I imagine any time you meet Jack Monroe it always feels a bit like you have interrupted her mid-story. There is a brilliant indiscretion about her, as if her life is not entirely contained and you have turned up in the nick of time to try to help her keep a handle on it. On a Monday lunchtime last month she was in the big downstairs bar of the Railway Hotel in Southend-on-Sea, her local since she was in her teens, bunged up with a heavy cold, sniffing and apologising for sniffing.
The Railway is designed to welcome strong characters. There is a pulpit at one end of the pub housing a DJ deck, as well as a drum kit and piano waiting for a band; upstairs rooms promise art classes and poetry readings. “They put on a music class for people with learning difficulties, which is bonkers and fantastic, all tambourines and trumpets,” Monroe explains. The pub has been run for a decade by Dave and Fi Dulake, who are something of a Southend institution. “When they got married,” Monroe recalls, “they rode a tandem through town and people were coming out and cheering, running along behind, playing instruments. It was like our equivalent of a royal wedding.”
The other reason she has chosen to come here is that the Railway serves some of the best vegan pub food around. “It went vegan about five years ago, long before I did,” Monroe says. “And it was one of the catalysts to make me realise vegan food could be really yummy.” (The other catalyst in her decision was a blog she wrote about visiting a slaughterhouse, the images and noises of which have never left her).
I came to Southend and wrote a story about Monroe for this magazine four years ago. She was then still starting out on a journey that had begun when she blogged about trying to feed herself and her young son while living on desperately uncertain benefits, having lost her job with the local fire service. Since then it seems she has lived several lives. She has become a best-selling food writer and an indomitable campaigner against political austerity and for genderqueer rights (having identified as lesbian back then, she is now happily non-binary, though equally happy to be called “she” until someone comes up with a better pronoun). She has moved in to central London and then out again. She now lives at nearby Leigh-on-Sea, with her partner, a news editor at the BBC. “I need to live by the water. It is what keeps me sane. A pond just won’t cut it.” She has also – in an act that should afford her lifelong national treasure status – taken Katie Hopkins to court for libelling her on Twitter, and won a settlement against the former Mail Online columnist.
When we meet, Monroe is eyeing up her 30th birthday the following week, a milestone that she seems determined to celebrate with abstention. She has given up drinking – partly because of the medication she is on for recently diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis. She is also cold turkeying from social media.
“Twitter became like any addiction: ‘This makes me feel terrible! I want more of it!’ It is not productive. I have done more work in the last five days than for ages.”
There was a point, she admits, when she had nine anonymised Twitter accounts, for various arguments, including a Scottish one, Benedict Cumberscotch, for the Scottish independence debate. Another was reserved to follow rightwingers she wanted to keep an eye on – “You know, all of the BNP plus Katie Hopkins.” She says she was trying to explain what it was like the other day to her mum. “I told her imagine going into work every morning and before you get to your desk everyone turning round to you and shouting: ‘You’re fat! You’re shit! You look like a minger!’ It’s a tough working environment …”
She is currently testing food for a new book. She had her best version of macaroni cheese for breakfast and decides she will have it again now, too, because she wants to test theirs against hers. I have a vegan fish and chips, (recent winner of “Best Vegan Seafood Dish at the PETA food awards”) which turns out to be an almost Heston-like trompe l’oeil of a platter, with a big beer-battered “fish” that is a magically flaky blend of tapoica, wheat starch and knojac, served with hand-cut chips, pea puree and homemade tartare sauce.
I ask Monroe about her current politics. She has fallen in and out of love with the Labour party. She was a fan of Ed Miliband, initially very sceptical of Jeremy Corbyn, mostly for his soft stance on the IRA (Monroe’s mother is northern Irish and she grew up on tales of the Troubles.) “I left for a bit, like a teenager, stomping about and slamming doors … Then after Jo Cox was murdered I grew up quite sharply,” she says. There was a time when she was thinking of running for selection as a Labour MP, and she does not rule that out. Her first act, she suggests, would be to try to organise “some kind of trade of Kate Hoey for Anna Soubry”.
Monroe would make a terrific parliamentarian you can’t help feeling, though the Speaker might quickly be sensing the appeal of early retirement. You’d have to have a hard heart not to be swayed by her when she is in her stride, whether talking about animal welfare, or poverty, or (as the daughter of a firefighter and as a former station switchboard operator) Grenfell Tower. It was that authentic ability to cut through to the emotional core of our inequalities that first brought her a public and a platform. Bits of her early blogs went pretty much verbatim into Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake – she had to walk out of the screening she went to because it all still seemed too hard to remember.
There have been the inevitable attempts to co-opt her as a “celebrity” – offers to go into the jungle – which she has so far resisted. “I am actually holding out for Strictly,” she says, mostly in earnest. “Though I’d need to do it in the next couple of years before my joints give up.”
We are on to puddings by now. She has a plate of banana fritters, which remind her of those that her dad used to get for her on the special occasions they had a Chinese takeaway.
While we eat we talk a bit about her court case. Hopkins had suggested, entirely falsely, that Monroe had approved of defacing a war memorial. “I couldn’t let it go,” she says. “My brother served in Iraq. It was a very specific allegation which she refused to withdraw.”
Though Hopkins did not face her in court, Monroe was subjected to three days of cross-examination in which she was required to read out the highlights of her own Twitter past. Referencing an old exchange with Piers Morgan, for example, she had to “explain to my learned friend how the word ‘twunt’ was a personal portmanteau of the words ‘twat’ and ‘cunt’, because neither seemed quite enough on its own …”
The barrister was at pains to make Hopkins’s claims seem like “just words on the internet”. In response to that Monroe had six A4 ring binders of the abuse she had been sent; some saying she would be pushed off a cliff or shot in the back of the head. She read them out, “crying and shaking – I said, ‘Imagine getting those words when you are trying to read your son a bedtime story.’”
One of the benefits of winning the case is that the tabloid press has given her a wider berth since, she says. Walking to the train station she explains, irrepressibly, how much she is enjoying a slightly lower profile, a slightly more measured life. “I am not saying anything revolutionary,” she says. “Mostly I am just trying to make beans taste OK and saying that people need a decent place to live.” She joins me on the train back to London, and in the middle of a breathless story about fires she has helped to put out, just about manages to jump off at her stop.
Cooking on a Bootstrap by Jack Monroe is published by Bluebird in August