A surgeon, a student and a lawyer Party's new MPs find their feet

It is a sunny day in Norfolk and Peter Prinsley, the first Labour MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, is about to look up the nostrils of a 90-year-old man.

- Helen Pidd ,Lucy Hough

But before he can get out his microscope to look for the cause of the man's chronic nosebleeds his patient has something to say.

"Congratulations on your appointment," says Tony Wilkin as he lies down on the examination bed in Prinsley's consultation room at James Paget university hospital in Great Yarmouth.

Wilkin's wife, Vera, has a question: does Prinsley - an eminent ear, nose and throat (ENT) surgeon - really have the time to be in parliament when the orifices of East Anglia need him? Her husband was declared an urgent case in May and is only now being seen.

Prinsley never really expected to be fielding questions from his patients about why it would now be even harder to get an appointment with him.

"The honest truth is that I was hoping to win, but in my heart of hearts I didn't really expect to win because [Bury St Edmunds] was, I think, the third safest Conservative seat in England," he had said shortly after his shock victory.

Some may think Prinsley would be of more use to society in the NHS than in parliament, since he also helps train the next generation of ENT surgeons and runs a genetics programme at the University of East Anglia. But "both of these roles have their uses", he says, with mischievous eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. "I've been in that group of doctors who have often been moaning about the situation that we're in. And a lot of people have said to me: 'Well, if you're moaning so much, why don't you go and get elected and try to change things?""

Prinsley had not applied to be the candidate in Bury St Edmunds, which had been solidly Tory for 150 years. He wanted to represent Great Yarmouth, but Labour chose someone else (something the party's decision-makers may now regret after their candidate ended up losing to Reform UK).