6 hours ago
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Hannah Spencer presents nothing like a politician – open, frank, friendly, wearing hot-pink joggers. I don’t want to say I’ve never encountered these qualities in an MP, but I’ve never encountered them in the same person. Her house tells the story of her recent byelection victory. The path and the hall are filled with mostly empty cardboard boxes that once contained leaflets.
When Spencer, 34, won Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester for the Greens last month, there was a 26% swing from Labour. She won more than 40% of the vote, up 28 percentage points on the party’s performance in the 2024 general election. It was billed as a shock to the political establishment, a seismic blow to Labour (who were knocked into third place) and a reality check for Reform, who had peacocked their certain victory beforehand yet finished a distant second. But it wasn’t that much of a surprise to the Greens.
“I think we knew from the outset that we could win it,” says Spencer. “There were different points throughout the campaign – wow, people were so angry at Labour. I knew that, and I felt it, but only while I was campaigning did I get how much their support had fallen.”
It all happened at a sprint. The incumbent MP, Andrew Gwynne, resigned in January for health reasons, but it was implicitly timed so that Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, could stand. When he was blocked from doing so by Labour’s leadership, even commentators who were calling that an open goal for Reform started wondering whom Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party of England and Wales, would select to stand. “And he said: ‘I’m not choosing anyone. I’m not involved; the local party members decide.’” They chose Spencer. The two other candidates campaigned for her: “I’d have done the same for them, if they’d got selected.”
After a ground campaign so ugly that I couldn’t believe it until I saw the proof – a van emblazoned with a picture of Spencer and Polanski, claiming they wanted to “teach our children to use drugs including crack and heroin and let our daughters be used for legal prostitution”, driving around the constituency the day before the election – the Greens had another MP in parliament, bringing the total to five for the first time ever.
All anyone knew about Spencer before the campaign was that she was a plumber who loved greyhounds. People call her “ordinary”, but in truth she is unusual: an extremely atypical plumber, certainly, as well as an autodidact plasterer. (As an aside, the greyhounds – she has four – are enormous. Sitting with them as I talk to Spencer is like being circled by friendly sharks.) Spencer’s election will force a number of conversations in the commentariat and I hope one of them is about decoding its language. Often, “ordinary” is used to mean “not posh”.
Spencer grew up in Bolton, one of four children in a two-parent household: “I’m from a very hard-working family; grafters.” I had to crowbar that scant information from her – she didn’t want to talk about her private life at all. Her reticence is due to the fact that family members have been contacted by the press and doorstepped. Polanski, who has been very open about his divorced parents, has had the same, while Spencer’s ex-boyfriend has been portrayed as “the multimillionaire chief executive of AstraZeneca when he absolutely isn’t”. (He is a scientist at the pharmaceutical company.)
And then there is the social-media cesspit. One greyhound-walking friend had to take down a picture of herself, Spencer and the dogs from a dating app. Spencer won’t say whether or not she has a partner: “I signed up for this, but they didn’t. Nobody deserves it if they didn’t choose it.”
The media puts a remarkable amount of effort into showing that progressive politicians aren’t who they say they are. Polanski is from a “jet-setting” family (according to the Daily Mail); Spencer isn’t really a plumber (according to accounts on X, probably bots “that were paid for by someone, somewhere”). I’m struck by this pincer movement of delegitimisation and hassle. It creates an environment whereby no one normal would want to enter politics. “But I think [detractors] just don’t realise who I am. Every person who’s told me: ‘You’ll never be a plumber,’ ‘You’ll never lift that radiator,’ ‘You’ll never lift that bag of plaster;’ feed that to me, because that’s the motivation that I need to show you that I’m absolutely capable of doing this.”
Spencer had a happy, uneventful life in “nice schools in Bolton” until she was about 12 or 13, “when everyone’s starting to get their head down and thinking about mocks. I was swimming against the tide. I just felt myself getting left behind. I remember my friends getting together to revise and I either wouldn’t go or I wouldn’t be invited.
“A lot of my school reports said: ‘You’re not reaching your potential,’ but what is potential? I look back now and I think I have reached my potential. I think leaving school at 16, getting a trade and doing it – how could I not have reached my potential?”
There are two routes into plumbing. One is an apprenticeship, which she didn’t get: “They were obviously so unimpressed with a 16-year-old girl. They said something about me wearing a short skirt. I was dressed really smartly – my skirt wasn’t even that short – and they said something about distracting the boys. At that age, I really took that in.”
The other is further education. She qualified at Bolton College, did work experience for a housing association, worked for a plumbing company and then set up on her own, Hannah’s Household Plumbing. She wasn’t conventionally political in her 20s, although she argues that simply being a woman in construction is a rebellious act. “I’ve heard people on the phone to the company saying: ‘Are you sure it’s her you meant to send? Is anyone coming with her? Will someone be coming back at the end to check her work?’ And my manager would be going: ‘No, of course they won’t.’
“But we all have prejudices; I enjoyed challenging them. I can see where I’ve been ignorant in the past. We just have to be patient with each other. We can’t expect everybody to have lived the same life as we’ve had.”
The plumbing has been a can of worms. Even when she became a councillor in Trafford, in 2023, “the Tories were saying I didn’t have a proper job. The Conservative group leader at the council – he’s a landlord with however many houses. Whatever you think about that, he thought that I didn’t do a proper job. Good job getting your houses checked [by a tradesperson] when you look down your nose at all the people who keep this country turning. They’re the people in charge, they’re the people that make the decisions, they’re the people that run the country. It’s alarming.”
