The new leader of the House of Commons, Mark Spencer, doesn’t have a clue about the ‘real world’

As I door-knocked in Birmingham last week, I asked how people felt that the government was performing, writes Jess Phillips. I have rarely heard as many expletives

Mark Spencer has moved from government chief whip to leader of the House of Commons (PA Wire)

I have recently noticed that Tory MPs and government ministers, in a bid to get out of answering difficult questions about the dreadful behaviour of their leader, have decided to pretend they know what people in the real world care about.

We hear drivel from talking heads about how no one is talking about the many lockdown-breaking parties (literally everyone is talking about it) or that real people are more concerned with Ukraine and the cost of living. This week, Mark Spencer moved from being the government chief whip to being the leader of the House of Commons in what seems like the dullest, most male, pale and stale reshuffle in history. He said that people in the “real world” didn’t care about Boris Johnson’s partying.

But if you look at polling on the matter of the parties, you would know that people in the “real world” very much do care about being lied to, being taken for fools and being asked to live by rules that our prime minister thought himself above, while they missed their families and lost loved ones.

If you walk into any pub or restaurant, get on any bus, have a brief chat with your neighbours, or sit in a GP waiting room, you will find that literally every person in the real world is talking about it. In my office, residents come in to tell me about their housing problem, their domestic violence issue, their kid’s school place but before they do, each of them first has to cover off my views on Boris Johnson and his lies. I have had to extend surgery times in order to allow for Boris Johnson moaning time.

As I door-knocked in different parts of Birmingham last week, we asked at every door how people felt that the government was performing. I have rarely heard as many expletives on a canvassing session, and I have knocked doors through some pretty crappy times for the Labour Party. So we shall assume that Mark Spencer knows naff all about what people in the “real world” are talking about.

However, being wrong about what the public thinks is not the worst crime a cabinet minister can commit. Frankly, I think it is a key part of the job description. The offence is that when Spencer says ordinary people don’t care about this, or when his cronies say what people really care about is other important issues like the cost of living, they are claiming that the British public is not clever enough to care about more than one thing at a time.

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Of course people care that they are waiting more than a year for vital surgery or that they can’t afford their energy bills. Of course they care that their kids are still routinely out of school because of staff shortages or that they are likely going to have to sell their elderly mother’s home in order to pay for her social care. People care about a million things at once and all the while they are completely capable of being furious that while they missed their family and friends, the prime minister was quaffing champagne with his mates dressed up in tinsel.

I don’t only care about one of my children at a time; I worry about them both in tandem. I am capable of doing this at the exact same time as worrying about Ukraine and the growing levels of poverty in my constituency. It isn’t a zero-sum game. It is a dangerous thing for a politician to assert that there is a hierarchy of pain. I have sat opposite victims of exploitation who are worried they are wasting my time because I have “more important things to worry about”. In the real world, ordinary people still manage to get the tea on the table and remember to top up the kids’ dinner money account for the following week. We are not idiots, Mark Spencer.

I can only conclude that the reason Conservative MPs have decided to be trivial about the fact that our prime minister is under criminal investigation and seems to have lied to the country, is because they are in fact very basic. For a while, it has been clear that cabinet members are only capable of caring about one thing: themselves. Out here in the real world, we are better than that.

Jess Phillips is the shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding and Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley