Advertisement

Everywoman: One Woman’s Truth about Speaking the Truth by Jess Phillips - review

Women's rights front and centre: MP Jess Phillips (left) with Yvette Cooper (right) on the campaign trail for Labour last year: Getty Images
Women's rights front and centre: MP Jess Phillips (left) with Yvette Cooper (right) on the campaign trail for Labour last year: Getty Images

How do MPs find time to write so many books? We’ve had Nadine Dorries’ misery lit, Boris Johnson on (and hoping to provoke comparisons with) Winston Churchill, and Iain Duncan Smith’s thriller, The Devil’s Tune — only a penny on Amazon, and about which one reviewer noted: “I only gave it one star as there isn’t an option for none.”

The latest parliamentarian keeping the printing presses whirring is Jess Phillips, the 35-year-old Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. If party members hadn’t been brainwashed by the Corbyn cult, she would be on the shadow frontbench. Instead, she’s written — in her evenings, she stresses — a feminist-polemic-cum-call-to-action. Labour’s loss.

Phillips comes across as great company — not just passing the “Would you go for a drink with her?” test but making sure you’d end the evening having put the world to rights but lost both your shoes and your dignity. She certainly isn’t your typical MP. She’s “gobbier” (her word). Swearier. With a propensity to overshare. She had her first cigarette at 11 and went on to “abuse” her body with “drinking, partying and not eating”. Teenage Phillips thought Courtney Love should play her in a film of her life.

She’s very open about that life. Her brother Luke was a heroin addict (he’s clean now), and she recalls the many trips to A&E, searching her house after he’d been over to find what he had taken and — after she’d been selected as a parliamentary candidate — having to bundle him into a car in the constituency when he was violent and suffering from drug-induced psychosis. She also regales the reader with accounts of the sexism she’s suffered: aged 13, a man assumed she was a prostitute and asked her to get into his car. Aged 19, a man stuck his hand up her skirt in a club. She slapped him in response — but it was she who was thrown out.

On politics, she doesn’t pull any punches, and it’s Jeremy Corbyn who comes under the most sustained attack. Well, she did once say she’d “knife him in the front” when the time came. Phillips accuses the Labour leader of treating female MPs like “arm candy” and calls for him to “bloody well publish an equal pay audit” of his office staff. Her philosophical criticism is that Labour’s hard Left sees equality as “an add-on” to class struggle rather than a goal in itself. “I think the leadership looks down on women as a group of patronised poor people who need the big, important, clever men to come and save them.” Even now she fears Labour isn’t ready for a female leader.

Before she entered parliament, Phillips worked for the charity Women’s Aid, and she continues to speak up for domestic-violence victims. A year ago, she read out in the Commons the names of the 120 women killed by men in the previous 12 months. Her writing on violence here is just as powerful, especially where she answers the refrain “Why doesn’t she just leave?” Fear of being murdered is a common reason.

There’s joy in Everywoman too. Phillips is enormously appreciative of the women who came before her, feeling Harriet Harman passed on the baton when she warned “you will never be popular” — and is a big believer in the sisterhood. That latter idea is tinged with sadness, though: Jo Cox — a passionate advocate for sorority — was a friend. Phillips wrote to Cox’s children after their mother’s death: “Love is how I will remember your Mum. We walked shoulder to shoulder into the fray.”

I suspect Everywoman has been rushed out (misspellings such as Sheryl Sandberg’s name hint at that), but that’s my only niggle. Being an MP has given Phillips a platform, and if this book inspires just one teenager to switch from partying to politics, it will have been well used. This is one book I’m glad an MP has written.

£10.49, Amazon, Buy it now