During the campaign, she invited Reform’s candidate, Matt Goodwin, to do a day’s work with her. “I said: ‘I’d just love for you to genuinely see what it’s like, experience a day in people’s lives. Doing work. Getting your hands dirty.’” What did he say? She laughs. “He didn’t say anything.” Time and again, Spencer’s plumbing hinterland unearthed nothing except a reflexive contempt the old-right had for manual work, which played into her hands. “The common ground that a lot of us have, that anger and that frustration, boils down to the same thing. It’s being treated like shit by people who are absolutely laughing at us.”
Then the rumours started that she wasn’t a plumber. She can laugh at them now – the first thing she did when she got elected to parliament was hang her qualifications in her constituency office – but many of the consequences weren’t funny. “I’ve had quite a few awful, scary incidents with people,” she says. “They’ve turned up to stuff and been screaming in my face: ‘You’re not a plumber!’ Because they feel like they’ve been lied to. These people have been fed misinformation constantly and now they really believe it.”
The smears on X have “filtered through to local Facebook community groups, where people get a lot of their information from”, she says. “That’s what I genuinely find most upsetting and most worrying about what’s happened to our democracy. We can disagree with each other and hold each other to account and challenge each other; that’s absolutely fine. But how do you counter the misinformation when it’s so wrong and it spreads so quickly?”
Recently, she was at a rally that turned violent; she can’t say too much because it’s an open police investigation. “But the people who were screaming at me – we probably have quite a lot in common. We could have played together as kids and we probably would work together now – and they’re playing out the internet lines of the super-rich.” She sounds businesslike, not despairing.
Then the dogs catch something and slope over in a kind of supportive huddle. Forest sits on my knee. (Again, it’s hard to overstate how gigantic a greyhound is.) It’s apposite that the dogs should intervene, because Spencer’s origin story begins with her first greyhound, Graham (RIP). She started leafleting outside the nearby Belle Vue dog track. “I was saying: ‘Look, do you know how badly these dogs are treated?’ A lot of people didn’t know. That track got closed [in 2020], which felt massive.”
That was the gateway. Beyond the harm to dogs, “there’s a harm to humans through gambling. I thought: hang on a minute. Why does our high street have loads of betting shops on it and some high streets don’t? Why do a lot of my colleagues have gambling addictions? A friend I worked with then would have lost all his wages by dinner time on a Friday, the day we’d been paid. These gambling companies target working-class people and it’s parasitic.”
Looking at the system to see which bits aren’t working? Sounds a lot like a plumber. “Why can’t we ban greyhound racing? Well, we can’t because the MPs are lobbied by the gambling industry and they take donations from them. All these things that don’t happen in the Green party.”
Covid was another turning point. “I just saw what happens when you have politicians who aren’t like us, making the rules and breaking the rules. The vast majority of people were willing to sacrifice an awful lot to look after people, even people they didn’t know. We were doing that because we really care about each other, while the super-rich gave out contracts to each other for dodgy PPE. How did these people do so well while so many people died alone?”
But it was also personal. She had gone back to college to get a gas-fitting certificate (“at 27, in a class full of 16-year-old boys; it was so funny”). Even though the pubs were open by the time she finished the course, further-education colleges weren’t. “So I couldn’t do my end‑point assessment, which meant I couldn’t work.” She rang the minister for apprenticeships, the Conservative Gillian Keegan, on a radio phone-in, then chased her the week after. Keegan agreed to raise it in parliament. “And she got all the details of it wrong. I thought: my life is in this woman’s hands, and there must be thousands of people in my shoes, and she doesn’t even understand the system that she’s in charge of. These people don’t know what day of the week it is half the time.”
Spencer is brusque about career politicians: “Politics at uni, work for an MP, become an MP. If you have a handful of people who’ve done it that way, absolutely fine. But at the moment, there’s way too many like that and they lose themselves along the way.”
If you distill her politics to one principle, it’s that you should never have to leave anywhere to have a good life. “Towns like Bolton have been absolutely shat on. After a decade and a half of austerity, under the Conservatives and Labour, no wonder people feel like they have to leave,” she says. “But I don’t want that any more. I don’t want that for me and I don’t want that for other people.”
She thinks student debt is a rip-off and the housing market is rigged; the climate crisis won’t be fixed by people who don’t care about others and “the climate movement is in grave danger if we don’t get people in who believe that the crisis is happening, which far too many politicians apparently don’t”. She thinks it’s “an absolute scandal that having a bit more money gets you not just a nicer high street – it gets you a longer life expectancy, it gets you cleaner air.
“This is fixable. We just haven’t got people who care enough about other people to make the changes.”
I don’t want to say it’s not rocket science, but it isn’t. None of this is novel, or even really arguable. Plenty of people, even Tories during their “levelling up” fever dream, have made similar points. Politics thrashes around on a fundamental binary of diagnosis and prescription (is it immigrants stealing your jobs or billionaires stealing your livelihood?), but in the space where a lot of people are saying the same thing, it’s come down to credibility. Do they really believe what they say they believe?
I don’t want to editorialise, so I’ll leave it like this: Hannah Spencer is definitely a plumber and she definitely taught herself to plaster. She learned on her own walls; I’ve seen them.
