THE job of making the Liberal Democrats’ sums add up in the party’s next manifesto was handed to a 27-year-old yesterday as Sir Menzies Campbell kept his pledge to promote women MPs.

Julia Goldsworthy, a former economics adviser to the Lib Dems, becomes the youngest senior frontbench spokesman of any of the parties in Parliament. Her task will be to stop Lib Dem MPs from making wild spending pledges as the party tries to establish economic credibility and sheds its image of demanding ever-higher taxation.

Ms Goldsworthy, whose interests include judo and open sea rowing, entered the Commons last May after winning the three-way marginal seat of Falmouth & Camborne from Labour. She was educated privately at Truro School, Cornwall, to which she won a scholarship, and read history at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. She spent a year studying in Japan, becoming fluent in Japanese and honing her judo skills, before taking a postgraduate certificate in economics at Birkbeck College, London.

She will take over a spending review agreed under Charles Kennedy to identify £15 billion of cuts in Whitehall budgets in order to fund Lib Dem spending pledges, three times the scale of those identified by the party in last year’s general election. “I am very pleased and privileged to join the Shadow Cabinet and greatly looking forward to the challenge,” Ms Goldsworthy said.

“It is vital that we develop fresh thinking and new ideas, that we reduce the tax burden on the lowest paid in society and that individuals and companies are incentivised to behave in an environmentally friendly fashion.”

In between number-crunching and trouble-shooting among spendthrift Lib Dem MPs, she may go ahead with a week-long television sports challenge, The Games, this month although filming clashes with the week of the Budget, for which she will have to be in Parliament.

Other appointments by Sir Menzies, as forecast by The Times, were Nick Clegg as home affairs spokesman, Mike Moore as foreign affairs spokesman and Chris Huhne, runner-up in the leadership election, taking on the environment brief. Vince Cable remains as Treasury spokesman, although he is thought to have expressed an interest in the home affairs portfolio, and Steve Webb stays as health spokesman.

The appointments give Mr Clegg, frequently tipped as a future party leader, in particular an opportunity to raise his profile in one of the most demanding political roles.

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