Tigress tamed

Fiona Cunningham, who has had to resign from her role as a special advisor to Theresa May, started off in journalism on features for The Scotsman, and progressed, via a spell at the BBC's Parliament channel, to a Deputy News Editor at Sky. There she met and married Tim, who was an Executive Producer (now with Princess Productions).  They're now divorced.

Fiona first worked for the Tories in 2006, joining the media relations team and supporting Andrew Lansley, then Shadow Health Secretary. She took a year out with the British Chambers of Commerce, before rejoining as press secretary to Chris Grayling, when he was Shadow Home Secretary.

She tried a year-long dip into the wonders of Twitter, from 2009, under the unmusical handle @cunnersf. Among the opinion-formers she tracks - Lily Allen and the combative @toryeducation, "pantomime villain of leftie education folk". Fiona's Twitter style was also a little shouty, to say the least.

In 2011, working for Theresa May, she got caught up in "catgate". The Home Secretary told the Tory Party conference of an "illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because – and I am not making this up – he had a pet." It turned out it was made up, but not before Fiona, according to Hugh Muir in the Guardian, had emailed one of Ken Clarke's advisers "If you don't shut your man up you're out of a job at the next reshuffle".

In March last year, the Independent reported that relations between Fiona and the Prime Minister's media man, Craig Oliver were "strained", quoting a Government source thus: "There is a particular problem between Fiona and Craig. There have been explosions in the past and there have been disagreements over strategy. Fiona had her card marked a while ago.”

And, around the same time, Peter Hitchens noted that Fiona had been appearing "in shot" in newspapers - apparently, something most Special Advisors try to avoid, as they have to buy cakes for their colleagues in penance.

Last month, Mrs Michael Gove aka Sarah Vine produced a double-edged sword, with this piece of advice in her Mail column on how the Tories could win the next election:

Let women do the talking: Not just Theresa May, whose tractor beam glare makes Anna Wintour’s seem positively Bambi-esque, but also all the other straight-talking but little-known women ..... Fi Cunningham, who works for May at the Home Office and is, say colleagues, ‘brilliant but completely terrifying’.

Toby Young pays Fiona this tribute in the Telegraph today, based on sitting next to her at dinner a couple of years ago (hang on, isn't Toby a little fixated on education ?) "Ferociously bright, obsessed with the minutiae of Westminster politics and full of seditious gossip". Perhaps receiving as well as giving.

For an inside story on what happens when hardball Westminster tactics go wrong, the BBC's Chris Mason's blog on his first phone calls from Fiona for two years is a toe-curler.