Catherine Margaret Ashton or Baroness Ashton of Upholland was born in Lancashire. After gaining a degree in economics at the University of London, Baroness Ashton has had a varied career in the third sector before her rise up the political ladder, culminating in her new high-profile role as the European Union’s first High Representative for Foreign Affairs.
She began work in the 1970s as an administrator at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, later being elected as one of its vice-chairs. Baroness Ashton then went on to lead Business in the Community, a charitable organisation concerned with fighting inequality. As director between 1983 and 1989, she established organisations such as the Employers’ Forum on Disability, Opportunity Now and the Windsor Fellowship.
Between 1998 and 2001, she chaired Hertfordshire Health Authority, later becoming the Vice President of the National Council for One Parent Families.
After being appointed a life peer by Tony Blair in 1999, she worked as a junior minister in the Department of Education and was responsible for Labour’s flagship education project, Sure Start. She switched to the Ministry of Constitutional Affairs in 2004 where she was voted politician of the year in 2006 by Stonewall, the gay rights organisation, for championing equality and human rights.
In 2007 she was promoted to Leader of the Lords where she took responsibility for equalities issues and pushed proposals such as allowing victims of forced marriages to seek compensation under the Forced Marriages Bill in 2007.
Baroness Ashton was appointed as the first British woman EU Trade Commissioner after being chosen to replace Lord Mandelson last year. In this role she has widely been regarded a success and built a reputation as a competent negotiator who achieves results, after leading trade negotiations with China and other key powers and arguing the case for free trade. According to the European Commission’s website, in her time as Trade Commissioner she has ‘initialled an ambitious and far-reaching trade agreement with South Korea, and solved a number of high-profile trade disputes with major trading partners’, and championed trade as a means of promoting international development.
How Baroness Ashton performs in her new high-profile role remains to be seen but as Denis MacShane, former Europe Minister is quoted in the Times as saying: ‘She was Labour’s best leader in the House of Lords and anyone who can herd peers will have no trouble with EU foreign ministers’.