Not long ago, a heavily pregnant woman walked into Kizzy Gardiner’s office in desperation. She was homeless, with nowhere to sleep that night, and had approached her local MP’s staff because she didn’t know where else to go. “That was one of those things where you’re like: ‘I’m going to have to put her in my spare room,’” says Gardiner, the former head of fundraising for an international development charity. But after an afternoon hitting the phones, eventually the team found her somewhere to stay. “The most rewarding bit is when you get those wins for people – when we get to use the power of the MP’s office to do something positive.” It is stories like this that not only keep MPs awake in the small hours, but also make it exceptionally hard for them to take time off when they’re pregnant themselves. Who would want cases like this slipping through the cracks? Yet what Gardiner is doing has the potential to change all that. She is parliament’s first ever maternity locum, hired only after a considerable bureaucratic struggle to cover the Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy’s constituency work while Creasy takes time off with her newborn daughter, Hettie. Unsurprisingly, Gardiner is very aware of how much it matters to make this work. “It’s great that my role exists, but it’s been a huge battle and there’s no commitment to doing it again,” she says, sipping tea in Creasy’s Walthamstow office. “I could be the first and the last.” When she first found out Creasy was looking for a locum, she almost didn’t apply. “I vaguely thought about putting an application in but then I was like: ‘Oh no, what are the chances? She’ll know somebody,’” says Gardiner, 35. She lives in Walthamstow and is a local party member but hadn’t met Creasy before. She let herself be talked into it by friends, she says, partly because “it had never been done before. So I thought, ‘I’m probably not going to be definitely not the right person, because who knows what that person is?’” Besides, she liked the description of the job as “rooted in Walthamstow, not in Westminster”. Gardiner can’t vote or speak on Creasy’s behalf in parliament, since she is not elected, although she does meet other MPs to discuss constituency cases in which they have a common interest and she lobbies ministers on behalf of constituents. (Creasy’s voting duties in the Commons are covered by the Labour MP Peter Kyle, who exercises a proxy vote on her behalf.) Her main role is as the public face of the MP in her east London patch, doing everything from running weekly surgeries to keeping Creasy’s national political campaigns ticking over on issues such as domestic violence. She regularly finds herself making up the rules as she goes along: “Something that I’ve learned is about just stepping into spaces and waiting for the challenge, especially in a role like this where it’s brand new. People don’t know what it means, so you have to just go for it. If people don’t want you to be there, you will find out soon enough.” Nobody has yet refused to deal with her because she isn’t the “real” MP, she says. “I think some people are shocked, but people handle it very differently.” Most constituents take it in their stride once they realise she can still help them: “A lot of it is in the proof of doing the work.” She works full-time hours, a rough indication of how hard Creasy must have pushed heself when she was doing parliamentary and political work on top of casework. The big surprise has been the range of problems on which Gardiner is expected to be an instant expert. “The breadth of stuff people come in with is mind-boggling. We get a lot of ‘Can you fix my bins?’ or ‘Can you make sure there’s speed bumps in my road because it’s dangerous?’, and we get a lot of complaints about antisocial behaviour.” Strictly speaking, many of these are questions for local councillors, not MPs, but Gardiner says it is often about advocating for people who don’t feel they have got anywhere with the council. And then there are the deeper problems: “We get a lot of housing issues, we get a lot of immigration issues. Mostly people will come to us when they feel they hit a brick wall.” Gardiner, who has a four-year-old daughter, job-shared in her previous role and thinks that experience of working alongside someone else helps with a delicate balancing act, poised somewhere between trying to second-guess what Creasy would be doing if she was here and simply being herself. “I’m definitely trying to follow the lead that Stella has set because ultimately it’s her seat, her job, her community that I’m filling in for. But I also bring my own experience.” She and Creasy confer regularly by text and WhatsApp, keeping each other up to date: Gardiner may need to know how Creasy is using her proxy vote on upcoming legislation so that she can explain to constituents, and in return feeds back things she picks up that might influence Creasy’s decisions. Might more permanent job-sharing one day be a viable option for MPs, with the role split between one person in the constituency and one in Westminster? “I think it could be.”
