Layla Moran is one of 17 new MPs in 2017 to give an interview to the Huffington Post about her life and what makes her tick. She talks about her childhood in places as diverse as famine-hit 1980s Ethiopia, Brussels and Jerusalem.

She talks about what sparked her interest in politics and distracted her from her first love of science.

I did a Masters degree in comparative education in 2007. That’s what really politicised me. I got very angry about the fact that having a had a background in countries that are genuinely poor, why in this country do we still have this level of educational inequality? It is still not acceptable that anyone in this country is ever left behind, educationally speaking. I got genuinely angry about hat. There are well meaning politicians in countries that have nothing that frankly have a better track record of dealing with this than our country, a G7 country.

Two aspects of her job motivate her:

As far as I am concerned I have two jobs here. One is to be the best possible constituency MP I can possibly be, because I believe in democracy and what it stands for. I love local politics and I love pot holes, the stuff that people get really irate about. It matters to people. It is a good thing for democracy to have local representatives who care about stuff like that.

But then on the other hand, my other aim is I think education and the importance of education and education that is genuinely focused on the child, not the voter who are the parents, not the teachers who are also voters, but actually the child. A lot of people pay lip service to that, but don’t enact it in policy.

She and I share our political hero, Shirley Williams:

I respect her intellect. As a young female politician you look around and you think who am I going to look to. And Shirley is someone who somehow marries two really tough things for politicians. She has a steely intellect and determination to get things done, but also is very warm and very human.

You might not have thought of Layla as an anarchist, but she says that there is a small part of her that “carries the anarchism from Radiohead songs within me.”

It’s her favourite film that really surprised me. Especially when her book was quite a worthy tome. I’m not going to fault her given how many of that genre I love. Her pick was quite a traditional one. Her immediate “Is that going in print? Oh dear God.” was quite funny. You’ll have to look it up yourself to find out which one she was talking to.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social