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Jenny Willott, taken in her Cardiff Central constituency office

IT WAS one of the more memorable moments of the 2005 General Election night.

Jon Owen Jones, a former junior minister and Welsh Labour stalwart for well over a decade, had been unseated in Cardiff Central, a casualty of the city’s gradual shift to yellow. In his place came Jenny Willott, whom he had triumphed over – just – in 2001. Looking slightly Amazonian and a little flushed with the fear of sudden power, she had stepped up to make her victory speech, promising to “make Cardiff proud”.

Looking slightly more relaxed some four years on as she cradles a cup of tea in Liberal Democrat offices in Woodville Road, close to Cardiff University, she remembers back to that time with a smile. “Even though most people thought I was going to win, I was totally convinced I was going to lose, even though everything was telling me there was overwhelming support.”

Willott had achieved a 13% swing against the incumbent, building on the 11% gain she managed in 2001 that took her close to the seat, but not close enough. Still, as she explains, there was some logic to how she felt. “I have enormous sympathy for anyone who loses an election, having gone through it in 2001. Most people, when they fail, they fail privately. In an election, you have to be gracious and keep on smiling. It’s really hard.”

The victory, says Willott, came about as a consequence of three factors: “Partly how the Labour party was viewed (the Iraq War had proven to be deeply unpopular in her multi-cultural constituency), partly because of tuition fees, and partly because of 30 years of hard work by the Liberal Democrats in the constituency”.

Since then, Willott – who lives in a terraced house in Adamsdown, in the heart of her constituency – has built a solid reputation in Parliament for tenacity, particularly following her work in the five-year fight to secure payouts for South Wales steelworkers who lost their pensions when ASW went bust in 2002. Meanwhile, in her constituency, she has become well-known for handling large amounts of casework.

When asked how she made good on her promise to “make Cardiff proud”, she says: “I think for local residents I’ve been very accessible, very available. Absolutely thousands of people have contacted me since I was elected. I’ve picked up masses of cases. We’ve not won them all – particularly if the Home Office is involved. But we have a pinboard upstairs where we put all the cards we’ve received from people we’ve helped. It’s there to remind us during the bad days.”

Born and formerly educated in Wimbledon, Willott attended Uppingham School in Rutland on a scholarship. In her year was Edward Timpson, the Tory MP for Crewe, and Hannah Foster, who will stand for the Conservatives against Labour culture secretary Ben Bradshaw next year in Exeter . “If she’s elected, it will be the first time that three MPs have all come from the same class,” adds Willott.

She studied classics at Durham University before completing a masters in international development at the London School of Economics. But her formative experience from this time took place between the two, working for around five months in Bihar, in India for a NGO that the state itself had established.

“When you tell people from India where you’ve worked, you see the look of horror on their faces. It’s generally considered the most backward state in the country. I think it’s the only place where somebody was elected while serving time in prison for murder. It’s very deprived, very corrupt, and very beautiful. I had a great time working there.”

She has also worked for Oxfam. However, in 1997, she took up a full time job with Lembit Opik, working out of his Newtown office, where she would meet her future husband Andy, whom she married in May this year. “I really enjoyed working for Lembit. In some ways, he was a very considerate employer. He’s very good at making people feel appreciated and their opinions important. And he is very good at encouraging staff to push forward with their own careers. One former press officer is now an MP while another old member of staff is an MEP.”

In the time between losing in 2001 and winning in 2005, Willott worked in the Assembly for a variety of Lib Dems such as current leader Kirsty Williams, Jenny Randerson and former AM Christine Humphries (now Welsh Liberal Democrat president), preparing papers among other things. She also put in considerable time with the Lib Dems in her target constituency. It was to prove invaluable.

“The problems I deal with are rubbish, housing, immigration, problems with benefits,” said Willott. “In terms of total volume, rubbish is number one. In terms of length of time taken to resolve individual problems, it’s definitely dealing with the Home Office.”

It sounds much like any city in the UK. “From speaking to parliamentary colleagues with seats in other cities, two things are much better here. There are fewer gang violence-related problems, and fewer race-related problems. I think that’s because Cardiff is very tolerant and welcoming in the best Welsh tradition. Nottingham’s a comparable city to Cardiff, and they have huge problems with violence, with guns.

“What’s worse is that the concentration of alcohol establishments in Cardiff is the greatest in the UK.” Ah yes, the capital’s greatest stumbling block in credibly claiming to rightly call itself a world class city.  Willott says it there is more to it than blaming the council for short-sightedly giving the green light to yet more disco barns.

“There is a presumption of granting planning permission for these establishments. The police have to provide evidence that more crime will happen as a consequence of opening a new establishment, and that’s very hard to prove. So it’s very difficult to object to. And if the council refuses permission, it always get over-turned on appeal, anyway.” She gives as an example what has happened in City Road, one of the busiest restaurant and takeaway strips in Cardiff where, of the 10 food establishments that have been rejected in the past five years, nine have been allowed on appeal.

