BARRIE HUDSON chats to Anne Snelgrove, standing for the Labour Party in South Swindon, in our series on all the candidates in the General Election on May 7.

ANNE Snelgrove was South Swindon’s MP for five years until being unseated in 2010.

Among the things she looks back on with most pride is her fight to secure compensation and justice for local victims of the Farepak hamper firm collapse.

“On a wider issue,” she added, “I was part of the cross-party group in the House of Commons which fought to get the cervical cancer HPV vaccine for all girls in schools.

“We succeeded in doing that, working with a couple of charities, and from my own personal experience I know that will make a huge difference to those youngsters’ lives.

“Hopefully we will see cervical cancer cases dropping hugely.”

The issue is one with which Anne is all too well-acquainted, having been diagnosed with the illness in 1997 and 2012 and beaten it both times.

Anne is from Bracknell in Berkshire, and is one of two children born to an electronics worker dad and a mum who founded and ran her own catering business.

Her interest in politics came early; she wanted to learn to read so she could discuss the stories in her dad’s Daily Mirror.

Anne achieved her ambition to become a teacher, training in the 1970s.

She has been an educational adviser, worked in communications and, most recently, volunteered at Oxfam headquarters and started her own communications firm.

Anne’s rise in politics began in the 1990s when she was asked to stand for a Berkshire council seat after leading a campaign against a controversial link road. Successfully winning South Swindon after predecessor Julia Drown stood down, Anne also became parliamentary private secretary to Gordon Brown.

She said: “I bring a huge amount of life experiences and skills to this job, and there are so many different facets to it which I believe I can contribute to really well.

“Having been a constituency MP I know how you need to run your office and be effective, so that people who are in trouble, have problems or want to take you up on policy issues get a fair hearing.

“Secondly, in the House of Commons, I’m a really effective advocate for Swindon. I’ve made it my business to be trusted and liked by my party, particularly the people who hold the positions of power.

“They know that I am no pushover. You don’t get to be the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary by being a pushover.

“I will serve the people of Swindon by bringing extra investment to our town, by making those arguments so that when funding is up for grabs I’m first in the queue.

“The third part of it is actually being a champion for Swindon in the national and international sphere.

“I get angry that people bad-mouth Swindon, and that we’re a kind of handy, easy hit for the national press when they’re looking for bad stories. I want to change that because we have a proud industrial heritage we’ve made very little of, and we have picked ourselves up and gone forward to greater success.”

Also standing in South Swindon are: Robert Buckland (Conservative); Talis Kimberley-Fairbourn (Green); Damon Hooton (Liberal Democrat); John Short (UKIP).