Tell us about your background…

I’m from Port Talbot in south Wales. It’s the steel capital of Britain so we’ve had some difficult times recently. I was lucky because I went to Dyffryn School, a great local comprehensive, and I had very supportive teachers. I did my A levels at the Afan campus of Neath Port Talbot College. Once again, I had great lecturers who were very encouraging. They took us to lots of university open days and taught us about interview techniques – they really cared about our futures.

What was your experience with the Sutton Trust?

I went to St Catherine’s College at Oxford and got a brilliant insight into what life on campus was like. It was nice to be with a diverse group of peers – I made new friends and stayed in touch with many of them afterwards via MSN messenger, remember that? To be honest I was always going to apply for Oxford, but I particularly remember having to do a Summer School presentation on British politics and the British Empire and the support we had from a former student – it was instrumental in helping me choose a subject and a college.

I then did history and politics at Oxford and it was a fantastic three years. The education I received was almost surreal, we really were living and working in a world heritage site. I was on the Junior Common Room Executive at Merton College, and the friends I made there are still friends I see now.

What happened next?

When I left Oxford, I started applying for internships. They were mostly unpaid – that’s a bit better now – and harder to get if you weren’t already living in London. I ended up interning at a thinktank and Sky News.

After that, I started working for the Media Standards Trust. My main job there was running the Orwell Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for political writing, helping to promote political writing and debate. We started a prize for blogging and came up with the idea of the Orwell Youth Prize – I’m now one of the Youth Prize trustees.

We also did a lot of work on press regulation and its insufficiencies and we were right at the heart of the phone hacking scandal. We also spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the media. It’s been fascinating, if worrying, to see some of our predictions come to life, particularly with some of the recent debates around Cambridge Analytica.

In March 2012 I started working in Harriet Harman’s office as a political advisor. She was the Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and Shadow Deputy Prime Minister. Westminster is unbelievable, and not always in a good way – though it is incredible what you can achieve. I think the entirety of my induction was being told not to carry papers in a way that made the text visible. During my stint in Westminster, I began to understand how important it is to think about how political organisations operate and how decisions are made, as well as the actual decisions. And the Leveson period was particularly extraordinary. There’s no policy area like press regulation – it’s something of an intractable political problem. The Daily Mail even published a full-page hatchet job on me. It was a slightly terrifying experience; I knew they were going to do it ahead of time but didn’t know what they’d publish. It’s safe to say that your mind goes wild in that situation!

What are you doing now?

I joined an independent thinktank called the Institute for Government in 2013. Most thinktanks do the ‘what’, but we’re more interested in the ‘how’. We’re looking at the machinery of government and how things get done. We do a lot of research, events, and learning and development. We work with civil servants, ministers, and potential ministers – this group aren’t offered training, so we play an important role. Most of my work is to do with data and transparency. We take open data to chart what government looks like – literally! – to help people understand what’s happening, hold it to account, and how it could be improved by using data more effectively.

Do you have any advice for young people?

Throw spaghetti and see what sticks! Take all of the opportunities that come your way because you never know where things will go – sometimes, you just have to be in the right place at the right time.