Hannah Spencer: ‘MPs tell me I’ll get used to Westminster. I hope I never do’

Photographs by Tom Pilston for The Observer

We meet at the charming Grounded MCR cafe, which serves a tasty “grandad’s sausage butty” and advertises itself as “dog friendly”. That’s fortunate because Hannah Spencer has brought along her posse of four greyhounds. She introduces me to “the gang”: Forest, Judy, Olive and Will. Will has been given a starring role in a party political broadcast for the Greens. Weren’t the other three put out? “He is the most compliant. He generally sniffs less. He just gets on with it,” she explains. “So he was the right choice.”

The Green’s fifth and newest MP unseated Labour and saw off Reform in a byelection spectacular in the Manchester suburbs at the end of February. The plumber turned MP, who turns 35 on Sunday, has chosen Cringle Park in the Levenshulme area of her Gorton and Denton constituency for our walk because “it’s a beautiful park” which is busy with “all different people, just muddling along together”.

She adopted her first greyhound nine years ago: “We came into each other’s lives when we were both struggling,” she says. It changed her view of the world. “It opened my eyes to a lot of things that are wrong with society. I didn’t know how much greyhound racing really was responsible for hooking people on gambling and I didn’t really question a lot of stuff until I got him.”

She’d ban greyhound racing? “A hundred per cent, yeah,” she replies. “It causes misery to so many people and to so many dogs.”

Some would scorn a ban as typical of the Greens wanting to rob other people of their pleasures. As the dogs nose round the park at a leisurely pace, she counters: “We’re not in a world of 100 years ago where people used to have a couple of dogs that they’d take to the tracks on a Friday night. My auntie had greyhounds that she used to race. She used to sew them little racing vests. They lived with her, they were pets that she would have a go at making some money on. But now you’ve got trainers who own, like, hundreds of dogs who they race constantly.”

She warms to her theme: “It’s exploitative of the dogs. Exploitative of people, as I’ve known many people with gambling addiction.”

Our conversation is occasionally interrupted by other dog-walkers. One does a double-take before exclaiming: “Oh, it’s you!” Spencer has been an MP for nearly two months but her profile punches above the average newbie, especially among the young, in part thanks to her flair with social media. She has 353,000 followers on Instagram where she posts under the handle @hannahtheplumbermcr, also her TikTok moniker.

The colourful outfit she wore to deliver her maiden speech triggered some unpleasant sniping. “I was wearing smart trousers. I hadn’t turned up in dirty clothes,” she points out. “We’ve trusted the middle-aged men in dusty suits who’ve all come from the same place. Look at Covid. Where did that get us? If it’s clothes that’s the biggest criticism, I’m probably kind of doing all right.”

To the sound of children enjoying themselves in the park, she talks about the playground she has joined in SW1. “You know, it’s interesting, because well-meaning MPs keep telling me ‘You’ll get used to this place’, and I think, do you know what – I hope I never get used to it. It is so strange. It’s broken, it’s so backwards. The day you stop questioning all that, and fitting in, is the day that you’ve lost touch.” Her most piercing criticism is about the sheer amateurism of the Commons.

“It’s a workplace. It should be treated as such, but there’s just a lot of things that are so unprofessional: people jeering at each other… These joke insults.” In common with many of the novice MPs I’ve met over the years, she’s finding it weird in the world of Westminster. “They have a members’ tea room. And there’s these seating arrangements, and it’s like ‘Oh, you mustn’t sit there.”

The voting system is “bonkers”. “That bell that rings and everyone’s got to leg it from wherever you are in the building… How can you not just, like, vote online where you are?”

I agree that it seems antiquated that MPs have to dash to the division lobbies, but I offer one defence of the ritual. It gives the humble backbencher the chance to grab the elbow of mighty ministers and bend their ears.

“OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK.” She seems to take the point and then decides she doesn’t. “Yeah, but then you could tackle that in another way by making them more accessible in other settings. Maybe by letting them sit next to each other in the tea room.” She’s got a dry wit about her.

People have been welcoming, but “I’m not there to make friends. I’m there to do a job and I’m there to serve people here.”

You can’t expect people to get on board in the climate movement if they can’t see past where their kids are going to get their next meal fromShe isn’t one of those politicians who started fantasising about being prime minister when they were at primary school. “It was never in my plan [to become an MP] partly because I thought I never could.” But she’d lived and worked in the constituency and “it’s the biggest honour of my life to do this, to see the difference that you can make is incredible”. She’s a backbench MP and her party is not in power. Can she really make that much difference? “You can’t under-estimate the power of having good people in opposition,” she responds. “Five Green MPs is a lot more than five Labour MPs.”

Why does she think that? “Because they’re just lost in a big sea of the party that tells them what to do. So it’s harder for them to stand up.”

Her disdain for Labour, which she accuses of presiding over “austerity”, is unrestrained. “I can’t describe how much people are just fizzing with upset and rage about what the Labour party have done.”

A flock of people who were Labour policy and media advisers when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn are now gravitating towards the Greens. “People are just noticing that party was once something, now it isn’t that anymore, and they’re moving to us.”

Was Corbyn a good leader of the Labour party? She swerves this one by pleading ignorance: “To be honest, I was not political really at that time… I wasn’t following politics closely.”

For Labour to recover its standing – “It would have to take a completely new leader, and a completely new set of people to regain that trust… it would have to have an absolute overhaul.”

