She was first elected to Parliament in the 1997 election. She made headlines when as Child Protection Minister at the Home Office, she embarked on a media tour to condemn an episode of Brass Eye as 'unspeakably sick', but was later forced to admit she hadn't actually seen it. She later became Immigration Minister, and was eventually forced to resign on April 1, 2004 after a series of scandals emerged about alleged bypassing of proper checks in order to reduce the backlog of immigration requests.
