Sarah Champion MP: 'The job is fabulous. The lifestyle is living hell'

Sarah Champion never meant to be an MP. Yet in the space of a month towards the end of 2012, she went from running a children’s hospice in Rotherham to representing the South Yorkshire town at Westminster. Friends, including the Derbyshire MP Natascha Engel, said she’d make a good parliamentarian, but, says the chirpy 45-year-old, “it was like being told: ‘Sarah, you’d make a great astronaut.’ Very funny, never going to happen.”

Then Denis MacShane resigned after being caught fiddling his expenses and a hasty byelection was called. The child sexual exploitation (CSE) scandal which was to later engulf the town was already bubbling under. In the Times, Andrew Norfolk had reported that misplaced political correctness had allowed gangs of predominantly Asian men to abuse hundreds of girls in Rotherham and other northern towns. The British National Party had already been campaigning on it locally, following the prosecution of five men in 2010.

By the time the byelection was in full swing, Ukip were making hay in Rotherham after two of their local supporters claimed they had been told by the Labour-run council they could not foster eastern European Roma children because of their political allegiances. Labour realised it needed a clean candidate, someone with no connections at all to local politics. Suddenly, the fact Champion had only joined the party in 2010 was to be shouted about, not covered up. Never mind that she didn’t know what hustings were and hadn’t even visited parliament as a tourist; Champion was deemed so saintly, Labour nicknamed her “Mother Teresa”, she says.

“I think that because of the controversial way that Denis left, they wanted someone who really wasn’t political, who really didn’t have any potential skeletons in any cupboards,” says Champion, above a soundtrack of constantly ringing phones in her constituency office on Friday. Champion is much in demand right now, partly thanks to her starring appearance on the BBC2 documentary Inside the Commons last week. Juxtaposed with some of parliament’s dinosaurs, she was a breath of fresh air – likeable, relatable, a shock of Cruella de Vil waves in a sea of bald heads.

But beneath the sunny exterior is a steel skeleton. Nothing was made easy for Champion in Rotherham. Her election campaign may have been short, but it was tough. Even after she won – with a majority of 5,318 – she was not made welcome.

More than half of local Labour party members, led by the then deputy council leader, Jahangir Akhtar (described by the Casey report last week as as an intimidating and “powerful figure” in Rotherham politics, thought to have “influence that extended to the police”) walked out of her selection meeting to protest the absence of local councillor Mahroof Hussain from the shortlist. Hussain, who held the community cohesion brief in Rotherham, was made MBE in 2008 for services to local government; last week, he became one of the members of cabinet forced to resign en masse from Rotherham council..

“The leader of the council, Roger Stone, told me he was going to treat me as an opposition MP,” says Champion. “He was a sexist bully. I think one of the problems is that people haven’t got any baggage on me, they haven’t got any levers on me. I’m genuinely trying to be here for the people of Rotherham. I don’t play party-political games. I don’t collude. If something’s wrong, I’ll say it’s wrong, so I think when he was having a fiefdom that he controlled every aspect of, to have this loose cannon running around – and she’s a bloody woman as well – I can see why, in his reality, it was a real threat.”

Stone resigned last August, on the day Professor Alexis Jay published her report into CSE in Rotherham. Last week’s Casey report described him as a powerful leader who presided over a “sexist, bullying culture”. Right until he handed in his notice, Champion says obstacles were put in her way. She claims she was deliberately not invited to key events, that she received no council press releases, and that she was turned away from the door when she tried to attend the press conference on Jay’s report.

“I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown because of the scale and the level of depravity,” she says of the report. “It happens in films, it doesn’t happen in real life”. She soon heard first-hand from victims the brutal truth of their abuse when they started queueing up outside her office, begging for assistance. Some were still living on the same street as the men who abused them.

Champion realised she needed help, and wrote an SOS to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa), which authorises payments to MPs. “I said, ‘look, I have to get a worker otherwise I am genuinely going to go insane.’ I think I put: ‘Please help me!’.” In October, she got the best-informed assistant she could have hoped for in Jayne Senior, whom she describes as “the real hero of this story”. Senior was a manager at Risky Business, the first public service in Rotherham to identify and support young people involved in child sexual exploitation, which was shut down by the council in 2011.

Gaining Senior’s trust was not easy – she was terrified of repercussions and insisted her first meeting with Champion was “on a barge, literally in the middle of nowhere”. She joined Champion’s office in mid-October and now sees up to 10 victims a week. Senior has gone through all of her old Risky Business files and identified 1,700 victims, says Champion. Yet the MP does not seem confident that the abusers will be brought to justice, complaining of “crass policing” and saying she is worried that the perpetrators could flee the country before facing court.

She complains that some of the most recent policing is “from the 1970s”, detailing how just before Christmas police officers in uniform decided to cold call on 300 women who had all previously accused the same men of abusing them. Many of these women had moved on and now had children of their own, some fathered by their abusers.The police approach was retrograde, suggests Champion: “Can you imagine, five years on, police knocking on your door, in uniform? These are bobbies on the beat, these aren’t victim support people. ‘We believe you were abused in 2011. Is that true? Hello?’ What happened is the girls slam the door in their faces and the police think, ‘oh, she’s just a bitch, so she’s not helping.’”

Contacted by the Guardian, South Yorkshire police declined to respond to Champion’s allegations, but said in a statement: “South Yorkshire Police takes victim care and support extremely seriously and we have dedicated, specially trained officers and staff working with victims of sexual exploitation.”

Dealing with the fall out of the CSE scandal takes up much of Champion’s day-to-day life. Senior counsels the victims while she harangues the council, the police and David Cameron. It can be slow, painstaking work. On the BBC show last week, she was jubilant after getting one word changed in the grooming law, so that now police can intervene after they have proof someone has groomed a child once (and not twice, as before). This small victory was nine months in the making, she says.

Unsurprisingly, dealing so intensively with such harrowing cases has taken its toll. Does it damage your personal life, being an MP, I ask? Her answer is unequivocal: “It destroys your personal life. You don’t have a personal life. At all. You can’t. It’s a nightmare.” She is not married but I ask if she has a partner. “I did have when I came into this job, but it got completely blown out of the water,” she says, adding that she doesn’t know how colleagues with children manage. “I don’t think they can. They are constantly pulled, constantly guilty.”

She continues: “You get into a cycle, you’re working really hard, so you stop seeing your friends. Then, because you stop seeing your friends you throw yourself into work and the whole thing perpetuates.At Christmas, I actually took a week off, it’s the first time I’ve had a full week off, my friends were like, ‘who the hell are you?’. Things like Twitter and 24-hour-news means you are always working. It’s horrendous. The job is fabulous. The lifestyle is living hell.”

No wonder she has vowed to only serve two terms – assuming she can keep the Ukip threat at bay in Rotherham. “My plan is to do another five years and then go. I don’t think it’s healthy to be there for too long. Because the longer you’re there, the more distant you get from reality.”