Only Jess Phillips can save the Labour Party – Corbyn would be mad to let her go

She belongs to that nascent breed of anti-tribalist politician who’s had it with the cliquish, masculinist power gaming and doctrinal narrowness which Brexit has brought to the boil

In the unlikely event that Jess Phillips hires me as her life coach, the first advice will be this: In the name of sanity, Jess, take a holiday.

The moment the immediate Brexit crisis has passed, find a remote Greek island, laze on the beach with a trashy novel, drink too much retsina over dinner, blitz the boxsets in bed, lie in till 11am the next morning... and repeat daily for a minimum of two weeks.

In an interview with The Times, the Brummie Dorothy Parker scattergunned the zingers. (“I’m meant to be in the same political party as Chris Williamson. I don’t particularly like being in the same country.”)

But the quote that rang alarm bells for fans of her parliamentary presence was this: “I feel exhausted by everything. I think I’m just at the end of the road for all of it, to be honest.”

Although her willingness to share the contents of her mind and heart can be deceptive, I do not personally know the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. So it’s the apex of impertinence to say, from a vantage point of absolute ignorance, that I worry a bit about Jess Phillips.

In a televised Brexit debate the week before last, railing at Theresa May’s cowardice and the disintegration of social safety nets, she appeared to be on the edge of tears.

You’d have to be an old-school sexist drongo to see the passion and raw emotion as anything but a show of strength. Yet with it was also a hint of someone struggling with fatigue, despair, and levels of stress few of us could tolerate. She seemed just as she describes herself: exhausted, and at the end of the road.

If so, no wonder. In an interview gone barely less viral than her hilarious Commons tour de force of a few weeks ago – “I thought I was quite posh [before going to Westminster], but actually I’d just met people who eat olives” – she touched on the horrendous abuse and threats from the hard left and the far right.

She has nine locks on the front door and a police panic button by her bed. After Jo Cox’s murder, her elder son, then 12, asked if it’s worth it. “The trouble is,” she replied, “it is”. Now she says: “Unlike Emily Thornberry, I wouldn’t rather die than leave the Labour party.”

If she does leave Labour, as she is openly contemplating, it will be a disaster for Jeremy Corbyn. He probably doesn’t realise this – to him, Phillips may be no more than one of those Blairite, closet Tory nuisances he could merrily survive without.

She is a nuisance to a leader she once promised to stab in the front – a metaphor, she drolly explained to the literalists of Twitter; not the sort of death threat she regularly receives – if her conscience dictated.

But a soft Tory she is not. Firmly of the left, she belongs to that nascent breed of anti-tribalist politician who’s bleedin’ had it with the cliquish, masculinist power gaming and doctrinal narrowness which Brexit has both brought to the boil and, by threatening a centrist realignment, begun to challenge.

The most instinctively gifted communicator of the age, she might do here what the young Democrat megastar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is doing in the US. She could electrify centre-left politics. She could be the lightning bolt that revives it from the stasis in which the dismal decade of Blair-Brown feuding left it.

Her warmth, wit and ability to slice through the drivel with one sentence make her a figure of huge potential importance. If she joined the Independent Group, she’d be its natural leader.

But there is one obvious danger – were she a man, there would be two, the male ego being the nasty, rapacious little beast that it is, any MP with gonads who was love-bombed like she is today would be a narcissistic monster by tomorrow.

Phillips seems too grounded for that, too ironically self-aware in the Black Country style, though she has a healthy ego. She thinks she’d make a good prime minister if she the first from Birmingham since Neville Chamberlain.

But she is no more an egomaniac than an appeaser – and if she is in danger of quitting politics, as that “end of the road” quote might suggest, it would be a colossal shame.

She isn’t the only woman Labour desperately needs to keep. Stella Creasy, the halloumi-fixated member for Walthamstow and fellow stoical serial victim of murderous abuse, is every inch as brave, devoted, funny and cool.

When people say of MPs that “they’re all the same”, names such as these are the shortcut rebuttal. You shouldn’t need to agree with them on every issue to appreciate that they are recognisably human beings who work astoundingly hard for their constituents and fight a gruelling uphill battle for a less wickedly unfair society.

Nor need you spend long scanning the social media bullying – Phillips is now a class traitor for wearing expensive clothes in a photo shoot, apparently, and because her mother rose through the NHS to a well paid job – to understand why the brightest women in the party might be tempted to jack it in.

If Phillips were overwhelmed by the 80-hour working weeks while raising two children, and the need for a panic room in her constituency office, much less would be too much for most of us.

But there’s a whiff of change on the breeze. When the dust settles on Brexit, there is a chance – a small one in a system built to resist change, admittedly – of a political future dominated by strong, smart, non-doctrinal pragmatists who powerfully empathise with the poor and disaffected because they come from that life, and/or live it vicariously through their constituents.

What we have now allegedly leading the two parties of government are, she says, antiquated caricatures. “It’s a bit like The Good Life – she’s Margo and he’s Tom. Their politics are so Seventies.”

It's a brilliant analogy from a brilliant woman whom one hopes is going nowhere, other than to recharge her frazzled batteries on a Greek island where the eating of olives will never be confused with a question of class.