Ms Lam rose through the ranks at Goldman Sachs but also found time to co-create musicals and cabaret shows which have been performed at venues including New York’s legendary Studio 54. She worked for Boris Johnson in Downing Street and sought to thwart terrorists and gangsters while at the Home Office, and last year she entered the Commons as the MP for the newly created Weald of Kent.

She won attention with her passionate calls for justice for the victims of grooming gangs and today she identifies two key threats to Britain’s future.

The first is the economy. When it comes to making Britons wealthier, she says “we’ve made no progress in my adult life”.

And, secondly, she argues the “fudge” of attempting to counter economic stagnation by embracing mass immigration must stop.

If this continues, she warns, “there’ll be even fewer places to live relative to how many people there are. It’ll be even harder to get a GP appointment.

“But also, I think it has really serious implications for our society and our culture because there’s no way you can integrate and assimilate that volume of people over that period of time. It just can’t be done.”

She supports a “serious program to send home everybody who’s here illegally”, an overall cap on immigration and reform of the “indefinite leave to remain” system which allows people to stay in the UK with no time limit.

Ms Lam does not want the UK to become a nation where people “don’t know their neighbours” and she argues the essence of “Britishness” cannot be taught in a classroom.

“You can only learn it by living amongst it,” she says – which she argues is why it is “really destructive to our national culture” when people live in “enclaves” with “completely different cultures”.

She makes her case at a time when many people with concerns about high immigration have turned to Reform UK, which sits at 30% in the latest Techne poll, ahead of Labour on 20% and the Conservatives on 19%.

Ms Lam insists the Tories can win the next election.

“I believe that the nation needs a reformed Conservative party or I wouldn’t be doing this,” she says.

The journey of her grandmother’s grandfather to Britain shaped his descendants viewed democracy. He was a Left-wing senator whose condemnation of the Nazis led to the family being stripped of their citizenship.

She recalls: “We were never cynical about politicians in my family.”

Politics seemed “very high stakes” and “kind of exciting” – it was “about good and evil and fighting for the soul of a country and a people”. It looked like “an amazing thing to do with your life”.

Ms Lam found herself on the frontline of a national crisis during the pandemic. As a senior figure in the Downing Street business team she spent the days before Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme was unveiled pleading with employers not to sack workers.

“I spent the whole time on the phone to businesses saying, ‘Please, something is coming. I can’t tell you what it is because nobody knows yet, because it hasn’t yet been written. But it is coming.

“‘Please don’t make 15,000 people redundant. Just give me 72 hours.”

She has mixed feelings about this time, admitting: “I hope the Government is never that powerful again.”

It was a mistake, she argues, to close schools and she believes some hospital visits were unnecessarily stopped.

“There are men who never met their babies because they only lived for an hour and they weren’t allowed into the hospital,” she says. “I don’t think that should ever have happened.”

In Parliament, she was at the forefront of the push for a national inquiry into grooming gangs. She understands why there was such entrenched denial for so long about the scale of the crisis.

“For a long time, not just the Labour Party and the Government but what one might call the establishment didn’t really want to believe that this could possibly be true,” she says. “And it is so horrific that it does seem like it can’t be true.

“There’s just something in you that says, ‘That’s so awful that that can’t be real.’”

But now she is concerned by a second wave of “lies”, as people pretend they were alert to the horrors unfolding in the nation’s streets.

“That leaves a bad taste in my mouth,” she says.

Vigilance will be required as the inquiry process goes forward, she argues: “The victims and survivors are very hopeful and that is crucially important but I think the Government’s feet are going to have to be held to the fire pretty much every step of the way.”

As a schoolgirl she “totally fell in love with Latin” and studying the rise and fall of ancient empires at university has shaped her political perspective.

The future of Western civilization cannot be taken for granted, she claims. But, she adds, “it’s done pretty well so far.”

And in the House of Commons she is one of 650 people battling to shape the future of this country.

“I just really like to get involved,” she says. “When I was a kid, my mum always used to say to me and my younger sister, ‘Well, someone’s got to do it, so why shouldn’t it be you?”

The Conservative party and the country can be renewed, she states, with the right mixture of “honesty, consistency and hope”.

“I believe this is the greatest country in the world,” she enthuses. “It saved the free world multiple times.

“It gave parliamentary democracy to the human race. I mean, Britain is an incredible place.”

As Ms Lam has proved, it is a land of opportunity.