Here is some good news for European Commission stagiaires, MEPs’ assistants – even for the MEPs themselves. Play your cards right, and one day you might end up as prime minister, like Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who has held all three of these posts. The bad news is that it being prime minister may not prove a very pleasant experience – at least, not if Thorning-Schmidt’s experience is any guide.

In September, the 45-year-old Social Democrat became the first woman to take up the top political office in Denmark. But it has been almost all downhill since there, with the party polling at an historic low and her coalition government taking hits from all sides. And now, as leader of the country at the helm of the presidency of the Council of Ministers for the next six months, she carries an extra political burden.

Born in the Copenhagen suburbs to middle-class parents, the woman who has been described as “the greatest surprise in Danish politics” was a stellar student in addition to being both pretty and popular. She went on to study political science at the University of Copenhagen, which was her ticket into the College of Europe in Bruges. Here in the nesting box of the Eurocrat elite, her fate was sealed in more than one way. Not only did she have a political awakening; she also met the man who was to become her husband and the father of her two daughters. This man was Stephen Kinnock, the son of Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the British Labour Party and European commissioner.

They both ended up in Brussels after their studies, where he worked in the European Parliament and where she started out as a Commission stagiaire. She then moved directly to become the head of office for the Danish Social Democrats in the Parliament, where she displayed her trademark cocktail of brains, charisma and self-confidence.

Despite having no political experience, she went on to win her own seat in the European Parliament in 1999, beating the runner-up by a mere 38 votes. Here she was one of the core members of the cross-party Campaign for Parliamentary Reform founded by a group of young MEPs eager to do away with the gravy-train image of the Parliament. Others were Nick Clegg, now the leader of the UK’s Liberal Democrats and his country’s deputy prime minister, and Cecilia Malmström, the Swede who is now the European commissioner for justice and home affairs.

High on their agenda was a wish to end the Parliament’s monthly trip to Strasbourg for plenary sessions. They failed in that objective, but they were instrumental in removing Friday meetings from the Strasbourg calendar, thus making one small dent in the Parliament’s institutional procedures.

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She also worked on the Convention on the Future of Europe, becoming something of a favourite of the Convention’s president, the French former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. As the rapporteur on a directive on noise in the workplace, she found herself under attack from lovers of bagpipes after a news story in a Scottish tabloid (wrongly) accused her of wanting to ban the instrument as too noisy.

Notwithstanding that story, Thorning-Schmidt was a largely unknown figure in national politics when she returned to Denmark in 2004. But a power vacuum was developing within the Social Democrat party after years of infighting about how to forge a new identity in a society far removed from the old working-class order. Thorning-Schmidt’s knack of being at the right place at the right time, coupled with her ability to breathe fresh air into a tired party, soon propelled her to the forefront of events.

Fact File

Curriculum Vitae

1966: Born, Rødovre

1992-93: College of Europe

1993: Joins the Social Democrats

1994: Degree in political science from the University of Copenhagen

1994: Stagiaire, European Commission

1995-97: Senior assistant to the Danish Social Democrats in the European Parliament.

1997-99: International consultant to the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO)

1999-2004: Member of the European Parliament

2005-: Member of the Danish parliament, Folketinget

2005-: Elected leader of the Social Democrats

2011- : Prime minister

The day after winning a seat in parliament at the general elections in 2005 she launched her bid to become chairman of the Social Democrats – and won on the promise that she could beat the then prime minister (and current NATO boss) Anders Fogh Rasmussen. She could not. But last September she pushed his successor, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, off the throne and formed a three-party coalition with the Socialist People’s Party and the social liberal Radikale Venstre. Since taking office, her government has been pummelled for breaking election pledges right, left and centre, and it is struggling to shake off a variety of smaller and bigger scandals.

These include accusations of tax evasion launched against Thorning-Schmidt’s husband – allegations that have proved unfounded and may have been part of a smear campaign headed by figures in the former government. Nonetheless, they have compounded Thorning-Schmidt’s image problems.

Her allies call her undogmatic and a great listener, who carefully considers all input before deciding what route to take. Her enemies describe her as opportunistic, void of substance and lacking in political ideas. Less acidic critics describe her as too perfect, too eloquent, too distant, too cool and too well-dressed, making it hard for her to lose the old ‘Gucci Helle’ moniker that fellow party members pinned on her during her European Parliament days because of her un-labour-like preferences for expensive clothes and accessories.

She has fared much better on the broaderBrussels stage, where, to the joy of many, one of her first acts as prime minister was to discard the previous government’s plans to reinstate enhanced customs controls at the borders with Sweden and Germany. But despite her ease in EU circles and her good European connections, readers of the Financial Times’ account of a row over governance of the eurozone at the EU summit on 8-9 December will have noticed that the French president seemed less impressed with her.

“You’re an ‘out’, you’re a small out and you’re new,” the French president is reported to have hissed at her, when Thorning-Schmidt, leader of a country outside the eurozone, tried to argue for a treaty change acceptable to all 27 member states. “Nobody wants to listen to you.”

She has urged people to take this account with a pinch of salt. But the success of the presidency will rely on her and her cabinet’s ability to assert themselves as credible partners despite Denmark’s position as a small country that has refused to adopt the euro. And it would not hurt her chances of success if she got her own house in order as well.