If you find yourself frazzled by the Christmas rush, spare a thought for Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, who is struggling to balance motherhood and her hectic social schedule. The other day she tweeted: ‘As I walk past everyone going to Christmas parties and drinks on my way to get the kids from nursery, yet again acutely aware the motherhood penalty is just a gift that keeps giving…. Not just flexible working we need but flexible networking too.’

It’s tough, no? Having to put the drinks parties (and remember, half of political life is conducted on the social front) on hold to do the active parenting of two children is a trade-off. But those with larger families or less pay than an MP might observe that this trade-off is precisely what having children is about. You can’t do the things you did as your childless self after you’ve procreated. They too have their little social lives – the parties, the Nativity play (if Stella’s school engages in that sort of thing), festive baking – which unavoidably impinges on their parents’ important socialising.

The hard of heart might further say that if you can’t spare the time for your children, then you probably shouldn’t have them. It’s no doubt pure fun for Stella, who is not notoriously the jokester of the Labour party, to be suggesting flexible networking, but you never know. I honestly wouldn’t put it past her to insist that Christmas parties should be scheduled around the needs of working mothers, presumably after the children have been put to bed.

There is no limit to the ways Creasy manages to make an issue out of motherhood. Her most notorious interventions have been her role in extending abortion to Northern Ireland and, more recently, calling for protest ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics, lest it deter anyone from having an abortion.

As for the ‘motherhood penalty’, how about just thanking God – if that’s her thing – that she’s got two children to take up her time? The rhetoric about this ‘penalty’ is toxic – it is part of a way of thinking about children as a drain on our self-fulfilment as women, which is, in part, why so many younger women are simply opting out of parenthood altogether.

But there is a solution to the party-parenthood conundrum for an MP who lives really quite close to Westminster. Hire a nanny. It worked for Jacob Rees-Mogg; it can work for Stella’s tots.