“The honest answer,” she says, when we meet in her office at Portcullis House, “is that sometimes there is no difference in my life, death threats and things. My office will tell me “a guy tried to break into the office, shouting and knocking on the door”, and I ask them if they are okay, and then I move on, as if it’s nothing to me anymore. I’m literally immune to it. And indeed, this is horrible to think about, but not experiencing people calling you a prostitute is something that is not normal. There is no name you could call me that would shock me. It’s not enough for me, I’m used to it so much. Until the day I am not “. That day, in November 2020, Birmingham MP Yardley was with one of her two teenage sons, aged 13 and 17, “making this very secular [thing], waiting in an endless queue. I was just completely scared. “I had to go back to the car because I could not breathe.” Earlier in the day, Phillips spent about an hour on her laptop watching an inmate named Rakeem Malik sentenced to 10 years in prison for threatening to kill her. “I heard the judge make the sum and then they read my victim’s statement. I heard all this, and then I turned off my laptop and my husband said “Do you want a cup of tea?” as if nothing had just happened. ” Phillips does not blame her husband or her two sons for this – as she now explains, “I learned to be like, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ “They take the lead from me and respond accordingly.” The 40-year-old was friends with the slain MP Jo Cox and was grateful to be with her colleagues when she learned of David Amess’s death last year. “They understand,” he says. Phillips tells me all this in cool tones, perhaps as a kind of coping mechanism. I say it sounds very annoying. “Yes, he’s upset,” he nods. “That’s why I guess you’re used to half life [she lives the first half of the week in a flat in London, and the second at her family home in her constituency in Birmingham]. So you are with people who are used to this side and then you hide it from the other side “. She believes that the fact that the sides got mixed up during the lockdown was the reason she was so terrified at Sainsbury’s. “I did not realize it before [the pandemic] that there was this balance. And when it was removed, I could not stand it. “ Phillips tells me she always suffered from anxiety – as a teenager she had anorexia. She knows it’s bad when she starts messing around because her husband, Tom, does not pick up the phone. I feel her when I learn that just a few days after our interview, her mother-in-law dies suddenly and takes compassionate leave – it is clear that she was extremely close to Diana, who was a rock in her life after her mother died when she was just 28 years old. .
