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Wannabe Tory MP Casting for your vote on TV
Last updated at 12:38pm on 09.03.07
True Blue: Castaway contestant Clare Hilley, 23, has been a Tory activist since she was 15
She is blonde, stuck on a remote desert island and surrounded by TV cameras. But there is a lot more to Clare Hilley than meets the eye.
A contestant in the new series of the BBC's Castaway, which starts tonight, the 23-year-old from Surrey is not your run-of-the-mill celebrity wannabe.
Instead of the usual ambitions to release a pop single or get a job on breakfast telly, Ms Hilley wants to be a Tory MP.
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A Tory activist since she was 15, she is a prominent figure in the party's Conservative Future youth wing, and stood in the Croydon council elections last year while still at university.
With her forthright views - "Margaret Thatcher was an incredible leader" - Ms Hilley was almost undoubtedly chosen to provide some political fireworks on the small island off New Zealand that will be the castaways' home for the next three months.
And you can be certain the trainee pilot will oblige. She admits she can be confident to the point of arrogance and finds it hard to be diplomatic.
She also recently caused controversy on a Tory blogsite by championing the cause of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Seven years after the original series on the Scottish island of Taransay, Ms Hilley is one of 13 contestants who will be trying to build a self-sufficient community from scratch on Great Barrier Island.
• Castaway is on BBC1 at 9pm.
Reader views (1)
So, Clare Hilley is 23. Mrs Thatcher stepped down as Prime Minister in 1990.
A back-of-a-fag-packet calculation tells me that when Mrs T was driven off into the sunset, Clare was roughly six years old.
I would gently suggest her declaration that "Margaret Thatcher was an incredible leader" does not stem from too much personal experience of the "Iron Lady's" leadership abilities!
- Steve R, London, UK
