When Hannah Spencer accepted her new role as the Green Party MP for Gorton and Denton in the early hours of Friday morning, she also had an apology to share. “To my customers, I’m sorry, but I think I might have to cancel the work that you had booked in, because I’m heading to Parliament,” she said. Afterwards, there may well have been plenty of Manchester households clamouring to find someone new to fix their pipes or fit their heat pump.
Not your average political victory speech, then. But Spencer, who managed to win 41 per cent of the vote in the long-time Labour stronghold in Greater Manchester, beating Reform to become the Green Party’s fifth MP and their first ever candidate to win a by-election in the process, is not your average politician. And that is undoubtedly a huge part of her appeal.
At 34 years old, hailing from a working-class background, and as someone who is trained as a plumber, Spencer will be something of a rarity in the Commons, dominated as it is by older, middle-class MPs, many of whom are career politicians, who took the time-honoured route to power (a PPE degree followed by a think tank job).
In fact, any one of those traits would make her pretty unusual in Westminster. Never mind the fact that she initially got into politics because she wanted to ban dog racing. Or that she adopts greyhounds (she currently has four of them: Olive, Judy, Forest and Will). Or that until a fortnight ago, she was juggling campaigning with getting up at the crack of dawn to drive down to Stoke for her plastering course (according to The Guardian, her fellow students added a sign to her workbench which read: “Ministry of Plastering and Plumbing – Hannah Spencer MP”).
But Spencer also feels like far more than the sum of these quirks. Her authenticity is striking (and certainly makes Starmer’s ever-repeated soundbites about being the son of a toolmaker sound even more wooden by comparison), and she is clearly a great communicator, largely by virtue of… just speaking straightforwardly.
And in a political era where it’s so common for would-be star candidates to get parachuted into constituencies they have no real passion for, purely based on polling, it is heartening to see someone with a connection to the area succeed.
Spencer was born in Bolton and dropped out of school after her GCSEs, before eventually going on to launch her plumbing business and branch out into installing heat pumps. She is, she has said, very proud of those working-class roots, and has vowed to represent people from similar backgrounds when she gets to Westminster. “We know how it feels to be looked down on, maybe because we didn’t do well at school, maybe because we do dirty manual jobs, because we are shut out of places we should be in,” she has said.
She only entered politics a few years ago, when she was elected as a councillor for Hale (a much posher Manchester suburb) in 2023. The following year, she ran as the Green Party’s candidate in the Greater Manchester mayoral election, ending up in fifth place.
While so many politicians strain to come off as relatable (or even just vaguely human), Spencer has this nailed, probably because she’s not trying to be anyone else. “People do keep saying, ‘You’re so relatable,’ and I think: ‘I’m no different to most people just walking down the street,’” she told Green leader Zack Polanski on his podcast, Bold Politics. “But what is rare is that any of us ever manage to get into politics. And that’s the difference.”
Instead of speaking in intangible soundbites about policy, her campaign saw her zero in on the cost of living as a major concern. This, she has said, came as a result of her nine-to-five in plumbing, where she’d constantly be in and out of people’s homes, speaking to them and hearing their worries: the boilers that haven’t been turned on all winter because of skyrocketing utility bills, for example. Her image is of someone who “gets it” because she’s lived it, as opposed to someone who spends their days having chummy lunches with wealthy stakeholders and then trots out a tired soundbite about “hard-working people”.
Focusing on, say, rising bills and rent controls rather than some of the Green Party’s trademark environmental policies was certainly a canny approach at a time when, frankly, many are so worn down by the sheer expense of existing that thinking properly about a greener future can feel a bit like a luxury. “I’m fighting for lower bills, for neighbourhoods scarred by austerity and underinvestment, and to stop the privatisation of the NHS,” Spencer wrote ahead of the by-election. “I’ve felt many of the pressures my neighbours face, which is why I’m determined to take their voices to parliament.”
This emphasis will almost certainly have helped win over younger voters in my age bracket. People in their twenties and thirties are largely bearing the brunt of the cost of living crisis, stuck endlessly renting while their pay stagnates and their elders berate them for living out some sort of suspended adolescence.
Most of us, I reckon, aren’t looking to find a convenient scapegoat for these problems; we just want the needle to move in the right direction and feel a bit – whisper it – hopeful, rather than getting roundly slagged off for not having kids or not living an entirely monastic life in order to scrape together a house deposit. “I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think working hard should get you a nice life,” Spencer said in her victory speech.
It was perhaps inevitable, though, that Spencer’s authenticity would be called into question. After all, it can sometimes feel like there’s nothing the British love more than assessing whether someone who identifies as working class does, in fact, meet some austere and ideologically perfect definition of that demographic, and pulling off a “gotcha!” moment when said person fails to stand up to that criteria.
And so Spencer ended up having her credentials put under the microscope and being painted by her detractors as some kind of “fake plumber”. “I’ve been a plumber for nearly 20 years,” she told the New Statesman in February. “What do they want, to see a toilet I’ve fixed?” It was a throwaway, but clever response that only doubled down on that sense of relatability. It’s hard to imagine a more establishment candidate offering that kind of retort; the undercurrent of slightly exasperated humour feels very northern, too.
Her critics, meanwhile, have accused the Greens of attempting to stir up division during the campaign, too, by appealing to Muslim voters over the war in Gaza and releasing a video in Urdu featuring a photo of Starmer with the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist. Spencer, for her part, described those claims as “disappointing”, and stressed that she had reached out to “tens of thousands of people across the constituency”.
In a by-election that has been branded one of the most fraught in recent memory, this hasn’t been the only bit of mud-slinging directed at her. Spencer’s living arrangements were also cited as some kind of black mark against her working-class credentials, when it emerged that she owns two homes, including one in leafy Altrincham that seemed to morph – in the minds of her critics, at least – into some kind of mega-mansion as the campaign went on. While the right-wing press slammed her as a hypocrite, this narrative was debunked in a snappily titled piece from the Manchester Evening News, which aimed to clear up the whole palaver with the Ronseal headline of: “No, Hannah Spencer doesn’t live in a massive house with a weird chimney.”
And her former partner even got dragged into the misinformation, when it was claimed that she was married to a top executive at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca (her ex did work there, but as a scientist, and although they bought that much-discussed Altrincham home together, they were never married). She brushed off rumours of this wealthy husband on the campaign trail with a snappy: “I can’t even get a text back.”
Relatable without feeling forced – this is textbook Spencer and the kind of normal-speaking politician the country craves. They are the hopeful antidote to the stale and wooden performances coming out of Westminster that feel so utterly hopeless. It isn’t about being northern and working class, it is about connecting with how most of the country are feeling. These are the “fresh-air” politicians whose party you want to go to because you feel like it might be fun, even when things are hard.
After her historic victory, all eyes will certainly be on her as she hops on the Avanti Pendolino from Manchester Piccadilly to kickstart her Westminster career. But before that, she’ll be celebrating. With karaoke, of course.
