From the war zones of Africa to fighting for London in the battleground of Brexit

ended up running the department.She then took a job for soft ware start-up Cortex in Boston before travelling to Uganda with the Voluntary Service Overseas.

It was that experience that encouraged her to turn her back on her corporate life in the late Nineties, despite being a managing director at business information firm Thomson Financial. “I was aware I was going to be in this bubble and move from one promotion to another and living in a comfortable environment. I thought ‘It’s a big world out there, if I don’t get out now, I might not’.”

An advert for a role as Oxfam’s regional director for West Africa was posted in The Economist and her husband, Howard, whom she met through work, faxed it to her. She got it at the second time of asking and shipped her family, including her kids, then aged two and four, to Dakar in Senegal in 1999. “It was hot and dusty, and beautiful in many ways,” she recalls.

Some of her assignments running Oxfam programmes across nine countries were more “stretching”, as she puts it. For example, when civil war was raging in Sierra Leone, she found herself with a team of engineers hiking to a water source in searing heat and attempting to restore the water supply.

That was one of the few times she questioned her safety. “You’ve got to make sure the local community wants you there and then the community will basically keep you safe.”