An indie kid: a portrait of Stella Creasy

'She's incredibly impressive,' according to one anonymous Labour MP. 'The problem is that she lets everyone know that she thinks she's incredibly impressive.'

Born in 1977, the child of a head teacher and an opera singer, Stella Creasy later attributed her youthful interest in politics to the family's move to Colchester when she was fourteen years old. 'It was a big shock for me to move from Manchester, which was very nice, liberal and middle class, to small-town Essex and have people who suddenly didn't agree that we needed to do more to help people and that poverty was a bad thing.'

Thus began her unlikely crusade to convert the Thatcherite working class of the South to the community spirit of the Northern middle class. She joined the Labour Party and while still at Cambridge University (where she studied social and political sciences) stood for election to Colchester council. She failed that time, but went on to be elected as the youngest councillor in Walham Forest. By the age of twenty-five she was deputy mayor of the borough.

She insisted that she was fully committed to fighting for her beliefs in local government: 'If I'm going to make a difference,' she said, 'it will be at the town hall.' But she kept her networking options open, just in case, by working as an adviser in Westminster for Douglas Alexander and Charles Clarke. And in 2009, now with a doctorate in psychology from the London School of Economics, she was selected to inherit the safe parliamentary seat of Walthamstow. She was already being referred to in the press as 'a career politician'.

Duly elected in 2010, she was swiftly identified as being 'tribal, loyal and dogged' and having 'the ambition and the hidden wiring to go far'. Certainly she demonstrated an impressive ability to generate media coverage, helped by her own extensive use of Twitter.

Indeed it was Twitter that brought her to many people's attention. In 2013 she called for the website to take firmer action when users were abused, particularly when women were threatened with sexual violence. This was in response to a sustained assault on a female journalist, but Creasy's intervention ensured that she too was soon receiving tweets threatening her with rape and death.

She was seen early on by journalists and broadcasters as a Labour equivalent of Louise Mensch: young, media-friendly and articulate, particularly good when you needed a comment on issues relating to women in public life.

So when David Cameron appropriated the language of a television commercial and told Angela Eagle to 'calm down, dear' in the Commons, Creasy was quick out of the blocks. 'His saying "calm down, dear" is symptomatic of a culture in which the contribution of women isn't valued but dismissed. We'll all be better for it when women don't "calm down" but get stuck in to helping change the world.'

The rent-a-quote image was unfortunate, because Creasy is much better than might be suggested by hackneyed platitudes fed to a grateful media. She's a serious politician, whose thinking and values evoke an old version of Labour - the version that emphasised voluntary societies, cooperatives and workers' education groups, the one that celebrated collective endeavour and mutual help.

Her most impressive contribution as a newly elected MP, for example, was taking an early lead in the campaign to regulate payday loans companies - but she did so by trumpeting the virtues of credit unions as an alternative. She argues more persuasively than most about the need for a democracy of participation.

In what may be the least likely political comparison you'll read this month, she reminds me a little of Frank Field, though obviously without the awkward, austere nature that has made him such a difficult figure. But there is something there of the willingness to find new solutions and of the restless campaigning spirit. 'I absolutely want to change the world,' she said. 'That's why I do politics, that's why I got involved.'

Elsewhere, the newspaper profiles told us, she supports Manchester United, thinks Fifty Shades of Grey was 'boring and repetitive', and has an absurdly exaggerated estimation of the music of the Wedding Present. 'I'm a bit of an indie kid,' she says: 'I get right down in the mosh pit when I go to gigs.'

With only five years in Parliament, and at the age of just thirty-eight, she has far less experience than her rivals for the deputy leadership. Even so, no one was much surprised when she put herself forward as a candidate. It seemed such a natural career move for a politician who The Times described as coming 'from Labour central casting'.

This is the last in a series of posts looking at each of the candidates in the current elections for deputy leader of the Labour Party , with portraits drawn entirely from their media coverage. Tomorrow I shall decide who to vote for.

Who gets my vote: Part 5

So finally, having looked out the Tory, Lib Dem, Green and fringe candidates for the constituency where I live, Holborn & St Pancras, I come to the person who will - barring acts of God - become the next MP. And that person is the Labour Party's candidate, Keir Starmer. Or Sir Keir Starmer, as he became last year.

Now Starmer starts with a slight advantage, as far as I'm concerned. I've got used to the idea that people offering themselves for the highest political office are younger than me (I once wrote an e-book on the subject). But Starmer was born just six months after I was, which is well within the margin of error.

According to a profile in the Guardian a decade or so back, he was born into a working-class family in South London and went to Reigate grammar school, where he had violin lessons alongside Fatboy Slim. His parents, after retiring, ran a donkey sanctuary.

He made his name in the 1990s as a defence lawyer, specialising in civil rights and representing everyone from the families of British soldiers killed by 'friendly fire' in the Kuwaiti War, through to Arthur Pendragon. (The latter, in case you've forgotten, was the official sword-bearer of the Secular Order of Druids and was accused of trespassary assembly at Stonehenge on the summer solstice.)

He was also involved in the epic McLibel case, and acted for Death Row prisoners in the Caribbean. In 2000 he was named Human Rights Lawyer of the Year by the two pressure groups Liberty and Justice.

In 2008 he became Director of Public Prosecutions. The Daily Telegraph called his appointment a case of 'poacher turned gamekeeper'; the Guardian said it was 'bold' (resisting the temptation to add 'very bold', in approved Jules and Sandy manner); while the Sun summed it up with the headline: 'New prosecutor defends paedos'. He left office five years later, and was subsequently selected as the Labour candidate for Holborn & St Pancras.

All of this is perfectly sound; you might say impressive. And the man even lives in the constituency. So why am I suspicious of Starmer?

Well, Wikipedia points out that as DPP he was responsible for the non-prosecution of the police officer involved in the death of Ian Tomlinson, and was subsequently keen on pursuing the Twitter Joke case. But I don't think that's the real cause of my distrust. Those decisions certainly besmirch his image as a liberal lawyer (Judge John Deed wouldn't have made them), but his broad record as DPP stands scrutiny with pretty much anyone else's.

No, I think my problem comes from a feeling that he is at heart a believer in the state as the solution to our woes. This is characteristic of many civil rights lawyers; a sense that they are the guardians of truth, freedom, progress, and that these things are therefore determined by action from the top down.

Back in 1990, for example, Starmer was quoted as saying that 'morality was a question for Parliament, not the judges'. I don't think it's a question for either, particularly. I think morality is a question for the people, with both Parliament and the judges following behind.

Or perhaps my problem is that he represents the new-look Labour Party. 'Labour has changed, with just 13 per cent of our MPs from skilled manual backgrounds,' said the union leader Ken Jackson in 1999. 'Barristers, academics and doctors have taken their place. Parliament is fast becoming the preserve of the professional.'

In Andy McSmith's excellent book Faces of Labour, he recounts the story of Tony Blair being introduced to Greg Dyke in 1983, at a time when Blair was looking for a safe constituency to fight. Dyke's response was: 'Not another fucking London barrister!'

Maybe that's it.