The Life of an MP

Everything You Really Need to Know About Politics

Jess Phillips

• Publisher: Gallery UK
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781398500921
• eBook ISBN: 9781398500914
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

‘This book is here to take you inside the daily realities of Westminster. I don’t mean that it’s going to bore you to death with a blow by blow account of what it’s like to sit on the Statutory Instrument Debate on Naval regulations 1968-2020 – but to demystify the places and practice of politics.’

From agonising decisions on foreign air strikes to making headlines about orgasms, from sitting in on history-making moments at the UN to eating McCain potato smiles at a black-tie banquet in China, the life of a politician is never dull. And it’s also never been more important. But politics is far bigger than Westminster, and in this book Jess Phillips makes the compelling case for why now, more than ever, we all need to be a part of it.

With trademark humour and honesty, Jess Phillips lifts the lid on what a career in politics is really like and why it matters – to all of us. This is the inside story of what’s really going on.
 

1 People Care About Potholes: Getting Elected

Elections are the very best part of political life and the very worst. They highlight the camaraderie and friendship within politics at the same time as bringing out all the demons of political battles. They are full of misleading spin, downright lies, tittle-tattle and grand promises, while simultaneously being the best example of a politician properly back among their people and responding to their needs.

I have stood in three general elections in six years in Parliament. I should only have stood in two. In the UK, government is required by law to call an election at least every five years. However, the Conservative government of the past decade has been quite trigger-happy with elections, which has led to three different prime ministers in the space of five years. Elections often cause political turmoil and uncertainty but I guess they are the only answer when politicians fail to act decisively and in the national interest. The only thing to do in that situation is to give that responsibility back to the people. Every single time a new general election was called, I was filled with a mixture of dread and delight. This was because I thought I would lose my job but I also absolutely bloody love an election campaign.

There is always the fear that the election will not go your way and you will find yourself out of a job. Politics is a risky business. In fact, I fear that one of the reasons we end up with the wrong people representing us politically is because the high stakes and the risk of possible public humiliation attracts the kind of people to public life who get a kick out of this. I don’t think that risk-taking is always a bad thing – in fact, I attribute almost all my successes in life to my willingness to take a risk. Having my first son with a man I had only been going out with for a matter of weeks was, you could say, something of a risk. Deciding to essentially indebt my family to the tune of thousands of pounds in order to stand in an election was definitely a risk. My willingness to simply say, ‘Sod it, let’s give it a go, what’s the worst that can happen?’ has undoubtedly opened up opportunities that many sensible people would have overthought and avoided. I am not anti-risk.

However – and it is a big however – since becoming a member of Parliament, I have seen some of the stupidest risks taken by politicians because they obviously just liked the thrill of a possible public shaming. In my view, anyone who thinks that it is a good idea to send a picture of their genitals to an unknown person they have been chatting to on the internet must know they are going to get caught. Ministers are always being caught out in a ‘text and tell’ story where they have committed to writing something that they should not have been up to in the first place. Every single time this happens, someone will ask me, ‘Gosh, how did they think that they were going to get away with it?’ And I always give the same answer: they knew they were going to get caught and that was part of the thrill.

The first rule of politics is basic: learn to count (in other words, if you cannot win a vote, don’t push it). The second rule of politics speaks to the more secretive nature of the plotting that goes on: never write anything down. My WhatsApp status is ‘ready for the leaks’. If you wrote it, if you did it, you are going to have to own it – and someone always tells!

I cannot help but think that the political process lends itself to people who are drawn to risk, and I would say that is a near universal type in MPs. The way that this manifests, however, is different depending on the individual: some thrive on the adrenaline of being brave and bold and speaking truth to power; for others the attraction to risk and humiliation means that they use their platform to act sleazy. It is no surprise that politicians often get caught with their pants down; it is the risk of exposure that no doubt thrills.

The fact that Westminster attracts those who like to take risks affects our politics way beyond the sex-pest texting scandals. If the risk is mixed with entitlement and privilege (which in politics it so often is) then we have a dangerous combination, and we start to see politicians taking risks not just with their own personal or political lives, but with the lives of those across the country. Election campaigns are an absolute breeding ground in which the risky operator can make big brash statements.

