Middle Class Holes 8 - Jess Phillips

Women’s rights, bab, as far as it goes

How refreshing Jess Phillips seemed when she burst Brummily into our lives as Labour’s new MP for Birmingham Yardley in 2015. What a breath of clean air on a super-stuffy scene!

She looks like a wonderfully gobby scrapper, a hold-my-coat, get-stuck-in type, a spirited hybrid of Linda La Hughes from Gimme Gimme Gimme and Pig from Pipkins, telling plain truths to the waffly, delusional Tom Farrells and Hartley Hares of public life. Like both those plain speakers of TV’s golden age, Phillips has a remarkably expressive foam rubber face. She is the straight talker, who tells it like it is.

But this is a very misleading image. The Noddy Holder accent and the free approach to swear words (legendarily she claimed to have told Diane Abbott to ‘fuck off’) and demotic language (she also claimed to have told Jeremy Corbyn ‘I won’t knife you in the back, I’ll knife you in the front’) conceal her actual background and upbringing.

Phillips is in fact the daughter of a stridently lefty teacher dad (‘Growing up with my father was like growing up with Jeremy Corbyn’ she told The Observer - let’s hope all sharp objects were hidden in the Phillips kitchen), and a health service manager mother, who went on to become the Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation.

Despite her ‘street’ aesthetic, Phillips is another example of middle class compromise, all fudge and flapdoodle, and the refusal to face very unpleasant facts. She combines two qualities that are tolerable in isolation - being very pleased with oneself, and not being very intelligent - but which are lethal in combination. She is extremely irritating.

Progress with Our Jess

But the irritating should, and must, have rights and protections too. We are all members of the Very Irritating Community to someone.

One day, when I worked at Granada TV in 1997, the printer in our office broke down and I had to take a hard disk of the top secret Corrie storylines down to another department of the building - Press and Publicity - and print them out there instead. This was a long and boring task, and my eye wandered to two piles of letters on a nearby shelf. One was half the size of the other. ‘Blimey,’ I wondered aloud, ‘who are all those for?’ ‘That’s the fan mail for X’ came the reply. X was one of the most popular people on TV at the time, an all-round entertainer - actor, comedian, singer, quiz show host. He was loved, at this point at his absolute peak. ‘And who are those for?’ I asked of the second pile. ‘Oh, those are for X too,’ came the reply. ‘But that’s the hate mail.’ I took a peek, and it was eye-meltingly nasty stuff.

But this was, of course, just before the expansion of the internet, and well before the advent of social media. X never got to see Pile Number 2. He didn’t even know it existed.

Mockery, lampoon, insults, and stridently rude challenges are all part of the job of an MP, and to an extent of any public figure. However, death threats are not. I’ve had a small amount of these myself. Phillips has received many, and has installed a panic button.

I take an old-fashioned attitude to this. I think the miscreants should be banged up long and hard, and an example set. In fact, I think an even older-fashioned, eighteenth century technique - the pillory - might work even better as a deterrent. One public egging of a miscreant on Thursday, and I suspect it would mostly be over by Friday. (I would also have Andrew Tate horse-whipped while I was about it. Bye bye, ‘manosphere’.)

But none of this ugliness exempts Jess Phillips from critique, as I’m sure she’d agree.

Let’s take four typical incidents and extrapolate from them. The high points of all four were, like everything else that has happened in the world since about 2007, captured on video. The pattern is consistent - but what is revealed is inconsistency.