Interview: New Tory vice-chair – Toff can help solve the Conservative youth problem

Ben Bradley had an inkling that his first week back at work wasn’t going to be an ordinary one when he received a text at 7am on Monday. The MP for Mansfield was summoned to 10 Downing Street for 11.30am with no explanation as to why. Given that this was the day Theresa May was expected to reshuffle her Cabinet, it was an odd request for an MP who had been in Parliament for less than a year, after taking the seat from Labour in the snap election. ‘I thought if it’s health, I’m not sure if I want it,’ Bradley jokes. He did, however, begin to put two and two together; ‘I’d been working a lot with the party in terms of some of this [membership] stuff anyway because it’s my cup of tea and there was something on Twitter actually which said ‘expect a raft of vice-chairs to come out early doors’ so I kind of got a clue from there.