Virginia Bottomley

Abstract

If you got into a train at Euston, and started travelling northwards towards Liverpool, it would be a great surprise if you finished up in Tunbridge Wells. I had the same sense of an impossible change of direction when I learned about Virginia Bottomley's early life and subsequent career. Her mother was a Conservative Education councillor, elected after Virginia Bottomley became an MP, but her uncle was a Labour Cabinet minister and she herself was the Labour candidate in her school's mock election. Then, in the hippy, radical, mid to late Sixties, she went on to read sociology at the University of Essex, surely the most radical of all the university campuses. After graduation, she went to work for Frank Field at the Child Poverty Action Group. Then on to the London School of Economics to train as a social worker, before employment as a full-time social worker for 10 years, first at Brixton and then at the Camberwell Child Guidance Unit. How on earth could all that lead to a safe Conservative seat in Surrey and then to two Cabinet posts in a Tory government, first as Secretary of State for Health and then as Secretary of State for National Heritage?