And then it all comes tumbling out: the night before that debate, she’d been in hospital with an infection she thinks was brought on by doing too much. The day after her caesarean, she was dialling into meetings with the defence secretary from hospital – she has had about 200 cases in her London constituency of people seeking help getting family members out of Afghanistan – and has barely stopped since. “There wasn’t any alternative,” she says. “These are people ringing up my staff threatening to kill themselves because they’re so worried about family members. You can hear the terror in their voices.” Meanwhile, she’s grappling with “the mum guilt” for not taking more time off, while struggling to be patient with people in parliament who ask how she is, only to back away when answered honestly. Having lost a battle with the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) this summer over the maternity leave cover she wanted, Creasy refuses to draw a polite veil over the consequences. And if that means breaking the working mother taboo against admitting that everything is not in fact fine, then so be it.

She says she is tired of being treated as if she was being difficult for wanting to try something that is routine in other workplaces but novel to parliament. “I’m not difficult – just different,” Creasy says. “I know there are a lot of other MPs going through this now, and I know there will be more.” If so, perhaps the most painful aspect has been the gap opening between Creasy and some of her own female colleagues – at least one of whom said something that, many months later, she will tell me she still can’t forgive.

Gregarious as she is, there is something of the cat that walks alone about Creasy. During her frontbench years there were mutterings about her not being a “team player”. It’s a criticism rarely aimed at similarly independent-minded men, of course, but it’s true that she seems happier launching one-woman crusades than reciting someone else’s lines; while she rarely rebels against the whip, she likes to plough her own furrow when choosing causes. When I ask if her battle for maternity cover was complicated by factional rivalry inside Labour (she’s seen as being on the right), she says, plaintively: “No, because I’m clearly not in anybody’s gang, am I?” Out in the cold politically during the Corbyn years, she is ideologically closer to Keir Starmer, yet remains on the backbenches. At only 44, she jokes that she’s practically a grandee – a Westminster nickname for former big beasts, periodically weighing in from a distance.

Her courage, however, is not in doubt. She has faced death threats from the far right over her anti-misogyny campaigns, deselection threats from the left over her criticisms of Corbyn, and (after campaigning for abortion rights for Northern Irish women) anti-abortion campaigners plastering her constituency with posters featuring dead foetuses. Creasy normally brushes such things off. But the brutal murder of the Conservative MP David Amess, a few weeks after our interview, forces many MPs to think twice about the risks they run in politics. When I call Creasy again shortly after Amess’s death, she is clearly upset. “I can’t comprehend that I’m not going to see him again, standing at the top of the escalators, asking me about the kids,” she says, as the baby gurgles on her lap. But she is nonetheless frustrated by arguments that MPs may need to become less open to their constituents. “If there are people out there targeting public figures, then we should be targeting those people, not asking public figures to be in a gilded cage,” she says. “My worry is that we have become almost inured to the idea that this is going to happen, and that the debate is about what security MPs have, not ‘How are we risk-assessing the threats people might face?’” It’s this idea that the system needs to change, rather than individuals simply being expected to tough it out, that also colours Creasy’s approach to how parliament handles working parents.

Things have changed since 1982, when a heavily pregnant (and newly elected) Harriet Harman arrived in parliament to letters from the public saying her children would suffer from having a working mother. Parliamentary working hours were reformed to reduce late-night votes, and the Commons now has its own nursery. In 2001 Labour’s Yvette Cooper became the first minister to take maternity leave in office; in 2019 proxy votes were introduced for pregnant or sick MPs, after Labour’s Tulip Siddiq was forced to vote from a wheelchair the day before her caesarean. Other European countries, including Denmark and Holland, have introduced full maternity cover for parliamentarians. But in the British system, constituency work remains a hurdle, given the personal nature of MPs’ connection with the people they represent. An expectation lingers that politicians can’t be seen to need time off, mirroring the fear many working mothers have of being perceived as uncommitted. Creasy, however, wonders why more women don’t talk honestly about all this.

