Kitty Ussher is MP for Burnley. Before being elected to parliament in this year’s general election, she was a special advisor to Patricia Hewitt at the Department for Trade and Industry. Previously, she was chief economist at Britain in Europe, and worked for the Centre for European Reform and the Economist Intelligence Unit. She was a councillor in Lambeth from 1998 to 2002.
What is your first political memory?
My first memory is as an English child being brought up in Ireland. My mother taught me the British national anthem but, on a long car journey, she wound up the car window when my two sisters and I started singing it at the tops of our voices. My second is, when we moved back to England, of Tory posters on the lampposts in rural Hertfordshire for the 1979 general election.
Who is your political hero?
Barbara Castle. She was a feisty woman who played an important part in making our country a fairer place to live, while becoming such a hero in next-door Blackburn that they named streets after her.
If you were granted one political wish, what would it be?
That there would be no link between peoples’ income and health.
When you were a child, what did you want to be?
First a traffic warden. Then an opera singer.
If Channel Four had a ‘Big Brother parliament special’, who would you nominate first for eviction?
Any of those chinless wonders in the Tory party that wouldn’t know the real world if it hit them in the face.
If you had to be stranded on a desert island with someone from the opposition benches, who would it be?
Michael Fabricant. I find his eccentricity interesting.
Apart from political engagements, how do you spend the weekend?
Watching Burnley playing at home, hill walking, spending time with my baby daughter and, if possible, sleeping!
What is the best and worst thing about being a new MP in Westminster?
The best is at last being able to start work on the long list of things that need to be done in my constituency. The worst is that it takes so long to set up the office and recruit staff before we can get going!
What would be your desert island disc and book?
Something cheerful by the Mamas and the Papas and a long meaty biography, perhaps Robert Skidelsky’s multi-volume biography of Maynard Keynes, which I have been half-way through for about ten years.
If you were able to spend an hour with one dead, historical figure, who would it be and what would you ask them?
I wouldn’t mind asking Lenin if he really thought communism would work in practice.