When I speak to a clearly thrilled Creasy by phone, with baby Hettie squawking happily in the background, she says she knew the arrangement was working when Gardiner told her about the homeless pregnant woman. “I have to be able to trust that Kizzy’s going to make the right choices, and when she told me about that, I thought: ‘That’s exactly why I picked you – that’s what I would have done,’” she says. “Kizzy doesn’t pretend to be me – she’s Kizzy, but she’s doing that role.” Having suffered a string of miscarriages before having her daughter, Creasy is clearly personally grateful to Gardiner for the time she now has with her baby. But she is also grateful on behalf of her constituents. “The thought of having fought for so long to get pregnant, and all the pain and misery that goes with that, and either not being able to spend some time with her or being worried because we all care about our constituents … We’ve got a knife crime epidemic in my constituency right now; I didn’t want to say: ‘Right, for six months you’re on your own.’ I spoke to colleagues from other political parties [about maternity leave] and one was describing hiding and hoping her constituents didn’t notice. That’s not feasible in Walthamstow.” None of it has been plain sailing, however. New parents in parliament have had the right to a proxy vote, meaning they needn’t physically walk through the lobbies to express a view on legislation, since last year (although it came only after widespread public indignation at the sight of the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq voting in a wheelchair on the day she was supposed to be giving birth). But until now, there has been no such cover for constituency work, meaning Siddiq was straight back to doing casework three days after a C-section. Creasy spent months locked in a pitched battle with the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa), the parliamentary agency responsible for MPs’ expenses including staff costs. It agreed to pay for maternity cover in her constituency only after she went public about the miscarriages she had suffered and her fear of losing this baby too. It was, to put it mildly, a lonely battle. While Theresa May wrote to Ipsa from Downing Street in support of her claim, all Creasy will say of the response from the senior reaches of her own party is: “The Labour party was the most sceptical and resistant. That was a surprise to me, to say the least.” The final twist in tale is that three weeks before she was due to hand over to Gardiner, Boris Johnson called a snap general election. Since it was Stella Creasy the people of Walthamstow were choosing whether or not to elect, she had no choice but to postpone her maternity leave and hit the campaign trail at eight months pregnant. She was back out chasing votes three days after giving birth and delivered her acceptance speech on election night with the baby in a sling. There are still things Creasy can’t delegate even now – only an MP can table an amendment to legislation in the Commons, which helps explain why last week Creasy was chairing a parliamentary seminar on moves to make misogyny a hate crime – and she has chosen to make occasional TV appearances and attend some events locally. She sees these as her equivalent of the “keeping in touch” days available to women on conventional maternity leave. Having been initially put off politics by dabbling in the student version of it, which she remembers as “a lot of sitting around and arguing about stuff, not a lot of doing”, Gardiner agrees that covering maternity leave could be the ideal test run for women considering a political career in their own right. But she still isn’t sure whether she wants to try for her own seat after Creasy returns in June. “It’s a big role and there’s a lot for me to learn … Would I want to do it again? I don’t know, is the honest answer. At the moment, I’m just focusing on trying to do this job well.” She admits to having thought hard about the implications for her family of covering for an MP in the current climate of threats against politicians (Creasy herself has faced attempts to deselect her by hard-left activists, death threats from the far right and an intimidating campaign locally by anti-abortion activists protesting against her successful bid to establish abortion rights for women in Northern Ireland). Eventually, Gardiner decided it was worth it, knowing that when the six months are over “I could always shut down Twitter and run away”, but it is clear she finds what she calls “the public ownership thing” the most testing part of the job. So would she be a locum again? When Boris Johnson announced that his fiancee Carrie Symonds was expecting a baby this summer, Gardiner tweeted tongue-in-cheek that she was happy to cover if needed. But beneath the joke was a serious point: it is not only female MPs who could benefit from cover for parental leave or even serious illness, and both she and Creasy are keen this shouldn’t be a one-off. “I don’t know why people aren’t pushing harder for it,” says Gardiner, who is worried that female politicians still daren’t risk being seen to need help. “There are other countries that do this successfully; we’re trialling it at the moment and it’s working well.” She is keeping notes on what she has learned in case they are useful to anyone else in future, but says so far the parliamentary authorities haven’t shown much interest. Any MP seeking a similar arrangement will need to apply all over again to Ipsa, with no guarantee of acceptance. While she still finds it “unreal” that in 2020 politicians have no automatic right to maternity leave, it surprises Gardiner less now that she has seen the system up close. “When you walk around Westminster it’s just steeped in history; everything is designed for hundreds of years ago. You look at the pictures and it’s all old white men. It just makes you realise why it’s not at the forefront of everybody’s minds.” Perhaps the arrival of a new baby in Downing Street could be more of a tipping point than we think.