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

My guest today comes from something of a political dynasty, both her father and uncle were MPs,

and the former represented the very same seat that she now currently holds.

She's done a PPE at Oxford before working as a researcher in Hillary Clinton's office in the early 2000s,

but she eschewed a political career to work firstly as a journalist and then as a barrister.

But in 2019 she became MP for Newbury, and she now works across both the Home Office and Ministry of Justice.

My guest today is Laura Farris.

Laura, thank you very much for coming on the podcast today. We always begin by asking the same

question, which is, was your happy childhood. I mentioned an introduction, the fact that politics

runs in your family. Yes, it was a very happy childhood.

And it was a political childhood.

Were you very conscious of your father's job?

And that might sound silly, but he said,

my dad would leave and disappear and come back.

And I never really thought about what he did.

But if your father was an MP, was kind of the parts of that's something you saw quite a lot.

Well, I was his only child, and I was born when he was 48, and I don't think he thought he

was going to be a dad. And my mum was married before, and so I've got half siblings. But I think

...