Politics is a funny old business. Back when I was still married to a Cabinet minister and frequented the dinner tables of power on a regular basis, I remember hearing a few jealous tongues discussing a young Special Adviser (or SpAd) at No10, a striking young woman, sharp as a tack, who had been putting the odd nose out of joint.

‘Bold as brass’ was the general gist. Funny how things turn out. Those faces are long gone, consigned to the dustbin of political failure, while the SpAd in question – Laura Trott – is now Shadow Education Secretary, a rising star of a resurgent Conservative Party.

Now 41, back then (around 2011, shortly after David Cameron became PM) Trott would have been in her mid-20s, not long a graduate of Oxford, followed by a stint at high-powered consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton.

Even before the start of the Coalition government, she had made a name for herself at the implementation unit, set up to prepare the Conservatives for power. As one friend and colleague who knew her back then recalls, she was ‘this unbelievably impressive spreadsheet bunny, phenomenally driven, fantastically competent, incredibly bossy – and always glammed up to the nines’.

In an arena dominated by old Etonians and assorted toffs bound by old-school ties, she stood out as a bright comprehensive girl from a tight-knit, hard-working family with a strong public-service ethos.

The first in her family to go to university, both her sisters are teachers, her mother was a special-needs teaching assistant and her father worked at the Bank of England. One of her grandparents was a milkman; another, Stan, worked as a doorman at The Sun newspaper.

‘He told me Rupert Murdoch was always incredibly polite to him,’ she tells me, as we sit down at the Mail offices in Kensington ahead of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.

Trim as a pin, blonde, and with striking blue eyes, she is resplendent in a shocking pink dress from Cefinn, Samantha Cameron’s dress brand. ‘I love her stuff because it doesn’t crease,’ she says, ‘but now that the company’s folded, I get it on Vinted.’

She is here to talk about the Conservatives’ new announcement on childcare, which will form an important plank of their next manifesto. The plan is to scrap the childcare ‘cliff edge’ which penalises working parents for, effectively, working too hard.

Currently, when one parent’s earnings exceed £100,000 a working couple can lose entitlement to up to 30 hours a week of free childcare as well as losing access to the Tax-Free Childcare scheme. This means you can have one household where both parents earn, say, £99,000 a year and still receive the entitlement; and another, where one parent earns £100,000 and the other pockets very little, would lose out.

As a mother of three children (with her husband Bahador Mahvelati, known as ‘Bids’), Trott believes very strongly that hard-working parents should be encouraged to have families, especially given the falling birth-rate, which has dipped to dangerously low levels in recent years.

It’s a policy clearly designed to appeal to the beleaguered middle-classes that this Labour government has decided to ‘squeeze until the pips squeak’, as Denis Healey famously once put it.

‘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 adds. But I know so many friends who’ve been worried about starting a family because of the cost.

‘It’s robbing people of something so special, and you should never not have a child because of the cost of childcare, or turn down a pay rise because you’re worried about being penalised.’

Elected as the MP for Sevenoaks in Kent in 2019, Trott has wanted to be a politician since she was 12, inspired largely by her family, which was very active in her local community, but also by (wait for it) John Major.

Not necessarily the first name that springs to mind in the pantheon of inspirational leaders, she admits; but seeing a working-class man who went to a comprehensive school like her succeed in parliament made her think she could do it too.

It is education that has always been her passion. It’s also the one legacy the Conservatives can take away from their 14 years in power.

When the education reforms initiated under David Cameron began in 2010, Britain’s international rankings were at an all-time low. Now, in England, where the changes were adopted, pupils have risen to ninth worldwide in reading (up from 20th) and 11th in maths (up from 22nd).

By contrast, in Scotland and Wales, where the respective SNP and Labour governments rejected the reforms, they have fallen. Welsh teens now rank 40th internationally for reading and 42nd for maths, putting them two years behind their counterparts 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.