Stella Creasy is waiting at Walthamstow bus station, nursing the end of a nasty cold. Deputy leadership campaigns are evidently just as exhausting as leadership ones, so is it frustrating for the candidates that their voices have been muffled by the din of the Labour leadership contest and Corbyn-mania?
“No, I think it was always going to be that people looked at the leadership first”, Ms Creasy, who led the fight to make payday lenders cap their interest rates, says. “I think our challenge has been to show people how we can complement what they do and — it’s a cheesy phrase — add value. This isn’t about two people at the top for me, but about how do we bring the movement together?”
Ms Creasy — called a loner by some in Westminster, although she says it is simply that “I don’t do tribes, I don’t play the traditional game” — would be happy to serve under whichever of the four candidates is elected, even Jeremy Corbyn. “Of course I would, because that process of rebuilding isn’t about any one person it’s about all of us. It’s written on the back of our membership card that we achieve more together than we do alone.” What does she make of those who refuse to serve under the favourite? Is it principled or ignoring the will of the electorate, albeit one which, it has been warned, could include several thousand Tory infiltrators?
“I’m not going to get into that,” she says. “The party will choose who the party chooses. I’m not going to comment on any of the individual campaigns because I have worked with all of them. I’ve been in Andy’s team, I’ve been in Yvette’s team, I’ve done campaigns with Liz, I’ve done campaigns with Jeremy — we did a lot of work on rail electrification in northeast London. What’s unhealthy is people shouting each other down. I’ve been pretty clear this is not the way to do it.”
Tom Watson is the favourite to win the deputy leadership: last month a poll put him ahead, with Ms Creasy second followed by Caroline Flint, Angela Eagle and Ben Bradshaw. However, a LabourList poll this month suggested that Ms Creasy had taken the lead, at 31 per cent to Mr Watson’s 27 per cent. One theory is that people voting for Mr Corbyn may be reluctant to vote for a man as deputy too, which could boost Ms Creasy’s chances.
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“People don’t have to agree all the time. They don’t have to think the same way all the time. In fact it’s weird and unhealthy . . . because it’s group-think then and actually I think one of the problems the Labour party has [is] what I call machine politics: ‘You’re in my gang, you’re in that gang, we only talk to our gang, you’re a Blairite, you’re a Brownite, you’re a Corbynista’. You sit in back rooms, you do your deal with your people and your people all think the same way as you. I come from a different perspective,” says the woman who calls Westminster “Hogwarts gone wrong”.
She urges the party not to fear the influx of Labour members attracted by Corbyn fever but to mobilise them. She believes that what Mr Corbyn has tapped into is members’ desire to be part of a movement, a contemporary thirst for people power, not simply being volunteers who are asked to drop leaflets, turn up and vote “then go away for four years”.
In other words the Labour party has sidelined its members, when actually they are the key to its success. Ms Creasy, 38, who is part of the Co-operative movement, says: “If you come from the Co-op tradition where everybody has a role to play, then you don’t shut the door to people.” Of the four leadership candidates she says: “I disagree with all of them on different points and I agree with them on others, because I go back to that point that it’s not healthy to think that everyone has to be of one mind. What you want to be is of one purpose, which is different. And that’s why I’m not tribal.”
Ms Creasy is quite clear on something else too: if she wins the deputy leadership race she does not want a job in the shadow cabinet. Really? Why not? “If I’m honest I would be asking the leader if I become deputy to let me go out there and be on the front line with our members,” she says. “This, for me, isn’t about standing for high office to be lauded on the green benches. I can do the dispatch box stuff, I’ve done that. ‘Hogwarts gone wrong’ is a beautiful place and has lots of wonderful things about it, but actually the challenge for the Labour party right now is in our grass roots. Those 660,000 people — how do we channel their energies? This isn’t about being in a back room. So I would be asking, ‘Look, let me go out there and do that work for you and build a movement again’, that sense of excitement.”
This plan to remould the role into activism sounds a bit like an appeal to Mr Corbyn’s supporters. She certainly seems to have no problem with the idea of being his deputy. She is constantly asked the question and jokes: “[People] ask, ‘Could you work with Jeremy?’ and my mum says, ‘Surely people should be asking could Jeremy work with you, Stel?’ ”
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Both Ms Creasy’s parents are party members — her father is a trained opera singer and her mother a former special-needs head teacher — and she credits them with inspiring much of her commitment to progressive campaigns. Since becoming the MP for Walthamstow in 2010, she has encountered sexism and Twitter trolling. A man who tweeted threats to rape her after she campaigned for Jane Austen to appear on £10 notes was jailed. Soon after she was elected, a Conservative MP who assumed that she was a researcher tried to throw her out of a members’ lift.
In the last election campaign her female Tory rival drew attention to the fact that Ms Creasy was not a wife or mother (she lives with her long-term partner in Walthamstow). She finds this incredible, just as she does that some people “are still asking questions about whether Labour could cope with two women” as leader and deputy. Even if this were to happen, she says, “there would still be more men in positions of leadership around the party. In some parts of the country only one in four of our members are women. As a deputy leader that would be a cause for concern and intervention.”
What of the chaos and controversy over the election and the warning that some infiltrators have paid their £3 membership fee to skew the vote towards Mr Corbyn or to make mischief? Ms Creasy seems sanguine about this. “We have to get it in proportion,” she says. “A thousand people out of 660,000 is a very small number.” The focus should be about mobilising the enthusiasm. “These people are not spectators; they are our voice in our communities. We need them to be fighting our corner.” There is, she says, “no connection between that grassroots work and our national ambition. I want to change that. We have to show that we are acting in the interest of the values that brought us into the movement and not our clique.”
Hold on, aren’t the grassroots screaming out against Conservative austerity cuts? Why did she not vote against them then? This is the only time in the interview that Ms Creasy’s answer is hesitant and she becomes waffly. She says that she has debated it with many constituents and although she still thinks it was the right call, “I’m not going to pretend that the way that was handled covered us in glory”.
Would she consider herself to be of the left? She has said, for example, that she doesn’t agree with Mr Corbyn’s argument that the railways should be renationalised. Instead she proposes that they should be mutualised. Whenever big rail or utility companies are fined, the money should be used to buy back shares that would then be held in a co-operative trust for customers so that they have a direct stake in it.
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“It’s not a question of left or right for me but about activism,” she says — the challenge is to be “relevant”. “People are questioning not whether we’re left or right but what’s the point of us at all? There is no rule in the British constitution that says there has to be a Labour party; there is no rule that requires us to be the official opposition, so come what may, we’ll always be there. I’m looking at 2020, I’m looking at the world to come.”
Ask or read about Ms Creasy, who wrote the sleeve notes to an album by her favourite band, the Wedding Present, and you will find claims that she is super-intelligent, a formidable campaigner but also that she’s “not a team player”, “very ambitious” (usually painted as a negative when it comes to women, but not men) and, again, that charge that she is a loner. Is it true?
“Well, that simply cannot be the case because we wouldn’t have been successful in winning arguments. Do I not do tribes? No. I will work with people who share a common interest. I’m very ideological,” she says. “I don’t play the traditional game.”