Claire Coutinho has enjoyed a meteoric rise since entering Parliament in 2019 – and is even tipped to become Britain’s first female chancellor.

The 38-year-old former investment banker yesterday became the first MP from the 2019 intake to reach the Cabinet when she was made Energy Secretary.

But many Tories believe she will rise higher still and some ministers suggest the promotion could pave the way for her to take over at the Treasury one day.

Jealous rivals put her success down to her close relationship with Rishi Sunak.

She served as his special adviser during his time as Treasury chief secretary before the last election and became his parliamentary private secretary after being elected as MP for East Surrey. 

Her background also mirrors his, with her parents emigrating from India and taking jobs in the NHS – as the PM’s did.

Claire Coutinho was appointed as Secretary of State for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero in a cabinet reshuffle yesterday

Ms Coutinho poses in clothes picked up on eBay as part of Oxfam’s Second Hand September campaign in 2020

The Tory MP for East Surrey has said on her MP website her ‘priorities include fixing our roads, supporting the local economy, and protecting our environment’

Like Mr Sunak, she is a Brexiteer. She has revealed that she left the private sector to work in government because she was ‘getting fed up’ with the slow progress toward leaving the EU and wanted to help deliver Brexit ‘from the inside’.

Friends acknowledge she is ‘close’ to the Prime Minister but insist she is ‘brilliant in her own right’. 

Before entering politics she was best known for a brief appearance as a contestant on the Channel Four cookery show The Taste in 2014, when she introduced herself as a ‘supper club host’.

Until yesterday, Ms Coutinho had held only two junior ministerial jobs, undertaking a brief stint as minister for the disabled last year before being appointed as children’s minister.

In her new role she will have responsibility for shoring up Britain’s energy security and walking a delicate line between the Government’s commitments on Net Zero and Tory MPs’ growing concerns about the cost of going green.

Her credentials suggest she is on the green wing of the Tory party. 

Before becoming a minister, she was an active member of the backbench green caucus, the Conservative Environment Network.

In 2021, she backed a campaign to ‘make September Greentember’ which was designed to promote a month of ‘pushing for environmental progress and raising awareness of green issues’.

The MP on a visit to a children’s play area at a farm in her constituency in July. Friends acknowledge she is ‘close’ to the Prime Minister but insist she is ‘brilliant in her own right’

Ms Coutinho in Ukraine sportswear as part of the Game4Ukraine charity campaign, which she supported in her local constituency in a match between Oxted FC and Reigatians AFC

She has backed a campaign to ‘make September Greentember’ which was designed to promote a month of ‘pushing for environmental progress and raising awareness of green issues’

Friends yesterday insisted she is also a ‘pragmatist’ who shared the Prime Minister’s view that progress toward Net Zero had to take account of the cost of living. 

Ms Coutinho was privately educated at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich, south London, before studying maths and philosophy at Oxford.

After leaving higher education she worked for the American investment bank Merrill Lynch and for the centre-Right think-tank the Centre for Social Justice. 

In 2012 she set up the Novel Diner, an events company which hosted dinners based on books including the Great Gatsby and American Psycho.