“It’s almost like this Instagram thing, isn’t it? ‘We’ve all got this, we’re all amazing, wonderful people, therefore carry on.’ And you think, OK, but maybe we could also make it a bit ... easier?” Besides, she says she doesn’t want to lie to constituents. “They live in a world where if this happened in their own workplaces, they would have rights. If people want to start saying, ‘This is why we shouldn’t have MPs who are women of childbearing age’, then it’s a very troubling development.” She’ll hate the comparison but I am reminded of the then Tory MP Louise Mensch announcing a decade ago in the middle of a televised parliamentary hearing that she was leaving early to collect her kids. Mensch, a high-profile figure who had been a bestselling author before politics, divided opinion between those who thought it a powerful statement that everyone has childcare needs, and those who thought she was letting the side down or grandstanding. Having discussed it privately with Mensch afterwards, I found she very much had her reasons, and something similar is true of Creasy.

When we first speak at length in August, she is still eight months pregnant with Pip, and suffering from gestational diabetes, a condition with which pregnant women’s bodies become temporarily unable to regulate their blood sugars. Outwardly polished, in bright pink lipstick, she is clearly anxious on the inside. A few days earlier, she went to A&E, scared because she couldn’t feel the baby moving (stillbirth is a risk with the condition). Despite taking a cocktail of drugs to manage it, she has been warned – correctly, as it turns out – that she’ll probably have to deliver the baby prematurely. She tells me: “I’m terrified, because it is my body doing something that puts my baby at risk. The longer a baby stays in the womb, the better it is for it, but if your womb is suddenly a toxic place …” She trails off, before adding: “My partner talks about my self-loathing, he’s like ‘You’re blaming yourself’, because you do. I’ve lost babies before, so it’s the worst that can happen, in the sense of your fear and your desperate desire as a mother to protect your child.” Had she been her own employer, she’d have signed herself off. But that isn’t an option when over the summer Walthamstow suffers flash flooding, three murders and the fallout of events in Kabul.

When campaigning for her first locum in 2019, Creasy wrote to all the party leaders, and was grateful for the support of Theresa May, the then Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson and the SNP’s Ian Blackford. There was, she says, no response from Jeremy Corbyn’s office. Starmer sent flowers when her second baby was born. But when she wrote back detailing concerns about maternity cover, she says, his office did not follow up. She was, she adds, warned off campaigning for a locum by other mothers in parliament. “I know that some have suggested that this is ‘golden skirt feminism’ – an elite asking for special privileges – but actually for me it’s about the message that we send, that our politics should be open to everybody at all stages of their lives from whatever background.” Still, she was genuinely shocked when Ipsa disclosed that its decision in 2019 not to consult on introducing locums for maternity cover was influenced by opposition from the women’s parliamentary Labour party, then chaired by the feminist MP Jess Phillips. “I’m not going to pretend it’s not heartbreaking for me, as somebody who has been active as a feminist and a socialist all my life, that there is an opposition within my own party,” Creasy says. The puzzle is why other female MPs, with lifelong records of fighting for other women’s rights, seem so reluctant to demand their own.

Months of banging her head against this brick wall have clearly taken their toll, following a difficult pregnancy and repeated miscarriages. (Earlier this month, Creasy marked Baby Loss Awareness Week on Facebook by posting some old pictures of herself at work – in a meeting, being filmed at a protest – noting that in each one she was secretly in the middle of losing a baby.) When I ask if she’s ever tempted to quit politics altogether, she insists she’s going nowhere. “​​I’m sorry to disappoint the many who will be hopeful,” she says, wryly. “I’ve been in the Labour movement since I was a 15-year-old, and I’ve campaigned and disagreed with every single Labour party leader my entire life, and I’m sure that will continue. I’m a woman who knows her own mind.” Besides, she says, the pushback has encouraged her to keep campaigning on issues such as the cost of childcare and workplace discrimination in pregnancy. There must, she argues, be thousands of women whose talents are being wasted because they’re made to feel unwelcome at work after having children.

Would she still encourage women to enter politics, though? That is, she snorts, half the point of having the argument. “There are already people online doing that ‘If you wanted to have babies you should never have stood’ thing, and every time I read those I remember why I’m fighting, because there are brilliant women out there who should be able to have kids and do politics. I don’t want to ask brilliant women to wait 20 years until their kids have grown up.” It’s all very well saying that others have managed or muddled through in the past, she says, but “the socialist case is not to ask women to manage. It’s a radical change of scenery which means that we unlock the potential of everybody. We can’t be in a position where we think it’s acceptable that most women in public life are either of a certain age, or have made the choice not to have children.”

Source: The Guardian

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