Helen Grants has no doubts. The new Minister for Sport is a firm believer in the benefits that exercise can bring to people, not only in their health but also in their feeling of self-worth, something that can help their academic work, careers and lives.

She should know. Grant has come from being the only black girl in a single-parent family on a housing estate in Carlisle to qualifying as a solicitor, setting up a successful practice, becoming the first black Tory female Member of Parliament and finally to being appointed a Minister, all while bringing up a family of two boys.

Sport, she knows, can help an individual’s self-confidence and she needed it when she struggled against bullying and racial prejudice at school.

She says: ”From quite an early age, I knew I was a quick runner because I used to do well in the village sports days. When I was at primary school, I wasn’t especially academic. It was pretty much sport that gave me the self-esteem that those of us, who are into sport, know they can get. It was in the 1960s and, at one stage, I was the only person [there] with a darker skin.

There was a fair bit of prejudice around and there was some bullying.” The fact that there were what she now terms as “scraps” was a factor in her starting judo for self-protection. It quickly became, she says, “a mechanism for staving off trouble”.

“I liked the discipline of the sport and having to learn the names of throws and I liked the feeling of winning. Judo and my running gave me a focus.” She became the north of England and southern Scotland junior champion and was also picked for her county at athletics, cross-country, hockey and tennis.

“Sport is in my DNA” she emphasises. “It kept me healthy and taught me to be part of a team and to know that if you are not a team player then that team is going to lose.

“It also taught me the importance of individual activities. You also think ‘If I can be good at sport, then maybe I can be good at academic work too’.”

Olympic memories
Did she have any early heroes or heroines? “The first Olympics I remember were those in 1972 in Munich. I remember the commentator (David Coleman on the BBC) urging on Mary Peters to win the pentathlon and also I recall Olga Korbut in gymnastics. The Soviet gymnast became the global darling of those Games after she fell off the asymmetric bars and burst into tears, although she still ended up with three gold medals that year.

Grant studied law at Hull University and then took specialist legal qualifications in Guildford and eventually joined a solicitor’s practice in Wimbledon concentrating on family law. In 2006, she worked with Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice as the Conservatives drew up a policy to deal with family breakdown. Simultaneously, Grant was a non-executive director of the Croydon NHS Primary Care Trust for more than two years before resigning to focus on her political career. She became MP for Maidstone and Weald at the 2010 General Election succeeding the retiring Ann Widdecombe.

It is no coincidence that she has been appointed minister in a department headed by Maria Miller, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Miller is determined to encourage more females, particularly teenagers, to get active. Already an extra 500,000 have been taking part in sport over the last year but Grant says: ”Still many are not as engaged as we would like. Some stop when they leave school. Many women are juggling their work with domestic duties and having children.

“We have to think more imaginatively, such as providing creche facilities. It’s very hard to get out and do something when you’re taking care of children women-only sessions are also important. Getting women into any physical activity is an absolute plus and could be the way to great things. We want more women doing sport and enjoying it. The media has a big part to play. Good progress has already been made but the more exposure we can get, the better it will be.”

Putting into practice
The department is going to examine the results of the 12-month long experiment undertaken in Bury, Greater Manchester, in which women will be attending activities such as group runs, dance and fitness sessions, including zumba and aerobics. Bury won a national competition, organised by Sport England, to run a pilot scheme to discover what attracts women to activities and what turns them off. A total of £1.8m of public funding has so far been earmarked for the initiative.

There is a fear among some young women that exercise will give them large muscles. Grant rejects such claims. “Personally I never thought that way. I was always fit when I was young and my legs and arms were quite thin. Some of our stars looks fantastic. Look at Jessica Ennis for example.”

And Grant herself continues to practise what she preaches. On holiday last summer she played tennis every day and, at home, goes sailing at weekends and runs on a treadmill that she has at home. Now she just wants more people to follow her example.

• Grant was interviewed by John Goodbody for The Sunday Times