Getting enthusiastically stuck into her chips, she suggests April is the cruellest month for her always on-off diet regimes. She’s on an Easter break from parliament. “I always start in the middle of the conversation.” It is the thing that gives you life for the rest of it.” She doesn’t doubt that MPs can be effective in places other than where they grew up, but she has a head start. “I wanted to be the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. “I never wanted to just be a Labour MP,” she tells me. Watching her in action, even over lunch, is to have your faith restored in what big-hearted, plain-speaking local representation might look like. She knows their stories, speaks their language. While we eat, a few people come over to give her a thumbs up, or to wonder if she can help with parking issues or anxieties about housing or schools or health. Phillips is, understandably, therefore right at home here. When he died, he had a little bit of money left in his savings and he left a third of it to Bedders fish and chip shop and to Janet.” After that, one particular woman, Janet, who used to work here, if she hadn’t seen him for a few days would take a bag of chips round to his house and check he was all right. One time though, crossing the road to here, he was knocked down by a car and shattered his pelvis. He’d been wounded in Burma during the war, but was fit as anything – in his 80s, he’d be up a ladder, always in his suit and tie, clearing his gutters. After my nan died at 92 in 2005, Grandad Fred – her second husband – would come and do his shopping at Asda over the road and then in here for his dinner. “And we would always come here when I was growing up. “My nan and grandad lived round the corner,” she says. Sitting in its back room, with a plate of cod, chips and mushy peas and a cup of builder’s tea in front of her, the MP is explaining to me why she feels she has a family stake in the place. It is not quite in Jess Phillips’s constituency, but she hopes she might claim it in the next round of boundary changes.
edders is a precinct fish and chip shop beside a busy traffic island in Small Heath in Birmingham.
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