Electioneering in this country and many others is all about taking risks, making big statements and pumping out messaging, therefore the people who are good at it are usually those who can take the biggest risks, make the biggest statements, puff out their chests the most. Electioneering is often reduced to politicians wearing hard hats and talking about building something or standing in front of a building that they claim they built, even if they had naff all to do with it. It makes for a good picture, but does very little in terms of engineering change.

A fundamental problem in our democracies is that many of these risk-taking, sloganeering individuals who are attracted to running for election have never had to face the consequences of a risk gone bad. Their houses have never been repossessed, they have never found themselves with not enough money to put petrol in the car or heard the ‘thunk’ of the electricity switching off. Over the time I have been involved on the front line of politics, the people who have risen to power and prominence have been those who don’t understand that gambling has a stake and you can lose it because they will never feel the pain of the loss.

The trouble is, of course, that this is compounded when so many of our MPs come from backgrounds of privilege, because no matter what happens to our economy, no matter what happens to our public services, no matter what happens at our borders, they will never feel the downside in their daily lives. They don’t need a good state school place for their kids. They are removed from that reality. So the risk to the public becomes quite significant, while the risk to the politicians themselves is just winning or losing in the game of politics.

The financial cost alone of getting elected is huge, especially if you put yourself forward in a marginal seat as I did, and very few people realise the reality of that. People often think that a) candidates are paid by their political parties – they are not; b) all people who stand for elected office are rich – many are (see above), lots are not; c) political parties give you loads of money to run your campaigns in your constituency – I bloody wish.

For me to be elected to Parliament cost my family around £40,000. Not in money we had in the bank you understand – we have never and will never have £40,000 in a bank account. And even if we had, I would have found it difficult to ask my husband to invest it in an election campaign that had a 50/50 chance of success. The cost for us was in our loss of earnings.

In 2013, two years before the 2015 election, I was selected to be the candidate for the Labour Party in Birmingham Yardley, a seat held at the time by the Liberal Democrats. In that time, I had to work without an office or base to raise the money, build an army of volunteers and get myself known by a population of 120-odd thousand people, all while holding down a job at a local women’s charity, being a city councillor and bringing up my five-year-old and eight-year-old sons with my husband, who worked nights as a lift engineer.

The first thing that had to go was my full-time job, so I started to work part-time in order to have at least one day per week to focus on campaigning. By the end of the campaign, I had reduced my hours even further and for the final three months I was on unpaid leave and using any holiday days I had left. This cost me around £15,000 in the time I was campaigning. The real kicker for my family, though, was my husband’s wage loss. As a lift engineer, he earned a premium for working a twelve-hour night shift. After I was selected, it became very clear that there was no way this could continue. Tom’s shifts were different each week and he worked two out of every four weekends, but most of my campaigning was done in the evenings after I had finished work and at the weekends and someone had to be at home to look after our kids. Unlike so many other politicians, we could not afford a live-in nanny and evening state childcare isn’t a thing. Of course, my dad and my in-laws helped when they could but they were still working themselves so to ask them to stay every night of a week until 11 p.m. was too much. So my decision to stand for office meant that my lovely, dependable, breadwinning husband had to quit the night shifts and work a normal 9–5 job, costing his income £10,000 per year of the campaign. The rest of the cost is the money you end up investing in the campaign yourself. I bought many a leaflet on my personal credit card. And unfortunately, alongside all this, the bank doesn’t accept requests to cut your mortgage to the same extent that your wages have been cut.

So, between us, we were £35,000 down, in mounting debt and all the while knowing that I might not win the seat. We sacrificed a lot to get me to Westminster and it could all have been for nothing.

I am pretty sure there has got to be a better election system than one such as this, that financially impoverishes a young family if they wish to get involved. It is not just a matter of the hardship this system brings to prospective candidates but the fact that it ensures that politics is a game that is only played by the very rich – or, as in my case, by potentially foolish idealists.

I don’t want people to think I received no resource from my political party; I did. However, over the two-year campaign period it amounted to around £10,000 for materials and technology. If you are lucky and have a target seat, they may also fund a part-time campaign manager for you to share with someone else. You also usually get an injection of cash during what we call ‘the short campaign’ (the six-week period prior to the election) so you can post out loads of lovely glossy materials featuring your tiny face and the leader of your party’s massive face. However, the candidate is expected to fundraise the lion’s share of the campaign finances as well as run the campaign, work on the campaign, write the leaflets and, in my case, spend literally all night printing all the leaflets in an office so small and so hot that on one occasion, 3 a.m. saw me slaving over the fast photocopier in only my bra and pants.

A huge part of what you have to do during an election campaign is inspire people to come along and help. The emotional labour of trying to be hopeful and inspiring in front of rooms of student activists or local people can be pretty draining when you are running on four hours’ sleep a night, your boss’s patience is wearing thin with all the phone calls you are getting at work, you’ve had to bin 40,000 leaflets because they printed with the wrong year for the election and your kids are moaning about having to spend all weekend at the Labour Party, which is nothing like an actual party as there is neither a cake nor a magician in sight. It’s hard to remain energetic and cheerful but if you don’t drum up that support then on election day you’ll be trying to knock 25,000 doors in a day with just the old party stalwart (who can only knock on three doors an hour because they get into a row about the Trident nuclear deterrent at every door) and another campaigner from the area who is still pissed off that they are not the candidate and deep down are waiting with bated breath for you to fail. So, you slick on some red lippy, turn your phone to silent and spend half your evenings standing in front of a crowd of people telling them that another future is possible.

And yet, amazingly, when you look back on all those years as a candidate, before you ever entered the hallowed halls of Westminster, you will only really remember the good times. Of course, this is not the case for those who don’t get elected – many of those whom I stood alongside in the 2015 election who were unsuccessful naturally feel very differently. But for me, the hazy spell of nostalgia means I mostly remember the moments when something went well. For every leaflet that contains an embarrassing mistake,^I there is the message that hits home and gets optimistically repeated back to you by the people that you meet. For every angry person who tells you that you are scum (or, in my favourite ever case, a voter who told me he would never vote Labour because he hadn’t liked the way Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald had governed the country some fifty years before I was born), there is someone on a doorstep who says, ‘I’ve never voted Labour before but I knew your nan and you are one of us so I am going to give you a shot.’ The memories that stay with you from an election campaign are the late nights laughing with your volunteers after another hilarious day on the doorstep or the killer putdown you managed to land against your opponent in the debates and hustings. A bit like childbirth, when you win an election or hold your baby in your arms, the fact that you can no longer feel your feet, you have given up on sleeping and you find most of those around you obscenely annoying all slips away.

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An election campaign is a game of two halves. There are two very distinct periods that I would call the long-term campaign and the short campaign once an election has been called. The long-term campaign has no distinguishable start point. If you are a good political activist, you will be campaigning in your seat from the day after you won the last election, or lost it, or from the day you decide you might one day want to be the candidate. This essentially looks like door knocking every weekend, holding a couple of public meetings a month and trying to put out a letter or leaflet in your area every couple of months.

We rely on volunteers to deliver these pieces of paper – which 90 per cent of people throw straight in the bin. I shall pause for a moment as I can hear those of you who have not used a plastic straw since 2018 balking at the idea that so much political literature is posted but only has, if you are lucky, a 10 per cent readership. Believe you me, I am also annoyed about this for all sorts of reasons. But if you do not communicate with your constituents telling them what you are doing in their area with an element of regularity, they will express their annoyance with you, whether they would have read your leaflet or not. And these leaflets matter all year round because even if your residents don’t read them, they make people feel that you are still there. Now, I am flattered that my constituents long for photos of me squatting and looking sad about a pothole but I wish more than anything that this was not the case because of the resource intensity of their production and delivery. I cannot afford paid delivery and it is very hard to keep volunteers motivated when you ask them to walk many miles every week delivering leaflets about bins. I wish that having a cracking Facebook page, a whip-smart Twitter account and a good email list was enough to properly reach all the people in my constituency, but it isn’t – yet. People like to see you with potholes.

I know this was never covered on The West Wing; I cannot tell you how many political dramas I have watched where I have shouted at the telly, ‘Why do you never see anyone stuffing envelopes?’ But the truth is, people like parochial politics and they want it on a leaflet. The first political party that offered drop kerbs for all or a comprehensive tree pruning service in every neighbourhood would win a general election in the UK by a landslide. If you think that people hated the European Union, you have never heard them talk about the state of their neighbour’s garden.

