James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour’s new golden girl

Stella Creasy, our campaigner of the year, stands out from the back benches

When I arrive to interview Stella Creasy in one of the cafés in parliament, she’s sitting in a meeting with two earnest, wonkish types, the coffee mugs having been cleared from the table. As time ticks by, her body language becomes urgent, but she’s too polite to wrap it up. I begin to see why her rather protective assistant insisted that this interview should be no more than 30 minutes. Creasy, though, has a lot to say and we speak for an hour before she goes off to write a speech on this summer’s riots. She’s a politician in demand.

MPs enjoy few things more than posing as talent scouts. Within hours of a new intake arriving in parliament, the old hands start picking out the ones who they think will go far. Creasy instantly caught the eye of the Tory benches. Her media-friendly manner and pitch-perfect attacks on the rates charged by pay-day loans companies were an example of how to do opposition politics. She had identified an issue people cared about, but that was almost impossible for the government to fix.

But Creasy, who won the campaigner of the year prize at the Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards last week, is motivated not by the approval of her peers but what she sees in her constituency. ‘In a very visceral sense I see it in Walthamstow. We now have eight of these companies in quite a small high street. I have been conscious about people getting into debt since I was a councillor and involved in various community groups. You couldn’t not be aware of people who were struggling financially, and that has exploded over the course of the last 18 months. This is not just Walthamstow any more. This is ­everywhere.’

‘I have become massively geeky about it,’ she concedes, discussing possible regulations in eye-watering detail.

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