Politics has always been a curious world. When I was married to a Cabinet minister and regularly found myself at the dinner tables where power was exercised, I recall hearing envious remarks about a young Special Adviser, or SpAd, at No 10. She was striking, highly capable and already irritating a few people in Westminster.
The phrase used most often was ‘bold as brass’. How quickly political fortunes can change. Many of those critics have disappeared into the history of failed careers, while the woman they were discussing, Laura Trott, is now the Conservative Party’s Shadow Education Secretary and one of its most prominent rising figures.
Trott is 41 today, but in the period around 2011, soon after David Cameron entered Downing Street, she was in her mid-20s. She had recently graduated from Oxford and gone on to work for the influential consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton.
Before the Coalition Government took office, she had already established herself in the implementation unit created to prepare the Conservatives for government. A former colleague remembers her as ‘this unbelievably impressive spreadsheet bunny, phenomenally driven, fantastically competent, incredibly bossy – and always glammed up to the nines’.
In a political culture shaped by old Etonians, inherited privilege and well-established connections, Trott was noticeably different: a bright comprehensive-school pupil from a close, industrious family with a deep commitment to public service.
She was the first member of her family to attend university. Her two sisters became teachers, her mother worked as a special-ne needs teaching assistant and her father was employed by the Bank of England. Among her grandparents, one was a milkman, while another, Stan, worked as a doorman at The Sun.
‘He told me Rupert Murdoch was always incredibly polite to him,’ Trott says when we meet at the Mail offices in Kensington, ahead of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.
Slim, blonde and blue-eyed, she arrives wearing a vivid pink Cefinn dress, the label founded by Samantha Cameron. ‘I love her stuff because it doesn’t crease,’ she says. ‘But now that the company’s folded, I get it on Vinted.’
Our conversation centres on the Conservatives’ latest childcare proposal, expected to feature prominently in their next manifesto. The policy aims to remove the childcare ‘cliff edge’ that can leave working parents worse off after their earnings rise beyond a certain level.
Under the current rules, once one parent earns more than £100,000, a couple can lose eligibility for up to 30 hours of funded childcare each week, along with access to Tax-Free Childcare. As a result, a household in which both parents earn £99,000 may retain the support, while another family, with one parent earning £100,000 and the other earning very little, can lose it altogether.
As the mother of three children with her husband, Bahador Mahvelati, known as ‘Bids’, Trott says she is determined that ambitious working parents should not be discouraged from having families. Her argument comes as the UK birth rate has fallen to notably low levels.
The proposal is also aimed squarely at middle-class families who feel increasingly squeezed by household costs. Trott suggests Labour’s approach risks applying pressure until, in Denis Healey’s famous phrase, ‘the pips squeak’.
‘We want working families to have children,’ she says. ‘There’s a real contrast between us and Labour here. We want to reduce childcare costs for parents who are working and trying to do the right thing; meanwhile, Labour has just abolished the two-child benefit cap. It’s a real statement of values.’
‘Having children is the best thing that has ever happened to me,’ she continues. ‘But I know so many friends who’ve been anxious about starting a family because of the expense.’
‘It’s robbing people of something so special. No one should decide against having a child because childcare is too expensive, or reject a pay rise because they fear it will leave them financially worse off.’
Trott was elected Conservative MP for Sevenoaks in Kent in 2019, but her political ambitions began much earlier. She says she wanted to enter politics from the age of 12, influenced by her family’s involvement in the local community and, perhaps unexpectedly, by John Major.
She accepts that Major may not be the first figure people name among Britain’s most inspiring leaders. Yet his example mattered to her: a working-class man educated at a comprehensive school who went on to succeed in Parliament. It helped her believe that she could do the same.
Education has remained Trott’s central political interest. It is also the area in which she believes the Conservatives can point to a lasting achievement after 14 years in government.
When the education reforms launched under David Cameron began in 2010, Britain’s performance in international comparisons was at a historic low. In England, where those reforms were introduced, pupils now rank ninth in the world for reading, up from 20th, and 11th in maths, compared with 22nd previously.
In Scotland and Wales, where the SNP and Labour administrations respectively rejected the changes, rankings have declined. Welsh teenagers now sit 40th internationally for reading and 42nd for maths, leaving them around two years behind pupils in England. ‘Ever since I took the job as Shadow Education Secretary, which is the one I asked for, it’s been about protecting standards in this country.’
‘Our schools are probably the biggest public policy success of the last couple of decades. It took a long time to percolate through the system, and that’s a lesson for policymakers: the things you do in politics often don’t show up until many years later.
‘The tragedy,’ she adds, ‘is that Labour are now undoing it, and we won’t see the damage – the vandalism, I’d say – for many years to come.’
She is fierce in her criticism of Lucy Powell, her opposite number, and of Powell’s predecessor, Bridget Phillipson.
‘Think of everything that’s wrong with this country, and they’re picking on the one thing that’s working really well,’ she says. ‘It’s extraordinary.’