Anyway, I digress. The long campaign is all the political things that you do to build up a brand in readiness for the next election. It sounds cynical to write it down in black and white. It makes it seem as if all the work to save a local hospital, for example, or to collect food donations for local families, is just so you can win an election. And in a way it is. Brand building will always sound brutal and capitalist but if your brand is ‘cares about the community’ then that is probably because you care about the community, and you want to win the election so you can do more of it.

Take the example of the maverick congresswoman in the US, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: she has a very strong brand of being one of the people, of caring about her neighbourhood and being tough in the battle to represent it. She wants to be seen as a woman who gives power back to the people. There is absolutely no doubt that she has whole teams working on that brand: social media strategists, data analysts, speech writers and the rest. Everything she wears and everything she does will push that brand. This doesn’t mean it is fake or put on just to win votes. The brand a politician pushes in almost everything they do is usually fomented by their own political and life experience and is built around the reason they entered politics. Her brand is strong because it is true.

Others may manufacture a brand that will fit with their political party. A Conservative politician in the UK, for example, is never going to try to push a brand in their local community built around fighting for the rights of immigrants or ensuring that more social housing is built to end the homelessness problem, even if they think this would be the right course of action, because if they were elected they would immediately come unstuck when they were forced to vote against this brand. Instead, they will work to build a brand that is about business and affluence in the local community, in line with their party politics. They probably don’t want to be seen as maverick but rather as competent, dependable – dare I say it, even a bit boring. Boring works in lots of places. Remember, people care about potholes.

The long campaign for me involves lots of local campaigning where I try to find out what issues matter to my residents and address them. This is stuff like working with a local young woman sexually assaulted in an underpass to build up a local campaign to get rid of the underpass and fighting for more resources to keep our streets safe. I make every political act that I take on about the people I represent, always linking back the national picture to real stories of the people that I live among.

I am lucky to have a big national profile – in fact, scrap that, I am not lucky; I worked really hard in order to build a bigger platform and that has had huge benefits for the people I represent. It has also helped me in my long campaign because the leaflets matter less if people see you on their telly at night or when they open their papers. They feel, rightly, that you are out there fighting for them. At election time, I don’t have to work very hard for people to know I am local or that I am tough and will battle on their behalf – they have seen it for years on their TV screens and in the stuff they read.

Obviously, having a big platform also carries a certain risk. Being so prominent gives your opponents an easy line of attack, especially if you are a woman. In the 2017 general election, my main opponent, the Liberal Democrat who had held the seat before me, tried to go hard on the fact that I was on the telly a lot, implying that I cared more about publicity than I did about my constituency. The attack was essentially designed to make me look like a show-off, more interested in frippery and fame than serving my community, but the truth is that having an MP who is a bit famous is not a bad thing for my constituents. It gives me a bigger platform, a voice that is harder to ignore, a call that can quickly rally an army to a cause. Anyone who tells you that as a representative you should seek to be less well known is either foolish or jealous.

This particular Lib Dem attack only told half the story. For example, one leaflet put out during the election took issue with the fact that I had been giving a book talk on the Saturday before the election. Had one of my constituents not been able to access help and support on that Saturday morning, this would of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction: Welcome to Parliament, the Place is Falling Apart
• Chapter 1: People Care About Potholes: Getting Elected
• Chapter 2: Get Out the Vote: Why Your Vote Counts
• Chapter 3: What Does an MP Do All Day?
• Chapter 4: Home Ground: Back in the Constituency
• Chapter 5: The Power to Change: How to Get Things Done
• Chapter 6: Being Diplomatic: MPs Abroad
• Chapter 7: The Room Where it Happens: The UN
• Chapter 8: Orgasms and Imaginary Boats: How Politics is Reported
• Chapter 9: Pls Like: Politics and Social Media
• Chapter 10: ‘It’s Complicated’: How Journalists and Politicians Really Get On
• Chapter 11: A Rosette on a Donkey: Party Politics
• Chapter 12: Speaking Out or Showing Off?: When and Why MPs Rebel
• Conclusion: Why We Need Politics
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of Terms
• About the Author
• Copyright