RACHAEL Maskell has been on a steep learning curve since being elected as Labour MP for York Central in May.

She's had to find her feet in the House of Commons, get to grips with the duties of a constituency MP, and familiarise herself with issues that matter in York - everything from the lack of affordable housing to the state of local mental health services and electrification of the Transpennine rail route.

Then, scarcely four months into her new job, she got a call from the office of Labour's new leader Jeremy Corbyn. He wanted to offer her a front-bench post as a shadow defence minister.

"I was quite surprised as a new MP to be promoted to the front bench," she admits. "There's a lot to learn."

It was all the more surprising because she herself had backed Mr Corbyn's rival Andy Burnham for the Labour leadership.

So what does she think of Mr Corbyn?

"Supporting one candidate doesn't mean that I'm against another candidate," she says. "Jeremy is one of the most experienced politicians we have - and he's a very different type of politician. I think he has something quite refreshing. He's proved that he can be a statesman, and he's real." And can Labour win the next election under his leadership? "Absolutely."

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Jeremy Corbyn: 'something refreshing'

Her new defence portfolio probably isn't the one that she would have chosen. Her experience so far has all been in health-related fields - first as a physiotherapist, and later combining that role with being a top national trades union official as Unite's head of health.

But her new brief takes in veterans, as well as reserve forces and some civilian defence workers. And she believes her health background will prove useful. There is a real issue with ex-soldiers and other forces personnel just 'falling out of society' when they leave the armed forces. "Particularly people who are discharged prematurely." And there is also the issue of the stress-related conditions that veterans can face. Her experience will help her in dealing with that, she believes.

Still, there have been long hours in the House of Commons library getting to grips with her new brief. She's a stickler for detail and hates it, she says, when MPs vote on issues they don't really know much about. "There were people voting for the Health and Social Care Bill who hadn't even read it. You need to make sure you are clear what you are voting on.""

That's very commendable. But does becoming a shadow minister so quickly - with all its calls on her time - mean she will have less time for her own York constituents?

Not at all, the 43-year-old insists. "I will always put my constituency first. If people have challenges or issues they want to raise, I'm there to take that up and to make sure we get solutions to those issues."

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Constituency comes first: Rachael Maskell campaigning for electrification of the Transpennine route

Politics is in her blood. Her dad was a merchant seaman turned onshore morse key operator who was also a trades union rep. Her uncle, meanwhile, was Terence Morris, the noted prisoner reformer who was on the Longford committee which advised Harold Wilson on penal reform.

He even went so far as to arrange to have himself admitted to prison for a spell so he could observe conditions from the inside. "He worked in the laundry!" Ms Maskell says.

She grew up in the Dorset village of Highlcliffe. "And ever since I was young, there wasn't a day I can remember when politics wasn't being discussed," she says. She joined the Labour Party when she was still at school, the first moment she could.

It was her mum she followed in her initial choice of career, however. She went to the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where she trained to become a physiotherapist. She started work at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, joined her profession's trades union, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) - and became a CSP union rep almost straight away. "People were saying 'Oh, Rachael, we need a local rep.'"

Eventually, an opportunity came to work for the TUC. She took it, and ultimately ended up as 'head of health' at Unite, Britain's biggest trades union.

It was a job that took her all over the UK, defending the rights and conditions of health workers, and campaigning against the Conservatives' Health and Social Care Bill, which saw consortia of GPs take over responsibility for commissioning local health care.

Throughout her union career, however, she continued to work as a hands-on physiotherapist, often at weekends. "It kept me grounded," she says.

During her travels around the country with her Unite job, she spent some time dealing with the Yorkshire Ambulance Service. And last year - before she knew that Hugh Bayley was going to step down, she insists - she moved to York.

She made it onto the all-woman shortlist to become Labour candidate for York central when Mr Bayley announced he would be standing down: and was selected, at a secret ballot of local party members, ahead of the popular former Labour Lord Mayor and city councillor Julie Gunnell, to stand in the election.

"I respect Julie," she says. "But it was a very democratic process."

Once she'd been selected as the Labour candidate, her election in strongly Labour York Central was never really in doubt.

She dived straight into constituency work - and her maiden speech on the floor of the Commons, in her first week as an MP, tackled an issue that is close to the heat of many in the city: the urgent need to replace York's only mental hospital, Bootham Park.

"I am asking for a new state of the art mental health facility," she told MPs. "My constituents deserve the very best."

That was back at the beginning of June. Nobody then quite realised just how urgent the need for a new mental hospital in York was soon to become. But it was to prove a very prescient first speech. Since the shock closure of Bootham Park, that need for a new mental hospital is more urgent than ever...

Rachael Maskell on...

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Closed: Bootham Park Hospital

Bootham Park Hospital: The Government's restructuring over the health service is ultimately to blame for the 'almighty mess' in York's mental health services, Ms Maskell believes. There are too many health organisations sharing responsibility for mental health care locally - from NHS Property Services which owns Bootham Park to the Tees, Esk and Wear Valley Trust which now runs mental heath services in York, the Vale of York Clinical Commissioning Group of GPs which commissions those services and the Care Quality Commission monitors them. "There has been a fragmentation of the health service," she says. "Too many people are involved in decision-making and nobody is in over-arching control."

The 'gentrification' of York: Many ordinary York people feel alienated and excluded in their own city, she accepts. We need more affordable housing. "And that comes back to the local plan." Big city-centre sites such as York Central and British Sugar should focus on providing social housing, she says. "There has been this stigma around social housing. But we are the only country in Europe that does that. We should take pride in social housing."

Trident: "The party (Labour) is setting up a review of Trident. I think that's right. Personally, I don't support renewal. Nine nations have a nuclear arsenal, 183 don't. If 183 countries get away with it (not having nuclear weapons) why should we have them?" The £100bn saved could be put to much better uses, she says - such as investing in green energy technology and in our conventional armed forces. "We need to make sure that our service personnel are properly equipped."

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Trident nuclear submarine Vanguard

NATO: She is in favour of remaining a member. "We're better having a seat around the table."

Europe: "We're better in Europe. It creates 3.5 million jobs and puts £30bn into our economy. And some of the social aspects are really important: employment legislation, equality legislation, human rights. I would want to see a reformed Europe. But do we really think we can survive in a global economy as little Britain? The world has changed."

The Railways: "I would like to see them brought back into public ownership." East Coast ran very successfully as a publicly-owned company, putting £1billion into Treasury coffers. It could be a good model for a publicly-owned national railway, she believes. In the meantime, she is pushing for an early start to electrification of the Transpennine route - particularly the York to Leeds stretch, which is easier to do than say the Standedge rail tunnel between Stalybridge and Huddersfield.

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A First Transpennine Express train