Her mother was the daughter of a Wolverhampton steel worker and her father, who ran a card store, was an immigrant from Nigeria.
Jacobs has said she is "from a family of working-class people whose lives were defined by their flunking of the 11 plus", and that her "white ancestors literally worked themselves to death in coal pits".
Jacobs started her career working on the breaking news desk for Deutsche Welle in the German city of Bonn.
While in Tunis, her journalistic interest was focused on the Arab Spring, its problems and the rise of Islamist extremism in the Maghreb.
[12] In February 2019, Jacobs was criticised by Owen Jones[13] for using the term "Cultural Marxism" in an editorial for the Daily Telegraph.