Quotes from Esther McVey

I've met people at the top of companies like Accenture who started off in McDonald's.

If that is your route, to go to university and get a job that way, that is fantastic.

Success isn't anything to do with being lucky. It's knowing what you want, taking the necessary action, and believing you can achieve anything you set your mind to.

I work with a host of amazing women who act as role models, who give their spare time freely to encourage these girls to give things a go, to reach out and take a chance and to explain that should they fail, well that's just a part of life.

First and foremost, we have to ensure that we have to get our own kids ready for work so that employers want to take them on.

When I became minister for employment, that was my ideal job because it meant I was able to reflect on what I saw growing up and actually try to change it.

If feminism was a dress, it would be that essential little black number, reached for in times of need; different for everyone but a steady constant in a woman's life. Outspoken or understated, demure or provocative, worn to reflect the mood, the personality, the time.

I guess, as a young girl growing up in Liverpool in the '80s, when unemployment was high, my ideal job would have been to have been Minister for Employment to see, can you solve these problems? Can you get people into work?

David Cameron, and before him Iain Duncan Smith, went out of their way to attract women into the party. Yes, we need to sell politics to more women, but quotas are not the way forward. You set a quota, what is the right quota? What is the wrong quota?

Labour's disastrous legacy and the Conservative success did not happen by accident: it was about the choices each party made, choices that impact on everyone.

We all have dreams, whether it be about success in our careers, improving our relationship with family and friends, or sorting out our finances.

Every Labour government has left office with higher unemployment than when it entered.