Before Stella Creasy became the Labour MP for Walthamstow in 2010, she was hoping to have “a life”, she says with a smile. “I’d spent a lot of my 20s doing politics – as a local councillor, working in parliament, studying.” She had already stepped back from Waltham Forest council in 2006 and worked for a thinktank, but when the Walthamstow MP Neil Gerrard, who had been in the seat since 1992, announced the following year that he would be standing down, she decided to go for it. Perhaps surprisingly for a politician, Creasy doesn’t, as far as I can tell, have a career path mapped out: she laughs and brushes off the question when asked what job she’d want should Labour win the next election. Instead, opportunities arise and, if they seem a good fit, Creasy goes for it. She stood for deputy leader in 2015 (she came second), is chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, and is now in the running for a new job – chair of the Committee on Standards, parliament’s watchdog. “One of the things that I have been working on with a number of different people for a while is addressing concerns about why we don’t take sexual harassment, abuse ...” She pauses briefly. “What it is about this place, which makes the laws on those issues, but we can’t make progress.”
A poll for Channel 4 News last year found one in 10 Westminster staffers had experienced sexual harassment. Just how prevalent is it? “I think if you ask most MPs, if they were honest with themselves, they will say there’s a lot more behaviour that is unacceptable and needs to be challenged, than is coming forward in the complaints process. People talk about there being lists of people to avoid – lists, plural. That should tell you there’s a problem.”
