It may surprise some people but I feel sorry for Kitty Ussher though I don’t agree with what she did and I think she is right to resign her post and not stand again.

Up to now she’s had a privileged life – the bright and hard-working daughter of a classic middle-class family, her parents a doctor and a headteacher.

She won a scholarship to a top independent girls’ school, read PPE at Balliol College, Oxford, and gained an MSc in economics at Birkbeck College, London.

She did research for various MPs and worked as a special adviser at the Department of Trade and Industry and as an economist with various top lobby and research bodies.

It’s a classic New Labour pedigree. No wonder they parachuted her into the “safe seat” of Burnley and whisked her into ministerial jobs almost before she got there.

A classic New Labour Woman. Everything is possible with intelligence and determination.

Represent a seat 200 miles from where you live with your family?

Cope with all the casework from one of the poorest towns in Britain?

Take a full-time job as an active “rising star” minister?

Have two or three children while you are doing all these things, and provide all the attention your family needs?

Well – isn’t this what the new brand of professional feminism is all about?

Of course in order to do these things half well you have to take on help.

I’ve no idea about the Ussher-Colley family’s domestic arrangements but she has parliamentary staff to help with the casework and stuff, and rightly too.

But people who live this kind of high-flying lifestyle rely on professional help for all kinds of things – like their mortgages and expenses.

If Kitty “flipped” her houses it would be following such advice. If you employ experts you do as they say.

It’s not a world I know or one of which I approve. But it’s how such people in all fields do things.

Kitty Ussher was living an impossible dream and she was duped.

I wish her the best of life with her family, as she intends, and I sincerely hope she can rebuild her career and contribute her obvious talents to the wider community.

But it won’t be in Burnley.