It’s Budget Day when I meet Sarah Champion for our interview in Westminster and George Osborne is already on his feet. ‘Shouldn’t you be in there?’ I ask, as we pass a TV monitor.

She laughs: ‘I wouldn’t even get a seat.’ But then Champion isn’t in Parliament for the set pieces; the pomp and ancient protocol still bemuse her.

Elected in 2012 as the Labour MP for Rotherham, she still feels a newbie, an outsider even in her own party. She is that rarest creature in politics: an ‘ordinary’ person who never wanted to be an MP.

Indeed Champion, 45, doesn’t come over like a politician. She answers questions in a warm, funny, unguarded way. She doesn’t look like one, either: no ill-fitting ministerial skirt suits for her, but a funky sweater dress and two-tone burst of Cruella curls. She was not a special adviser
or a think-tank wonk, she didn’t study PPE at Oxford, she didn’t even join her party until 2010.

The 'accidental politician'

So how did it all happen? After Rotherham MP Denis MacShane was jailed for expenses fraud, the Labour Party decided they needed an ‘outsider’ in the seat
– someone totally untainted by mainstream politics. Champion, who was running a children’s hospice in Rotherham at the time, was phoned one night by an MP she’d met through work and asked if she would stand. Flattered, she applied, but thought she had no chance – there were 10 candidates, including John Prescott’s son. Down to the final two, she was asked to do a hustings. ‘I went, “Yes, that’s fine – what’s a hustings?” They went, “Oh, God – you really do know nothing.”’

After a four-hour meeting she was narrowly selected, after which local party members walked out in disgust. ‘I thought, “What the hell have I got myself into?”’

What she’s ‘got into’ is a career that she’s already planning to be short- lived. She says she’ll only stay – if re-elected in May – another five years. ‘I worry that the longer you’re here, the less you understand reality. You get seduced. After seven years I’ll be part of the Establishment,’ she says.

‘Besides, I want a life!’
Since the Jay report into child sexual exploitation revealed last year that 1,400 Rotherham girls were raped and abused by ‘grooming’ gangs composed mainly of Pakistani-Muslim men, Champion has not had much of
a life. Victims, not just from her constituency but nationwide, have got in touch. Girls who had – with good reason – not trusted the council, social workers or police, saw in her someone who would believe them and take their side.

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‘It was a tidal wave. I started getting emails, texts, tweets, telephone calls – women were queueing outside the office.’ Fortunately, as a trained counsellor with
a psychology degree, Champion felt equipped to listen. Nonetheless what she heard disturbed her deeply. ‘My life has been quite nice, the people around me are law-abiding, decent people – someone might have been burgled so you know bad people are out there, but when you discover a parallel universe in your town, a place you thought you knew really well, and it involves local officials and police, that spiritually is a very challenging thing.’

Many victims still live on the same street as their abusers – some are even the children of their abusers – and fear violent retribution. Most spent their childhood in care, vulnerable yet unprotected. I ask why no one believed them and Champion says that social workers were trained to read a claim of sexual abuse as a cry for attention. Besides, she adds, ‘I believe there were people in paid positions to protect children, who were abusing those children.’ That is a strong claim. ‘Police and council workers, whether they were allowing it to happen or were actually abusing... either way, I think it’s deplorable. So I can see why it would be in their interest to cover it up.’

Champion says until the Jay report she had no idea of the scale of sexual abuse in Rotherham. Few people did. There were five convictions in 2010 and other cases were exposed by The Times reporter Andrew Norfolk, but the endemic nature of the problem was concealed. In retrospect Champion understands why she was treated as the enemy by councillors from her own party: they feared this nosy outsider woman would expose them.

In February, a government report described Rotherham political culture as unhealthy, bullying, sexist and actively suppressing the truth about sexual abuse. Champion 
was vindicated – almost the whole council resigned in disgrace. Another of her victories as an MP: a change in the law so that police can now intervene if they have proof someone has groomed a child only once (not twice, as before).

