In the early 1980s, as a dogsbody in a paper mill, she noted that the waste paper her superiors so casually discarded was actually worth something.
Disloyal backbenchers have a lot more fun than dogsbody junior ministers.Individual MPs have become more autonomous for one other big reason: the power of incumbency.
Everyone's mascot, jester, dogsbody, hoping to foil the punches by rolling over and begging for a pat on the head.
In the 1930s George Orwell worked as a plongeur, or kitchen dogsbody, at Hotel X in Paris.
They're a brilliant group of women who go and do the dogsbody work that nobody else does, for free.
Ana (a perfectly trim Claire Lams) is an East European émigrée working as an office dogsbody.
Whoever has made a television documentary will recognise this power struggle, though in television it's the cameraman who's the big cheese and the sound recordist who's the dogsbody.
He bought a Rolleiflex camera while on National Service in Singapore, became a studio dogsbody back in London, and wangled an assistantship with the fashion-shoot king, John French.
While Crosley's principal trio – Keiza, dogsbody for aforementioned jewellery designer; Victor, newly unemployed; and Nathaniel, an aspiring TV writer – aren't part of this cedar-and-flagstone gilded world, they exist on its periphery.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is, by contrast, a fateful love story; but headstrong Alice is hardly the Juliet to police dogsbody Teddy Butt's chest-waxing, body-building Romeo.
The sentence, "No, you look great," as he points his camera, is the sign that power has shifted and you're the dogsbody now.
