Julia Lopez entered Parliament at the height of the Brexit wars and joined the band of Tory “Spartans” who refused to back Theresa May’s EU deal and fought to break Britain free from Brussels. Today, she is at the heart of the Conservative battle to bring down Labour, save Brexit and put Kemi Badenoch in No 10.

Ms Lopez is one of the Tory leader’s true believers. The two friends arrived in Parliament in 2017 and – following the ousting of Boris Johnson in 2022 – she joined fellow Conservative MP Lee Rowley in nominating Mrs Badenoch to succeed him as PM.

She remembers: “Kemi put herself forward at that juncture, and we said we’d back her if she did it with a sense of mission and a sense of meaning. And it was a really incredible experience.

“It was a chance to be creative, to say where you thought the country needed to go and to put out a platform. And it was a thrilling couple of weeks.”

The party opted for Liz Truss, but Mrs Badenoch won respect among MPs and activists. In the wake of the devastating 2024 election defeat, they handed her the challenge of reviving the party and plotting a path back to power.

Ms Lopez is now Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, and, despite intense competition from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, she believes Mrs Badenoch can become PM at the next election.

Labour is “falling apart far faster than I would have anticipated,” she says.

Having served as one of Mrs Badenoch’s closest aides, she is impressed both by how she has grown “enormously” as a leader and by the values that drive her.

“There’s a lot about politics that is difficult and painful and requires personal sacrifice,” Ms Lopez says. “And I think that she is doing it because she believes that in making those sacrifices, she will be making the country a more sustainable place for the next generation. I think that’s a very noble mission.”

Ms Lopez entered politics as a councillor in London’s Tower Hamlets in 2014. She ran for a seat, as she puts it, to “fight corruption and electoral fraud” having been appalled at chaotic scenes she witnessed when she attended a council meeting.

The young Conservative was dismayed by her close encounter with “nasty, divisive politics based on your identity rather than what you believe in”.

“I loathe identity politics,” she adds, admitting she worries about it “very deeply”.

When Mrs May called the 2017 snap election, there was a rush to select candidates. Ms Lopez, who was born in Harlow and grew up in Stansted, was picked for the northeast London constituency of Hornchurch and Upminster.

She won it with six out of 10 of the votes but arrived in a Westminster where the PM had lost her majority, and the party was sharply divided on Brexit.

Ms Lopez, who had supported leaving the EU, remembers: “I should have felt really thrilled and excited about the adventure that lay before me [but] I had this deep sense of dread that we would not be able to get Brexit through with no majority.

“That sense of dread turned out to be absolutely correct, and I watched as the political class tied itself up in intellectual hoops trying to find a reasoned and intellectual case for why we shouldn’t implement the referendum. I thought it was a fundamental deceit.”

If the Brexit vote was betrayed, she feared, there would be a “massive democratic backlash”.

The thought of defying the PM was daunting for the new MP.

“I’m a nobody, and immediately you find yourselves at odds with the Prime Minister,” she recalls, adding: “I thought there would be a very sophisticated whips operation that would turn the screws on me very heavily.”

But she could not bring herself to vote for a deal she felt in her “soul to be wrong”.

Her own rationale for supporting Brexit was simple: “I thought that we needed to be accountable for our own destiny rather than continually blaming external forces on why Britain wasn’t going in the right direction.”

And today she fears that Sir Keir Starmer, the man who served as Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Brexit secretary, is pointing the country in the wrong direction and once again endangering Brexit.

“You can see Starmer again disingenuously talking about how he respects the referendum result while actually doing everything [to] find ways in which to align us with the European project,” she says.

She thinks power has drained away from the PM.

“Keir Starmer is no longer in charge of the Government as far as I can see,” she says.

Ms Lopez, who has co-authored books on the last financial crash, claims it is “very obvious” the Government will not be able to take the necessary action to rein in public spending.

“I think that the markets will increasingly look at the British political system and wonder whether the country can be governed,” she says.

She does not think the present level of public spending can be sustained with so many Britons out of the workforce.

“There is a shrinking number of people who are holding all of that burden, and it’s completely ruining the incentive structure in this country whereby people who are working their behinds off feel that this country’s no longer the right place for them,” she argues.

The mother of two longs to see Britain thrive.

“I’m 41, I want my country to be going places,” she says.

Many young people on the centre-right who share her frustrations and want to enter politics will be wondering whether to back the Conservatives or join Reform.

Ms Lopez has a ready pitch for why they put they should get behind the Tories: “We’re looking very deeply at some of the questions that face the country that go well beyond immigration and into all sorts of things, from technology to how we shape the environment to how we get the energy policy right.

“And if you want to be part of that team and genuinely engage in the future of the country, then I think that our party is the party that you should be joining.”

The London mayoral elections in 2028 will be a key test to see whether the Conservatives are within striking distance of winning back power in the Westminster election expected the following year. By this time, 12 years will have passed since the Conservatives last led the city with Mr Johnson as Mayor.

Would she consider a run?

“It’s not crossed my mind, no,” she says.

But she does think the mayoralty of the capital is winnable for the Tories.

She laments how incumbent Labour Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has used his position to “bang on about Brexit and how terrible that was” and to “bash Trump” and “talk about basically anything other than his key responsibilities”.

She says: “It’s not just Conservative voters or Reform voters who are totally disillusioned with the Mayor. It is many, many Labour voters and Liberal Democrats who think that he’s not done a very good job of running our wonderful city.

“I think that people are very disillusioned with Labour at every level of Government.”

Her parents’ politics were influenced by the change in the country unleashed by Margaret Thatcher, not long after Labour had been forced to go “cap in hand” to the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan.

She thinks her father, a businessman who spent time managing a dairy, was shaped by the feeling of “shame” at that time of financial chaos, adding: “They talked about the sense of relief and excitement when Thatcher came in and gripped the country and took on those battles.”

The spirit of Thatcher is alive in her as she describes how her “mum and dad started with £50 in the bank and built a good middle-class life for themselves by sheer hard work.”

Ms Lopez is now working hard on policies so that post-Brexit Britain can flourish. She has no shortage of energy, but she is impatient for real power.