Caroline Spelman, the new Conservative health number three, may have the hallmarks of a rising opposition star effortlessly cruising her way up the fast stream, but she has had her fair share of political disappointment along with the good fortune.
In 1992 she fought Bassetlaw, and was thrashed. Subsequently, several constituencies rejected her. Three months before the 1997 elections she had no seat to fight, and had virtually given up hope of ever becoming an MP.
Then Iain Mills, the incumbent MP for Meriden, West Midlands, died and she was given her chance. Even then she scraped home, surviving an 11.6 per cent swing to Labour to hold the seat with a majority of just 582.
Yet within a year of the election she had become the first of the new intake to be promoted to the whip's office, and was entrusted with a place on the standing committee looking at the Food Standards Agency.
She combines the technocratic flair of a modern businesswoman with more ancient Conservative values of family and church.
She is Euro-sceptic, but not stridently so, and espouses Conservative values of competition, but without recourse to mantras about markets.
So what motivates her? 'I have always been concerned about people being able to achieve their potential. I hate seeing wasted potential.
'And I feel strongly the Tory philosophy that you do not level down, but you level up to set individuals free.' And what does she know of the NHS? 'I'm a serious user of the NHS. All my three kids have seen a consultant at some point in their short lives. Mothers know backwards what the health service is really like.'
She less-than-strenuously defends the internal market. The main flaw with GP fundholding was that it wasn't made compulsory; if it had been there would have been none of the unfortunate 'two-tier' business that ensued, she suggests.
She is sanguine about private healthcare (she is covered by her husband's insurance). 'I try to use the NHS if I can because it's important to see what it is like for people who do not have the privilege of using private healthcare. I do not suffer a crisis of conscience about it.
'If you were forced to wait for a length of time watching your children suffer in distress, and it was affecting their school life, then shame on the parent who said no (to private healthcare).'
The summer will be spent getting to grips with her new portfolio (professions allied to medicine, midwives, food and health, women's health, social issues) and helping polish the new Conservative health policy, expected in the autumn.
She is confident the tide is turning against the government. 'I suspect that if people's experiences do not match up to Labour's rhetoric they will suffer from the opprobrium we attracted.
'Fundamentally, if your services are rationed you won't be happy.'
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