MOTHER

Here are 10 things you likely didn’t know about Britain’s latest Marmite Politician:

• Soubry is the daughter of David Soubry, a Nottinghamshire garage-owner
• Soubry attended Hartland Comprehensive in Worksop, Nottinghamshire
• Soubry was only elected to Parliament at the 2010 general election. Seems like she’s been around for ages.
• Soubry is a single mother of two children
• Soubry was involved in student politics in the 1970s, becoming the only Conservative member of the National Union of Students’ executive committee

• In July 2010, Soubry was criticised for employing a member of Nottingham Conservative Future for three months who in 2008 had faced a police probe, after holding up a banner calling for the return of slavery. The man, who was 20 at the time, was president of the University of Nottingham Conservative Association. Soubry said she was aware of his background but he had made a full apology and “regretted doing something so stupid”
• Soubry was a journalist from 1981 until 1995 and also reported on and presented several regional and networked TV programmes, including Grampian Television’s North Tonight in the North of Scotland and the East Midlands regional news programme, Central News East. Soubry also presented and reported Granada Television’s This Morning in the late 1980s. She returned to Liverpool’s Albert Dock in October 2013 for the This Morning 25-year anniversary party
• Soubry was called to the bar in 1995 and is a member of the Criminal Bar Association
• In December 2013 Soubry remarked on The Andrew Marr Show that UKIP leader Nigel Farage looked “like somebody has put their finger up his bottom and he really rather likes it”; words described by Farage as a “foul-mouthed attack”
• Somewhat sacriligeously, Tory Soubry was a member of the Social Democrat Party (SDP) from 1981 until it was dissolved in 1988. Although – and her rejection could well be true – Soubry denies this and claims it is merely a scurrilous rumour circulated on Wikipedia.