But within her own party, Willott is well known for her tenacity, preferring to fight on rather than accept any half-solution. ASW is a case in point. The 1,000 pension-less steel workers celebrated with Peter Hain when, in 2007, they won a settlement from the Government that amounted to around 90% of their lost earnings. But Willott says: “We didn’t get everything. We got significantly more than was first offered, but it wasn’t the full amount. I’m not claiming credit for it, because it was a team effort. But, in the first two-and-a-half years of the battle, I did a lot of work on ASW. It’s something I’m very proud of.”

It helped find her a place on the work and pensions committee, and she is also her party’s parliamentary spokesperson on the subject. “I absolutely love being on the select committee. For me, it’s one of the best things about being an MP. You have to know what you’re doing – if you don’t do your research, you’re soon found out. You have to be at the top of your game intellectually. What I love about it is that it’s all done with consensus, from farthest left to right wing. I get on extremely well with the other members (which includes Welsh Labour MPs Julie Morgan and Paul Flynn), often people that I don’t share any political common ground with.”

Willott has also worked extensively on crime and punishment. “I do a lot of work particularly with prisons. It’s interesting, because there’s a lot of political rhetoric around it that doesn’t have much bearing to reality. The evidence does not chime with the public perception. If you send someone to prison for three months, it’s not likely to stop their criminal behaviour. They lose their job, and possibly their family. I understand the need to punish, but punishment and rehabilitation sometimes undermine one another.”

It certainly doesn’t chime with what both Labour and the Conservatives say, which comes on to the ‘always the bridesmaid’ allegation often levelled at the Lib Dems. But, on the other hand, the party’s MPs are perfectly placed at close quarter to give a third view on the state of politics and how it is all likely to play out.

Are we sleepwalking into a Tory government? “Yes,” says Willott, who laughs before she expands on the subject. “It’s interesting to compare what’s happening to last time we had a massive change of government. There’s such a difference. Last time, I think people wanted Blair. Now, people don’t really want Cameron, or the Tories. They just want Brown and Labour less. There was real optimism then, but this time the enthusiasm isn’t there. It’s quite sad.”

This way of looking at the big two extends to the Prime Minister for Willott. “I feel quite sorry for him. He looks like he hates his job. I don’t think he’s a bad man, he’s just not the person to be Prime Minister. I don’t think he has the vision. He doesn’t seem to realise that being a Prime Minister means taking a more hands-off approach. I think they need to be more strategic. Blair had a picture in his head of the type of Britain he wanted and, while you might not have agreed with where he was going, at least he had an idea of what he wanted to do. You don’t sense that with Brown.”

Nevertheless, the Lib Dems don’t seem to have capitalised on this mood of despondency, despite escaping relatively unscathed from the MPs’ expenses row. But Willott remains optimistic about next May. “I hope we do reasonably well by increasing the number of seats we have. Our vote is holding up well in territories we hold.”

And she believes the leadership of Nick Clegg has been a bonus. “It’s a very hard time to be the leader of a third party, but he’s done very well with certain issues. He was the first leader to highlight the plight of the Gurkhas. Nick did a massive amount of work there, and it paid off. He was also the first to question Afghanistan.”

Willott’s own take reflects her background in international development. “We need to put more into that. The soldiers do their bit. They take an area, but when they move out, there’s nothing behind them. Unless there is, those areas fall straight back to the Taliban, and hope dashed is worse than no hope at all. It makes it easier for the Taliban to walk back in.”

When it comes to the other great current issue for government – the recession – the Lib Dems have a great asset in economic spokesman Vince Cable. However, Willott says, “It’s been frustrating. You go into politics to influence things. The Lib Dems are very lucky to have Vince, but here we had someone who got it right and said from the outset that we needed to nationalise Northern Rock, and it was frustrating it took so long. The right thing happened, but it could have happened sooner.”

She still believes that there is great danger in “jumping too quickly” in order to recover the economy. “Nobody really knows – still – what shape the recession is. Political parties have to be honest what problems there are and how we can address them. I don’t think the Government should trust the markets. We need reliability at the centre, and the boom times were, ultimately, built on sand.

“I have campaigned on personal debt. It all looks good during the boom times. People’s attitude to debt has changed massively. People used to save for the big things, now they can buy things straight away. I’m not saying we should go back to then, but there has to be a happy medium.”

The expectation is that the economy will be the great debating ground of the next General Election, along with Labour’s record. Willott – who is facing Karen Robson, a former Welsh Woman of the Year, for the Conservatives, and Labour’s Jenny Rathbone, currently a London councillor but also a member of the Wales 20:20 think tank – plans to do the same. Does it bother her, at this time, that she doesn’t generate the same kind of headlines that Opik, her former employer, frequently does?

“There’s never very much glamour in working hard. I can’t control the media attention, and if you’re getting on with stuff that isn’t to do with your personal life, or scandal, there’s little interest for the media. You need profile for a campaign, but if I get publicity for a case in the news, it’s probably likely that the person involved in that case will get publicity, and they often don’t want it.

“It may sound a little twee to say this, but I can walk around my constituency and meet hundreds of people that we’ve been able to help, and that’s what I always wanted to do in Cardiff. It’s what MPs are supposed to do.”