Let’s Be Honest: Truth, Lies and Politics
Jess Phillips, Simon & Schuster, £15.95

 
LET’S Be Honest, the title already of Jess Phillips’s latest autobiography – her fourth – raises the stakes for her going forwards. That’s Jess Phillips, outspoken MP for Birmingham Yardley, now Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls; potentially one of the most important voices in government for British women today. 

In this most recent chronicle of her parliamentary career Phillips writes from her personal experience in opposition under the rule of Rishi Sunak’s dying government. It’s a notes-from-the-battlefield attempt to cut through “the bullshit” of Tory populist tactics: distraction, division, distraction, more division, while the country went belly up. 

The book has been criticised by some reviewers for missing its sell-by date, arriving just as the country freed itself from Tory rule.

“We’ve come out of an abusive relationship,” as John O’Farrell defined it recently on BBC radio, and Phillips’s book writes from the mothership of the abuse, Parliament, illustrating graphically some of the pain and damage wreaked on people she served and on institutions she values. 

“My politics is personal” she writes of her exposure to the worst of people’s lives. Crisis points are revisited such as the shameful moment of withdrawal from Afghanistan when her office became a hub, her team frantically seeking information and support for the trapped families of many of her constituents.

An average working day in her constituency sees her doling out bad news on an overwhelmed battlefield of Britain where there is not the slightest possibility of providing social housing accommodation for a family evicted by a private landlord, and no hope of a rape victim’s attacker, her uncle, being processed through the courts for years to come. 

“Now,” she writes, “I have to tell her that it will likely take a year for even a slim possibility of a charge to be brought against her rapist. In that time, it will take over six months to get evidence from his phone, and the forensic evidence she has given over – a pair of knickers and swabs from an invasive examination – will take at least nine months to come back from the lab.”  

Phillips concludes that she herself had become a part of an industry normalising the breakdown of society; she knew the likelihood of this rapist being prosecuted and convicted was minimal.

To run away from the memory of abuse may be an instinctual response for an electorate the day after voting; this book is relevant for the way it deals with that situation, detailing the damage endured by vast amounts of the electorate. It also reveals personal trauma, relating how Phillips received the news of the murder of her close friend and colleague, Jo Cox MP, by a far right extremist in 2016.

In dismantling the populist Tory tactics of that period she has created a manifesto of sorts, setting the standards for her own future career in government. “End the era of political lying,” is her cri de coeur. She will no doubt be held to account for this.

“Politics is downstream of culture” was the Breitbart motto famously weaponised by Steve Bannon (currently in jail), the convicted felon Donald Trump, the disgraced Boris Johnson and the rest of the populist crew: Patel, Braverman, Jenrick, Raab, Truss and Sunak –  all name-checked here as culture war-mongers, bait-and-switch merchants pedalling “hot-button” issues to distract: Twitter spats, gaffes, red meat wedge issues, getting us all “spitting feathers” or “arguing with the clouds,” getting us to vent our reactions in the “outrage Olympics” rather than “doing the actual work it takes to change things,” she writes. 

The abusive relationship involved grooming too: “Low expectations are a cancer to politics. They allow really bad-faith actors to get away with murder and deliver absolutely nothing... There is too much failure for us to hang our hats on each thing and so, like anyone in an abusive relationship, we just learned to accept our fate and be grateful for the days we didn’t take a beating.”

The book’s wider worry is with the “snake-oil of populism” driving young people who are naturally more progressive to fall away from politics. “Up your expectations” is her demand for the electorate. Politicians want to look good so they will be elected and “this has replaced doing good,” she writes.

Phillips is no stranger to media bolstering of her own career. A frequent celebrity columnist as well as host on shows such as Have I Got News For You, working media platforms has presumably contributed to her becoming the second highest earner amongst Labour MPs. 

Recently, she had to apologise for rising to Reform-laid, Twitter-bait over the riots, thus ignoring her own advice – to ignore. As Simone Weil once wrote, “What is culture? The formation of attention.”

One of the Labour government’s most visible advocates for marginalised women and a previous contender for Labour Party leadership, Phillips is now in a position to focus attention on those in need of strong support. She has shown courage in a climate of threat and violence against female politicians. She faced down hecklers at the Birmingham count where her win was slim – 693 votes in a strongly pro-Gaza community. 

The book ends with her decision to resign from the shadow cabinet over Keir Starmer’s Gaza policy. In light of the final count that followed, her act of protest may have been seen as an essential move to hold onto her seat.

Now that she has set her own bar for performance in government, let’s see how she does.