The people's champion

While Rotherham was one long battle, Champion’s new life in Westminster is no less stressful. In the beginning she had to find a place to live, an office and staff. There are no handy FAQs for a new MP; ‘You’re on your own.’ Eventually she contacted North East Derbyshire MP Natascha Engel, who showed her how to make an intervention in the House. A much-needed mentoring scheme, Champion says, will be introduced after the election. And she still makes errors. Recently
 her office sent in a claim for a £17 wreath she’d laid on Remembrance Day – the story ended up all over the papers. It was a simple mistake, she says. Mortified, she repaid the money straight away.

As an outsider, even fellow MPs didn’t trust her. ‘People ask if I’m a Blairite or a Brownite,’ she says. ‘But I’m just here to do a good job. I think it makes people uncomfortable if they don’t know which box to put me in. Because otherwise how will
I respond to privatisation of trains, for example. Whereas I’m more... messy!’

Moreover, while most MPs have old
 party friendships built over decades,
 Sarah’s mates are all in the north and she 
barely has time to see them. At Christmas 
she pitched up at the homes of her girlfriends: ‘They were like, “Who the hell are you?” It was fabulous.’

I sense in London she is a little lonely. She has barely taken a holiday since being elected (‘I should be Catholic, the burden of responsibility and guilt is immense’). She scoffs at Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s remarks that being an MP is a part-time job – more sexual-abuse victims contact her every week.

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Her last proper relationship ended shortly after she was elected: ‘It was blown out of the water,’ she says. ‘You’re living in two separate places and also the job eats your life. So if I’m awake I’ve got my phone on, and anything can kick off.’ She understands why many MPs employ their partners as constituency managers or agents – ‘That’s the only time they are going to see each other.’

And it takes a confident man to stand back while his MP partner takes centre stage. ‘If I go with one of my staff to an event, the first thing I say is, “Can you hold my bag?” As the MP, you get swept up. If it was your husband or boyfriend they would just be stood there like a numpty.’ Also, she says, laughing, ‘How are you meant to find someone?’

At 38, Champion divorced her husband, a family friend 12 years her senior, who she’d been with since she was 24. ‘He became my best friend, and I just thought,
 I want to be in love. I’d rather be alone but trying to be in love than in just a very good, practical relationship.’

Born in Essex and raised in Northamptonshire, attending a comprehensive school, she was never hugely political, although always hated injustice – a boy she was at school with wrote to her recently recalling how she intervened when he was bullied. Her parents – a small garage owner and a school secretary – are still Mail-reading, aspirational working-class Conservative voters: ‘My mother will send me things about how wonderful [the Tory MP] Penny Mordaunt is.’

After graduating from Sheffield University, Champion ran arts organisations around Rotherham, working mainly with young people, who are her great passion: she loves their can-do absence of cynicism. (She has never wanted children of her own.)

So post-divorce, approaching 40, she vowed to change her life and took a job running 
a children’s hospice. Was this depressing? ‘No, not at all.’ The parents had already accepted their children’s diagnoses so her role was to enable families to have the best possible life – and death. Ed Sheeran came and performed his whole album to one girl; the Ferrari Owners’ Club took kids for rides. ‘Amazing things like that were commonplace. And for virtually all the children, they died being cuddled by their mum or dad, or they had their hamster on their lap...’

Her eyes fill. The hospice, she says, utterly changed her world view: ‘Life is for living, and it frustrates me enormously that most people don’t know that.’

That is why, although hugely daunted, she stood for Parliament. There is a certain boldness in Champion’s shrewd, candid brown eyes that says: ‘Bring it on!’

Champion’s support comes from all sides. A female Tory MP told her recently she’d campaign for Sarah if
it wouldn’t appal her party. While some of Labour’s old guard still refuse to canvass, and many voters say that after the Jay report they will never vote Labour again,
 she has won new supporters.

Many of the women 
who suffered sex abuse have joined her team, stuffing envelopes, attacking anyone who is rude to her on Twitter. ‘They are very protective of me,’ says 
Sarah Champion proudly, the ordinary
 woman turned extraordinary MP.