Outspoken Labour Party MP Jess Phillips clashed with BBC Breakfast presenters after they confronted her with a past video. Parliament erupted last week after fellow Labour MP, Paula Sherriff, urged the House to “moderate” their language as many MPs were received death threats. The Prime Minister dismissed the fears, saying that he’d never heard such “humbug”.

Despite heavily criticising Boris Johnson, a 2015 interview between Ms Phillips and Guardian journalist Owen Jones showed her using similarly inflammatory language.

In the video, Ms Phillips can be heard making a very extreme statement where she threatens to “knife” Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of her party.

She can be heard saying: “I would do anything that I felt was going to make the Labour Party win the next election because if I don’t have that attitude, all I’m doing is colluding with the Tories.

“If that’s making Jeremy better, I’ll roll my sleeves up.”

She continues: “If that’s not going to happen, and I’ve said that to him and to his staff to their faces, ‘the day that it becomes you are hurting us more than you are helping us, I won’t knife you in the back, I’ll knife you in the front’.”

BBC presenter Louise Minchin demanded that Ms Phillips “explain herself”.

The MP defended her comment as “a well-trodden metaphor that is used”.

She said: “I also said the words there that I’d roll up my sleeves, I didn’t literally mean I would roll up my sleeves.”

She concluded: “But the reality is that I wouldn’t say that now.”

Asked if she, therefore, regretted her comment, the Labour member again protested that it was a “well-used metaphor”.

She continued: “Just like in the newspaper this week, I said if you cut me, I’ll bleed Birmingham.”

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She said: “I mean, don’t actually try and cut me, but Birmingham won’t come out of my veins.

“But the reality is that I probably wouldn’t use that language now. I would temper that language, but, as I’m saying, this is not about the individual words that we use.

“It’s not even about when people rant and swear and get aggressive. It is about a direct strategy to harm. It is about the Prime Minister and his people looking at what will cause the most division in society and leaning into that.

“So if Boris Johnson is sorry for what he has done, I expect to see a change in his behaviour and I expect to see him trying to lead the country with consensus.

“But instead what we will see in his speech at the party conference, I’ almost certain, is he will be rabble-rousing the people vs parliament, and people like me will pay the price.”

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