A Pakistani-origin lawyer has become the first South Asian ever to join the British government as Cabinet Minister.

Sayeeda Warsi (39), who was born in Yorkshire town of Dewsbury, is an unelected member of the House of Lords. She has been also slotted to take over as the new chair of the Conservative Party, which comes with a Cabinet rank.

Warsi, who started legal practice some 15 years ago, is the daughter of a Pakistani bus driver, who went on to set up a bed manufacturing company.

Before she divorced her husband, Naeem, with whom she had 17 years’ relationship, Warsi defended the institution of arranged marriage, describing Naeem as “just right”. She met him at the age of 15 during a trip to Pakistan. They married when she was 19.

“It was an arranged marriage. My parents recommended a series of boys and he was the one I chose. It just felt right. He was my type. He came over here and spent six months with my family before we got married - during that period we fell in love,” she said

After their divorce in 2007 Naeem was quoted as saying, “I wish I had been with a woman who wants to be at home, looking after the family.”

Warsi, a champion of Muslim women’s rights, has since remarried and is now the wife of food company executive Ifthikar Azam, who was also a divorcée and had four children.

Warsi’s second marriage has been hugely controversial because she was accused of taking the husband of a vulnerable Pakistani woman whose grasp of English was so poor that she didn’t even realise she was being divorced. When the former Massarat Bi Azam received her divorced nisi, she is reported to have thought it was an electricity bill.