I bring up Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, who might have been her opponent in the byelection had he not been blocked. Would he make a more appealing Labour leader? “I think people recognise that he’s done good things,” she starts warmly, then goes for his jugular. “He was really distancing himself from the Labour party, and he does that a lot, and I think, hang on… there’s only so far you can distance yourself, but still be in something.”

The Greens have profited from Labour’s unpopularity by gaining members and surging in the polls. They hope for a lot of success in the May elections. But shouldn’t they be nervous that this is mid-term protest voting that will evaporate when the country next has to choose a government? “I don’t think it is a protest vote at all,” she responds. “People are seeing much more about our policies.”

Opponents are beginning to target those policies, which include eye-wateringly expensive spending promises. How will they be funded without sending the bond markets into meltdown? She mentions wealth taxes. I point out that many countries have tried that only then to abandon it. “We can look at countries that have done that really well. We can look at places where it’s not worked.”

She makes a similar defence of her party’s plan to bring in rent controls. “We can look at models where it’s worked and hasn’t worked and do something unique for this place to stop spiralling rents.”

The Greens would get rid of the nuclear deterrent and their leader has advocated quitting Nato. Is that sensible in such a menacing world? “I think the argument for reforming it, whether that’s in it or out of it, is really valid.” What sort of reform? “Yeah, it’s tricky,” she responds with a slight sigh of discomfort. Pressed a bit more, she says: “I don’t think I could come up with a model now of how we replace it until we accept that we need a different way of doing things.”

Anger about Gaza helped power her to victory in a constituency with a significant proportion of Muslim voters. Will she at least give Keir Starmer some credit for breaking with Donald Trump over the US conflict with Iran? Not likely. “What has happened now with Trump is a result of people not standing up to him sooner. We’ve just not called him out.”

Since Zack Polanski became leader, the Greens have concentrated on cost of living issues and seemed to focus less on the climate crisis. The most striking lines in her victory speech at the byelection count were about “being bled dry” by billionaires and people’s thwarted desires to have “a nice life”. Her constituency is one of the most deprived in the country and she’s more sensitive than some fellow Greens to why the less affluent can be resistant to measures to combat the climate crisis.

“You can’t expect people to get on board in the climate movement if they can’t see past where their kids are going to get their next meal from.”

The dogs have been impeccably behaved, but they suddenly get a bit lively. “Ah-ah,” she says. “They’ve seen a squirrel.”

Keir Starmer says it is “disgusting” that the Greens want it to be legal for his teenage son to be able to buy crack cocaine and heroin when he turns 18. “I think any politician who can come out with that line is just so out of touch about the realities of what is available to kids these days anyway. You can access anything in a WhatsApp group anywhere,” she scoffs. “I would worry about how in touch he is with his kids if he can’t see that that’s already a risk.”

She grew up in Bolton and says her childhood was happy. She has three siblings, but doesn’t want to talk about them or about mum and dad or whether or not she has a partner. We know she was brought up by two parents – her mother, a nurse – and that Spencer’s ex-boyfriend, who she shared a house with until recently, was a scientist for the pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca.

“I don’t talk about my family,” she says. She fears the levels of intrusion and abuse it might trigger. “It’s really sad because I can’t talk about a lot of things. I’m putting a target on anyone when I talk about them.”

During the byelection campaign, antagonists falsely portrayed her as a fake plumber who lived in a mansion. Did that hurt? “Yeah, it did. Certainly the job stuff.” She’s put up her plumbing qualifications in her constituency office, but she’s still had people attacking her in the streets. “I’ve had people who are really angry, who think that they’ve been conned,” she says.

“I worked so hard to get into that industry and stay in that industry. It’s hard, it’s a hard place to work. And now people don’t believe that I ever did it. They don’t think I ever got my hands dirty.”

She’d introduce a regime of fines for social media companies that propagate misinformation. “You could have the same limits on people like I’ve had in my industry. When I was a gas engineer, if I caused harm or did an action that would kill someone, I would go to prison, and yet we have kids taking their own lives because of something they’ve seen on social media.”

In her maiden parliamentary speech, she said something quite unusual for an MP: “I know what it feels like to be looked down on, to be let down and left behind.”

She “really struggled” at school, left after her GCSEs at 16 and decided to be a plumber, going to Bolton College when she failed to get an apprenticeship. Were there plumbers in the family? “Not really, no.” But “I have a practical side to me” and “growing up, I was always somewhere where things were being fixed.” She encountered people who couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a female plumber, and found it odd. “I’m, like, so I’m gonna do it more now. Why don’t girls do it? Why can’t I do it? Why can I not do what everyone else is doing?” When she learned plumbing, and later gas engineering and plastering, “I was always the only girl on the course.”

“My background is very working class,” she says. “And I still spend so much of my time with people who are very working class.” I remark that the Commons has become much more middle class than it once was. “I do think it’s a shame, because I just think you can’t expect the best decisions to be made if you’re not having all of the people around the table. If you fill that place with 650 plumbers, you’re not going to get the best decisions. You need a mixture.”

Hannah Spencer is not your archetypal Green. She prefers a pasty from Greggs to tofu. “I love my car,” she says, and it is a petrol estate large enough to accommodate four greyhounds and 3m lengths of copper. “I’d love to use it less.” When she’s looking to have fun, “I like a gig. Probably drinks at someone’s house and then going out for a dance. That’s a good night.” But she’s also a homebody. “To be honest, I like a night in. If my friends come to mine, we watch Corrie on the sofa. I love that.” As I say, not your archetypal Green.

Additional photograph by Ryan Jenkinson/Getty Images