This is Spectator Radio, the Spectator's curated podcast collection.

Hello and welcome to Women with Balls, where I, Katie Balls, talked to today's trailblazers.

Today I'm delighted to be joined by Kate Hoey.

Hoey is the Labour MP for Vauxhall and this June will mark 30 years in that role.

She has served as the Minister

for Sport in the Blair government and in 2016 campaigned for leave in the EU referendum. Herri is

a libertarian Eurosceptic who has frequently strayed from the party line. Since the referendum,

she has been a vocal proponent of leaving the EU, suggesting Jeremy Corbyn should trust his

instincts to back a no-deal Brexit, and defying the Labour whip in a crunch vote on a potential

customs union. She suffered a vote of no confidence for her constituency Labour Party last year over her

Brexit stance, but in trademark style, brushed it off, insisting at the time. After 29 years as an MP, I'm quite relaxed about the vote,

and I wrote influence in any way how I vote in the future.

So Kate, thank you very much for joining us today.

Thanks. Pleasure.

So to begin on this podcast, we'd like to go back to what you were doing

before you were in your current career.

And looking at your childhood,

you grew up in Northern Ireland on a small farm in County Antrim. What was your childhood like?

Oh, I had a very idyllic childhood looking back on a small farm, not much money, wonderful parents

very much wanted to make sure that my sister and myself and then my

brother had a good education, played a lot, always getting up trees and falling and having a

permanent cut on my knee from falling. And generally, a lovely time went to grammar school in Belfast, which was a great, you know,

...