always felt compelled to stand up for people
that were being ribbed because they didn’t
have the best trainers. There were very vis-
ible signs of poverty in the school that I was
very aware of.’
She’s on the left of her party, but dislikes
being described as a ‘Corbynite’, which to
her makes Labour sound like a ‘cult of per-
sonality’. But she says she can’t think ofanything she really disagrees with him on.
Before entering Parliament she was a trade
unionist and anti-racism campaigner, work-
ing on the Show Racism the Red Card cam-
paign. She was also a councillor, but lost her
Northumberland seat to a Tory a month
before being elected to Parliament.
Her constituency has the highest rate of
suicides in the country. She says she often
feels ‘close to tears’ after her surgeries with
people in crisis, often as a result of govern-
ment policies such as benefit cuts and the
rather clunky introduction of universal
credit. ‘I do feel genuinely sick and frus-
trated and, yes, angry. But really upset thatthere can be this picture painted that is so
starkly removed from what I’m seeing in my
constituency.’ She is in politics both to con-
front stereotypes and those who she thinks
propagate stereotypes.
But here is the puzzle: Pidcock may be
appalled at some ‘nasty party’ Tories who
are relying on stereotypes of the people she
represents. But might she, now, be relying
on a stereotype of a Tory? It isn’t just that
Pidcock doesn’t want to go drinking with
Conservatives. She doesn’t seem to want to
do much drinking (whether coffee or wine)
with anyone. She mentions the importance
of ‘professionalism’ throughout our inter-
view, and ends up admitting that she doesn’t
really socialise with politicians of any politi-
cal persuasion. ‘I want to reach out more
because I don’t really socialise much,’ she
says. ‘I’m just so insistent on doing a good
job and I don’t know if they [her fellow MPs]
are all off having a good time.’
She has said already in the chamber that
she finds the place ‘intimidating’ — and it
isn’t unusual for a new MP to pitch
themselves as standing outside the
system. But Pidcock doesn’t seem to
want to enter it at all, save in a pro-
fessional capacity. She even believes
that she and other Labour MPs with
strong northern accents, like her col-
league Angela Rayner, are treat-
ed like ‘exotic creatures’ merely
because of the way they speak, not
what they say.
Is this just a new MP sounding a
bit earnest? Perhaps, but normally
newly elected folk like to emphasise
the camaraderie in their intake, rath-
er than suggesting, as Pidcock does,
that they see each working day in
Parliament as a ‘shift’ and save their
energy and time for their friends at
home. It might actually be that Pid-
cock’s refusal to be friends with
Tories has as much to do with being a
‘swot’ as it does with her discomfort
about their beliefs.
It will be interesting to see wheth-
er she keeps this up, or whether she
finds drinks and dinners with unlike-
minded colleagues help her get
things done. But my more immedi-
ate concern is whether, having had a cof-
fee and an hour’s interview with me, she
would want to be my friend. She bursts
out laughing. ‘I’m sure there’s humanity in
you, Isabel,’ she jokes. ‘From what I gather
from you, you are a very genuine person
or I wouldn’t have agreed to do the inter-
view.’ I’m happy to take the compliment,
but I don’t think this makes me particularly
unusual in Parliament.
Indeed, I wonder whether if Pidcock
ends up accidentally having a coffee with
a real-life Tory MP she might find there’s
humanity in them, too. She might even find
she wants to be their friend.H
ave you heard the one about the
new Labour MP who refuses to be
friends with Tories? When Laura
Pidcock dropped into an interview with a
left-wing website that she has ‘absolutely no
intention of being friends with’ any Tories,
she was surprised by the fuss that followed.
It might have seemed odd to her, but with-
in Parliament it’s well known that friend-
ships that cross the divide spring
up the whole time. Sometimes it’s
personal: Kezia Dugdale, leader of
the Scottish Labour Party, caused
headlines when she started dating
a nationalist MSP. But more often,
political: to achieve something, MPs
from different parties often have to
work together.
But the new member for North
West Durham sounds as if she is
appalled at the whole system. Her
first speech in the House of Com-
mons was a denunciation of it. ‘The
clothes, the language, the obsession
with hierarchies, control and domi-
nation, are symbolic of the system
at large,’ she told her fellow MPs.
Then she elaborated in her inter-
view, saying she’s ‘not interested in
being cosy’ with the Tories (or ‘the
enemy’), as she’s ‘disgusted at the
way they’re running this country
— it’s visceral’. It was such strong,
almost hateful language that I felt
a little nervous trotting up to her in
Parliament and asking if she’d like
to be interviewed by The Spectator.
The strangest thing about the
29-year-old is that, in person, there is no
trace of the angry tribalist. She’s constant-
ly smiling, giggling quite often, and has a
warmth to her that is so at odds with her
public image as to be rather discombobu-
lating. So what’s going on?
‘From a very, very young age I was
taught to see everything through a political
lens and through a class lens,’ she explains.
She attended anti-Thatcher protests in
her buggy and in her final year of prima-
ry school she recalls her parents celebrat-
ing Tony Blair’s landslide victory in the
1997 election. At secondary school she was
known as ‘the political one’ and a ‘swot’. ‘ICan we be friends?
Labour MP Laura Pidcock isn’t half as fierce as she seems
ISABEL HARDMAN