As well as imposing VAT on independent schools (a disastrous policy which Trott says she will immediately reverse if the Tories are elected), one of the first things Phillipson did was take away Academy freedoms.
‘This means that Academies are now effectively under state control in a way they weren’t before,’ explains Trott. ‘This also stops good schools expanding and undoes everything that drove the improvement: choice, freedom, accountability, and the ability to replicate, expand and open new schools. They’re trying to wind it all back.’
Why take a wrecking ball to success, I ask? ‘Because of the unions,’ she says, bluntly. ‘They want central control because it gives them more power. For example, the Schools Act imposes national pay scales on academies and free schools. I had to point out to them that this means giving lots of teachers a pay cut, and they hadn’t even realised.
‘But that’s what drives them. It takes away freedom and choice, and it’s just wrong.’
One of the more contentious issues around schools in recent years has been the question of religious restrictions, and in particular head and face coverings. It emerged recently that a school in Barnet, north London was forcing girls as young as seven to cover their hair.
‘I’m very clear about hijabs not being part of the school uniform,’ she says. ‘I do not believe the state should be party to an instrument of female suppression.
‘To her credit, when I asked Lucy Powell about this at the despatch box, she agreed with me – but she’s done nothing about it. This would not happen under us.’
I ask her where that would leave other faith schools, such as Jewish and Catholic schools. Is there a case for saying that religion should have no place in education altogether?
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she replies. ‘I think faith schools are appropriate. We have rules about teaching British values, and many faith schools do amazing things. This is specifically about the hijab and what it means for women. I think most people can see there’s a category difference.’
Trott is confident in her beliefs, and not afraid to express them, regardless of who they might offend. It’s a characteristic she shares with Kemi Badenoch, whose plain-speaking, clear-sighted lack of compromise has catapulted her to the top of the political charts.
As Trott puts it, ‘She’s Madonna- level, with single-name recognition, which I love.’
Badenoch – and her team’s – mission is to restore the Tory backbone, to persuade the electorate that they have a strong vision for Britain and the determination to implement it.
Where Labour is on course for ever-bigger state intervention, Kemi’s Conservatives are all about individual responsibility and choice. Trott is adamant, for example, that the crisis involving NEETS (young people who are Not in Education, Employment or Training) is less to do with education and more to do with tax and welfare under Labour.
‘No one wants to employ anybody because they’ve made it so expensive,’ she says. ‘And the pull of welfare is also strong, and Labour are doing nothing about that. They’re not doing anything about retraining either.
‘That’s why Kemi’s policy is that you can’t go straight on to Universal Credit from school. Tough love is what everyone needs.’
This feeds into Trott’s other passion, reducing the harms done to children from screens and social media.
‘It’s a litany of issues,’ she says. ‘There’s the physical side – we’ve got 30 per cent more children with myopia now. Then there are the back and skeletal problems, socialisation, mental health, ADHD.
‘They’re using screens so much in school now. You need a smartphone just to get the timetable and the homework. Worksheets have a QR code on them. Sorry, what? They’re seven!’
Trott worked hard to steer the ban on social media for under-16s through parliament. ‘The social media companies lobbied so hard to stop it because they want to get children early: the earlier they start, the more time they spend on the platforms and the more money they make.
‘They’re monetising our children, which shouldn’t be allowed.’
Would she go further and support a total ban on smartphones for under 16s? ‘I would love to,’ she says. ‘But we’re taking it step-by-step.
‘The social media and smartphone ban in schools is a really good start. What I’m going to work on now is getting screens out of the classroom. What’s wrong with textbooks?’
I ask her how she feels about women and girls’ safeguarding, not just in the context of schools but against a broader background of female single spaces and the concerns raised by groups such as the women of Piddington, who have campaigned against Home Office plans to house 1,200 migrants nearby.
‘The Government’s record on protecting women’s safe spaces isn’t good,’ she says. ‘They had to be forced into it, and Kemi was so brave to speak out when it was still really unfashionable.’
On Piddington, she says: ‘I had a constituent who was raped by an illegal migrant.
‘He pretended to be a child when he was obviously about 40. To dismiss concerns like those of the women of Piddington is appalling. It’s tearing our country apart.’
Finally, I ask her about the threat from Reform. Nigel Farage’s party is somewhat in the doldrums now, but perhaps not for long given the huge donations from two crypto-billionaires.
‘I think most people now recognise that [Reform and Farage] give you the ick. Worse than that, a lot of their stuff is quite menacing. Like their support for all these balaclava people: weird.’
Final word, then, on Burnham’s speech at Labour conference last week, which many have heralded as a huge triumph. Trott is unimpressed.
‘He had nothing to say on the problems facing the country now. I’ve never seen a prime ministerial conference speech that barely dealt with the economy, nothing on international affairs, nothing on defence. It was extraordinary.
‘He delivered it very well, and he seems like a very nice man, but what is he doing to make people’s lives better today? Nothing at all.’
Something that few people could say about Trott herself.
