A Kent MP has told of her childhood battle with ADHD and the shock she felt the moment she was elected.

Rosie Duffield, Labour MP for Canterbury, spoke on the Women with Balls podcast on The Spectator, shedding light on her life in parliament.

The 52-year-old rewound the clock to tell of her time at school and how she was certainly not a model student, getting just 10% on a test once.

“I didn’t really feel like I fitted into school,” she says.

“I think I got 10% in a chemistry exam once and that was for writing my name.

“Things like writing and daydreaming and imagining worlds - that was my thing.”

She went on to explain the realisation in her late 40s that she in fact had ADHD and how this explained her childhood behaviour.

“Nobody knew that I had ADHD and I didn’t know until I was 47 or 48 maybe,” she said.

“My eldest son got diagnosed at university and it was like a lightbulb.”

Following an online assessment which her partner also did, Rosie said this was the moment she thought she could not ignore it anymore.

“My score was higher than his and I thought right okay, I can’t ignore this anymore,” she said.

“In terms of school, it meant that I was always, I mean I still am, incredibly disorganised.

“I didn’t believe for a millisecond I was going to win...”

“So with things like doing my homework, it wasn’t laziness. I got dismissed as being lazy but I am the least lazy person and I want to do things but finishing things off and organising in priority order and finishing something before starting something else things is impossible.

“I think part of the reason I was always dismissed at school and the naughty one was because I was chaotic.”

Fast forward to the 2017 election, Rosie Duffield told of her utter shock when she was told she had won.

“I didn’t know if there were any single mums in parliament but I thought why shouldn’t I get there,” she said.

“I thought it’ll be my five seconds of fame.

“In June I was thinking, I’ve got no income and I was in a real panic actually. I was panicking I would run out of money as I had got a loan to run.

“I didn’t believe for a millisecond I was going to win.

“I was in complete shock when I won. Literally, I was physically sick. I went to the loos, I started shaking and threw up.”

She added, ahead of the results, her campaign manager asked her if she had prepared a speech, to which she laughed and said no. She said she also had not mentally prepared for it, adding it took about six weeks to sink in.

“It was completely weird and mad when I went into parliament for the first time,” she said.

Six years in the job, and Rosie Duffield told of how it is now the norm for her to have to be snuck into meetings and there being security issues with conferences.

“There’s security issues for all women MPs,” she said.

“The last meeting we held was at a women’s centre and I had to be snuck in through the back entrance because there were people in balaclavas at the front - that’s just part of life for me now I’m used to it.”

Speaking about Brexit, she said “anything is better than the current situation”.

“My bit of Kent is a university town and we have incredibly strong links with the continent so I almost have to operate independently on that,” she said.

“My continuance on the whole really want that full membership with the EU.

“Anything is better for me than the current situation.”