The Amazing Adventures of Hannah the Plumber

Hello trees, hello sky – hello, Hannah Spencer. All dressed up like a daffodil, the recently elected Green MP looks like she’s off to present a CBeebies show, and is apparently so wholesome that she makes Julie Andrews look like Julie Burchill. How extremely pleased the Greens must have been when she won the Gorton and Denton by-election in Manchester last month – proof at last that they’re not all mad and / or scary. But it’s nice to find out that she’s not perfect, and can fall prey to the sin of pride like so many of us. She told the Manchester Evening News recently: ‘I feel like I’ve already done more in the last two weeks, genuinely, than some MPs will do in six months or a year.’

Steady on, Mary Sue! These achievements, it seems, include delivering her maiden speech (to a Commons so sparsely attended that it resembled a Labour Party disco), in which she came out with salt-of-the-earthisms such as, ‘[W]here I’m from, we’re taught to look after each other’ and to ‘stick up for each other’. (This was only slightly undermined by the fact that Spencer once wrote in 2021 on Mumsnet that she was ‘glad’ to leave the area as it was full of ‘money-laundering takeaways’, according to the Telegraph.) ‘It’s in our blood and in our bones’, she told parliament, ‘we see each other as human’. Human as opposed to what – plant-pot holders? I’m always a bit suspicious of people claiming that a character trait is part of their actual bodily self – rather too blood-and-soil for my liking.

She then went all teary when reading out the names of women who allegedly inspired her (I noted that none of them had penises), before recovering and practically hugging herself with glee at, she says, the girls who went to school on International Women’s Day dressed as ‘Hannah the Plumber’ with ‘trademark hair’. Bit heteronormative – couldn’t they have dressed up as Eddie Izzard? And then there was the predictable shout out to ‘trans siblings’ and ‘Muslims’, but for some reason not to Muslim trans siblings.

In previous speeches, she has quoted children who have apparently said wise things to her – usually a sure sign of a phoney. This includes one child in her by-election acceptance speech, to whom she allegedly answered:

‘I promised you I would try and improve the world you are growing up in. I told you I am not perfect, but that I always try my best. I always try and do the right thing.’

In her Commons maiden speech, we got a long list of people who she was representing in parliament, only leaving out the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, for some reason. What did Uncle Tom Cobley ever do to her, to be so cruelly snubbed? ‘Thank you for putting your faith in this plumber’, she ended.

There’s been no shortage of praise for Spencer from all the usual suspects. The Guardian called the speech she made after her by-election victory ‘endearingly down to earth’ and ‘an object lesson in grace’. This is what we’ve come to expect from a newspaper that has such a tin ear that it recently ran a column describing a business founded by a British Jew having all its windows smashed as a harmless gesture of solidarity with Gaza. Never heard of Kristallnacht, you Hamas-humping clowns?

What else has the busy bee Hannah Spencer been up to in two weeks that her co-workers couldn’t do in a year? Well, she witnessed her first PMQs and called them a ‘pantomime’, whereas to anyone who appreciates democracy, they’re one of the most vital (and entertaining) features of it:

‘Even though I knew what it was going to be like, I think it’s actually worse than I was expecting. That whole façade that people put on, this theatre of playing a certain way. That’s not what we’re there for. We’re there because people have elected us to do the things that we told them.’

This, from a woman who belongs to the same party as Mothin Ali, who once hounded a local rabbi into hiding, and who, when he was elected to Leeds City Council in 2024, stood in front of a Palestinian flag shrieking:

‘We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!’

Was this pathetic performance a ‘pantomime’, too? Or was it sinister, rather than silly? Either way, that she can criticise PMQs while not raising a peep about this does confirm the suspicion that the lethal teaming of the silly and the sinister is currently happening in the Green Party above all other places.

In her exciting first fortnight as a right-proper politician, lend-a-hand Hannah also found herself given a police escort after ‘scuffles’ broke out at an ‘anti-racism’ event in Manchester at which she had been emoting. As the Manchester Evening News had it, she said becoming an MP has changed the way she thinks about ‘personal safety’: ‘There’s a strange feeling about knowing the things I took for granted before’, she explained. ‘Being able to feel safe – safe enough – when I was walking around, I just can’t do any more. That’s really hard.’ Sensitive Hannah felt ‘real sadness’ to see how ‘angry’ people had become – including those who accused her of lying about being a plumber, a piece of doubtlessly ‘fake news’ which at one point included the naughty altering of her Wikipedia page to inform us that she was born in Kensington and grew up riding ponies.

It’s been erased now, thank goodness, but the question mark over Hannah’s social origins just won’t go away. Maybe because, generally, working-class girls don’t tend to be selected by the Guardian as among the ‘best-dressed of the fest’ at Glastonbury, for the reason that most working-class people would never think it a hoot to wallow in their own filth. It’s the white middle and upper classes who go in for that kind of lark.

Spencer seems to think that if only the media could stop telling fibs, we’d all be joining hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ in Urdu. ‘Once upon a time we’d have been kids that played with each other’, she said in her Commons speech: ‘We’re all human, but some people have been exposed to a lot of misinformation and it’s making them really angry.’ Still, she’ll be struggling bravely on. ‘Just like I’ve given the energy to other jobs I’ve done – because I care about it and I want to get the work done – I’ll do that here’, she opined, upper lip barely quivering.

It’s fascinating the way that questions about Spencer’s social background won’t go away – and, I think, quite healthy, as it’s always good to be vocal when one smells a rat, even when the plumber’s already called and assured us there’s nothing to see here. The fascinating self-described ‘working-class academic’ Lisa Mckenzie still maintains that Spencer is not of the proletarian blood royale, despite the fact that she, until recently, got her hands dirty in a way that Mckenzie and indeed myself do not. I’m of the opinion that a great part of being working-class is having very low or no expectations. My parents did their best to remove my ambition from me, and they were lovely people. They just didn’t want me to get hurt. Growing up with ‘a thousand paper cuts every day’, as Mckenzie strikingly describes it. When I look at Spencer, I don’t get that feeling.

Still, it’s always nice to see a youngster living their dream, and I’m sure that Hannah’s never ridden a pony in her life, unless it was a pit-pony her dad brought home from t’mines and which she, like the earth-angel she is, nursed back to life. Let us mock no more at the fact that she keeps greyhounds – a fashion model’s idea of whippets. And let us snipe no longer that, if indeed she is the salt of the earth, it’s that pink Himalayan stuff that costs a fortune.

Let’s put carping aside and welcome to the bold, believable, real-life roster of Strong Female Role Models, from Rosie the Riveter to Dora the Explorer and now Hannah the Plumber. Even if she gets chucked out at the next election, think what a cracking CBeebies show it’ll make!

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.