Nicky Morgan completes rapid rise to Cameron's top team

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/15/nicky-morgan-education-secretary-women-cameron

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Nicky Morgan has enjoyed an extremely swift rise in the past year. She became economic secretary to the Treasury in October, and was given the right to attend cabinet as women's minister and financial secretary just three months ago.

Now bumped up to the much more senior role of education secretary, as well as retaining the women's brief, the 41-year-old is a second mother and MP from the 2010 intake to enter David Cameron's top team. Within the party, she is regarded as a loyalist and safe pair of hands, having spent time in the whips' office.

She is not, however, afraid to speak up for what she believes in. In implicit criticism of some in her party, she told the Bright Blue thinktank earlier this year: "We're against this, we're anti-that, we don't like them, we don't want them here, we don't want them doing this. If we talk about what we hate all the time, we're not talking about we like and what we want to do to help people who want to do well. We never say actually we are on the side of these people, we want this to happen and we think this is great."

Last month, she was also slapped down by Conservative HQ for suggesting during an online chat with Mumsnet that all-women shortlists would not be off the table if the party did not get more female MPs at the next election.

Since then, it has emerged Cameron is also open to the idea on a "voluntary" basis, as long as they are not imposed on constituencies.

Morgan, a trustee of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, voted against same-sex marriage partly because she could not reconcile it with her faith. This is likely to be the reason that Cameron split the women and equalities brief, handing the latter to Sajid Javid, the culture secretary, and leading to accusations that she was the "minister for straight women".

She was privately educated at a girls' day school before reading law at Oxford University and going on to become a corporate lawyer.