Upon completing university aged 21 she wrote down a list of ambitions and placed it inside the frame of her graduation photo.
“It was faded, and I don’t know what pen I had written it in but it was all smudged,” she recalls of the day, three years ago, when finally the picture frame was broken open to check how she’d done. “That picture had been in there for 11 years.”
Smith’s scribbled-down goals had ranged from the modest to the audacious, but chief among them was a desire to finish her career in a national post.