politics was driven by frustration at seeing the real-world impact of austerity policies.

“It was when I was working in the women’s refuge movement for Women’s Aid and I just saw lots of decisions made without particular thought for those whose lives were being affected. I saw how that affected the women and children on the ground. My motivation to get into politics was so better decisions would be made with the voices of the people who were being affected being heard.

“I got on the local council. When they were commissioning services for vulnerable people in the city and the region, I wanted to be that somebody who knew what they were talking about inside the room.

“Local councils were hamstrung by decisions being made about welfare.”

After initially serving as a local councillor in Birmingham, where she was appointed as a ‘victims’ champion’, Phillips was elected as an MP in 2015 and says it was something of a culture shock.

“When I got to Parliament I realised how exclusive it can be and how detached. Everybody now suddenly cares about the impact of Tier 2 measures now London is part of it.”

In her book Truth to Power, which was published last year, Phillips wrote about a shocking culture of impunity for MPs accused of sexual harassment and abuse .

“Every single man I have received disclosures of sexual harassment and abuse about at my workplace is still walking around, voting in the same lobbies as me, sipping tea in the tea room,” she said.

Since the book was published, former Dover MP Charlie Elphicke was jailed after being found guilty of three counts of sexual assault, while earlier this year the creation of an independent tribunal to adjudicate on cases of harassment and bullying involving MPs was announced.

Phillips says while some things have changed since she made that comment in her book - including some of those she had privately heard allegations against being voted out of office by unsuspecting constituents - much work still needs to be done as victims are still uncertain about coming forward.

“There is a new policy but policy is only any good when it is actually being put into practice. It is a bit like the coronavirus rules - you have to trust the people who set them.”

Phillips, who told Parliament in 2018 that it was an open secret there were 12 people in the House of Commons known to abuse or bully others, says she is pleased to have played a part in the policy changing.

“Those who deserve the most credit are the women and men who came forward about bullying and harassment but I do think without me and a number of others including Andrea Leadsom keeping our foot on the pedal it wouldn’t have happened.”

Phillips says one of her proudest achievements in Parliament was her part in getting the Government to propose that councils across the country would be legally required to provide secure accommodation for survivors of domestic abuse and their children – an issue she campaigned on for several years before Theresa May announced a consultation on the change last year. The move is yet to be made law but Phillips says knowing you have contributed to potentially life-saving legislation is one of the best parts of being an MP.

“It is the greatest thing in the whole world. There is nothing better than when you change something and you know it will make a difference in people’s lives. There have been occasions where Ministers have rung up and basically said, ‘you have won’ and it is better than anything.”

Her entire time as an MP has come with Labour in Opposition and with the Conservatives holding an 80-seat majority, Phillips says her role has to be more of a campaigning one if she wants to effect change.

“My hope for the future is rather than being the person getting a call from a minister, imagine being that person.”

Phillips says she believes Labour are going in the right direction under Keir Starmer’s leadership but still has much to do to win power.

“We are closer but we are still in the foothills and there is still a long way to go. There are huge things we have to get over that aren’t just to blame on the Corbyn years. The world changes and I don’t think the Labour party was necessarily as future focused as it should be for quite some time.

“I would feel much more confident if there was a snap election called today than I did in 2017 and 2019.

“The Labour Party has to be trusted with people’s finances and the nation’s finances.”

Phillips holds little truck with critics of Starmer who find fault with both with his personality and a perception that he is triangulating on certain issues rather than setting out his true beliefs.

“There is always going to be an element of triangulation in politics - Jeremy Corbyn did it over Brexit for as long as he possibly could.

“When people criticise Keir for triangulating, I think maybe they just don’t agree with his principles. He is an incredibly principled human being.

“The criticism that he is boring - he is not, he is a proper laugh. But saying that, I was having my nails done recently and the woman next to me said ‘What I wouldn’t give for a bit of boring right now’. There is an element - whether it is Joe Biden or Keir Starmer - that people are wanting to go from calamity to calm.”

Yorkshire pride ‘should be bottled’

Jess Phillips says she has fond memories of her time in Yorkshire – even if the county’s local pride did take some getting used to.

Phillips, who attended Leeds University and also lived in North Yorkshire for a brief time, says: “I love Yorkshire but I have to say the number of people from Yorkshire who think it is the centre of the universe is both charming and infuriating. They should bottle that confidence and sell it to other places.”

The Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival is taking place between October 23 and 25 and is being streamed for free online. The Jess Phillips event will be available to watch from Saturday at 8am. Visit www.harrogateinternationalfestivals.com.

Support The Yorkshire Post and become a subscriber today.

Your subscription will help us to continue to bring quality news to the people of Yorkshire. In return, you’ll see fewer ads on site, get free access to our app and receive exclusive members-only offers.

So, please - if you can - pay for our work. Just £5 per month is the starting point. If you think that which we are trying to achieve is worth more, you can pay us what you think we are worth. By doing so, you will be investing in something that is becoming increasingly rare. Independent journalism that cares less about right and left and more about right and wrong. Journalism you can trust.

Thank you

James Mitchinson