The Creasy calamity

How funny is it to confuse a parrot and a parakeet?

Not very. I can understand Stella Creasy MP feeling bewildered by the scale of the response to her misunderstanding — and by the vitriolic tone of some of the responses.

But she had a choice. She could have rolled with the punches, laughed along with the jokes, and, say, posted a video of her parliamentary colleagues asking if anyone had lost their sloths. People would have probably appreciated that she took the jokes in good humour. Everybody would have moved on.

But Creasy had another choice. She could humourlessly complain about how hard it is to be a politician, and insisted that everybody should have cut her more slack. For some reason, Creasy chose the latter option. “I will not lose any sleep over the fact that I didn’t know the difference between a parrot and a parakeet,” said Creasy, in the tone of someone who was about to lose sleep … But I will worry about our democracy.”

The words “fuel” and “fire” should have come to mind here. Knowing that Creasy reacts so poorly to piss-taking made people all the more keen to take the piss. “Before you make fun of me,” the Walthamstow MP was implicitly saying, “You should know that I’m extremely sensitive to it, and you will get a reaction.”

The backlash continued. “When you’re in a hole,” someone appears to have told Ms Creasy, “Keep digging.” One of the people enjoying the jokes at Creasy’s expense advertised himself as a founding member of the Free Speech Union. “The irony that the free speech union now chiming in on this not lost here,” posted Creasy, ungrammatically. Of course, a member of the Free Speech Union is not the Free Speech Union. More pertinently, though, making fun of MPs — or anybody else — does not contradict the principle of free speech. Actually, making fun of MPs is among the hardest-won aspects of free speech. 

Perhaps someone had a quiet word with Creasy, because she took a cheerful-looking selfie with a parrot and posted, “This is all very silly.” Yes, it sort of was. It didn’t matter that she had confused two different kinds of birds, and if she had shrugged it off, the whole fuss would have died down. 

But Creasy still couldn’t let go of the delusion that she could fight her way back to a win. “Breaking: Stella knows what parakeets are!” JK Rowling posted, before delivering the very much on-brand line: “It’s probably too much to hope that women are next, but fingers crossed!”

This was a reference to Creasy saying that JK Rowling was wrong and that women could have penises. Creasy could not let it lie. She posted:

This is sadly typical of the kind of politician who thinks that stating your opinion aggressively is somehow equivalent to proving them correct. Granted, I think that all of us would agree that some rights should not be up for debate. You can have the opinion that my home should be seized but you can’t expect me to discuss it. So, I don’t disagree that the right of transgender people to be safe, say, should be non-negotiable. But what about the “right” of trans people to be in toilets or prisons with members of the opposite sex? What about the “right” of children who believe that they are trans to have gender-affirming surgeries? Does Creasy think that they should not be “up for debate”? Why? Says who? What gives her the authority to decide that?

The fact is that Creasy is the kind of politician who believes that being a politician should have entitled her to more respect. In her utopian state of Creasyland, her pronouncements would be greeted with rapturous applause by an admiring, appreciative society of Britons. I’m not basing this on a bad day and an argument about birds. I’m basing it on her consistent irritation when she is questioned on her politics — and on her enthusiasm for extending hate crime legislation, and on curbing the right to free assembly.  

Well, few of us are free speech absolutists. But it is hard not to become more of a free speech absolutist when you see the humourlessness, the self-entitlement, and the sheer argumentative incompetence of the people who limit it. Did Creasy deserve so much mockery for a harmless, well-meaning mistake? No. Has she faced some genuinely vile abuse? I’m sure. But to react so pompously and so dyspeptically exposed a fatal intolerance when it comes to disrespect. 

Alas, this is all too common in Parliament. Birds of a feather flock together.