Virginia Hilda Brunette Maxwell Bottomley, Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone, (née Garnett, born 12 March 1948) is a British Conservative Party politician and headhunter. She was a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons from 1984 to 2005. She became a member of the House of Lords in 2005. Early life and career Virginia Hilda Brunette Maxwell Garnett was born in Dunoon, Scotland, to Barbara Rutherford-Smith, Jarrow hunger marcher, a teacher and elected Conservative member of the Inner London Education Authority and W. John Garnett CBE, former director of what was then called The Industrial Society, grandson of Cambridge physicist and educational adviser William Garnett and of Sir Edward Poulton, Hope professor of zoology at Oxford. Her paternal aunt was Labour Greater London Council member Peggy Jay. She first met Peter Bottomley, her future husband, when she was 12 years old; they wed in 1967. Bottomley was educated at Putney High School, an independent school for girls in Putney in southwest London, before going up to the University of Essex to study sociology (BA). She later graduated from the London School of Economics with the degree of Master of Arts (MA). She began her working life as a social scientist and was a researcher for the Child Poverty Action Group. She has also been a social worker, magistrate (Justice of the Peace), and Chairman of the Inner London Juvenile Court. Member of Parliament and in government After unsuccessfully contesting the Isle of Wight in the 1983 general election (34,904 votes), she was elected to Parliament with 21,545 votes in a by-election in 1984 (filling the seat left vacant by the death of Maurice Macmillan, son of former prime minister Harold Macmillan), as the Member for South West Surrey, was PPS to Chris Patten and then to Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, received her first ministerial position in 1988 as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department of the Environment and was appointed Minister of State at the Department of Health in 1989. She was appointed a member of the Privy Council (PC) upon joining John Major's Cabinet as Secretary of State for Health in 1992, becoming the ninth woman to serve in the British cabinet. She served as Health Secretary until 1995. Bottomley and Ann Widdecombe have been listed as co-founders of Lady Olga Maitland’s pro-nuclear Women and Families for Defence group. She served as Secretary of State for National