The Labour politician is used to fighting battles – but can she win her latest: convincing her colleagues to back proper maternity cover for fellow members?

Stella Creasy is dodging people on the pavement as we talk. She apologises for the background noise but it’s hard finding time for a conversation when you have a newborn son, a toddler daughter, and no proper maternity leave from a full-time job as Labour MP for Walthamstow; this walk to an appointment is the only window she has. Last month, she spoke in a Commons debate on childcare, baby Pip in a sling, sounding astonishingly composed for someone who had given birth four weeks earlier. I ask how she’s feeling and she laughs briefly and says: “Tired as hell, mad as anything.”

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.