To paraphrase Rishi Sunak at the dispatch box the other week, politics comes at you pretty fast. Doubtless Jess Phillips expected and very much hoped her new book would be published before a general election was called. As she corrected her proofs, she cannot have known that by the time it squeezed its way into the nation’s bookshops, the election campaign would be long over, and she would find herself the new parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Home Office. All the people (I mean Tories) she complains about in its pages! Metaphorically speaking, they’ve evaporated into thin air. Though she somehow clung on to her seat, Esther McVey, previously so-called minister for common sense, is really only good for the GB News studio now, which means Phillips’s civil servants are henceforth free to wear their rainbow lanyards with alacrity, should that be their thing (McVey wanted to ban them).
Government is incredibly challenging, and one day in the future Phillips, the member for Birmingham Yardley since 2015, will surely want to reframe Let’s Be Honest, a text whose essential message may be summed up as: “Politics is a very fine thing except when it’s done by anyone other than me and my party.” Almost without exception, the only truly good books about life at Westminster are the work of ex-practitioners, their disillusionment rising from each page like steam from a giant cow pat (Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge is fascinating – and some of his descriptions of former colleagues certainly had me reaching for a clothes peg). But for now, we have only the volume that’s in front of us – and alas, its title is a bit of a hostage to fortune. Dishonesty takes many forms, and here it comes in the guise of the sin of omission; in the end, it’s hard to disagree with Phillips’s own analysis, which is that tribal politics is a sickness from which she suffers just as much as the next MP.
