A government minister has told how a miscarriage made her think twice about accepting a promotion from David Cameron.
Tracey Crouch had been a backbencher for five years when she was offered the role of sports minister – her dream job – back in May.
But in an interview with The Spectator, she said: "I said I wasn’t sure because I wanted to start a family and I said it so very honestly. I said to him [Cameron] I’m 40, I want to start a family, that I’d had a miscarriage during the election and it had changed my priorities on life in general."
Speaking for the first time about her experience, Crouch said the miscarriage had "just made me realise really how much I wanted children".
She added: "One of the things that I learned actually was how little we talk about miscarriage… I discovered that some of my closest friends had had miscarriages and hadn’t told anybody about it, and it’s, you know, it’s something that they had to cope with by themselves."
Six months on and Crouch is now both sports minister and pregnant. Her baby boy is due in February and she will become the first ever Tory minister to go on maternity leave.
The MP for Chatham and Aylesford will also be the first Tory minister to use the new shared parental leave brought in by the coalition government – sharing time off with her partner Steve, who works in local radio.
Crouch said she didn't want to be "Supermum" and thought it would be "difficult to completely stop doing constituency work" during her maternity leave. But she added: "At the same time the first few months of a baby’s life are so incredibly precious I will want to spend every moment possible enjoying them."