UNLIKE some of her more zealous counterparts, Maria Caulfield had not made up her mind about which way to vote until after her Prime Minister came back from negotiation talks in Brussels in February.

The Conservative MP for Lewes said the offer he secured did not go far enough on important points including immigration and fishing, so she threw her hat in for Brexit.

After a long campaign from the shores of Newhaven to the cottages of Lewes, she and her husband Steve Bell went down to the count on Thursday evening to watch history unfold.

“We were as surprised as anyone at the national outcome,” she said. “It is always hard to convince people to change and much easier to get people to stick to the status quo.”

Yet the results in her own constituency were split, with the Lewes local authority district voting to Remain (52 per cent) and Wealden, which includes some of her constituency, voting to Leave (54.5 per cent).

“It is daunting now," she said, "because even with the Wealden result, a significant number of my constituents voted to Remain and my job now is to make sure their concerns are also addressed."

Speaking three days after the result, the former senior cancer research nurse rejected claims from angry Remainers that the Leave campaign had backtracked on NHS funding promises, stressing that Brexit did mean more control over finances.

She added that there was also now “the potential to get full rights back” for smaller local fisherman, adding: “I think it depends what else we are negotiating, so for example with the French it may be between tariffs and fishing rights – so there is all sorts of scope.

“I will be pushing the case of fisherman to be high up on the agenda. But I think for fishermen, when I met with them a couple of weeks ago, it was not so much how quickly it would happen but that change could happen, because many of them were thinking of hanging up their nets. Now there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Mrs Caulfied said she would be unhappy with any deal with the EU that allowed for free movement of people, given that immigration was such a key issue for voters in her area.

Some commentators have suggested the UK could end up with a deal like Norway’s, in which free movement of people is a condition of access to the single market, or like Canada’s, which does not include financial markets nor all trade.

Leave campaigner and South East MEP Daniel Hannan also told Newsnight that the UK would want to stay in the common market, meaning accepting free movement of labour.

Mrs Caulfield said: “I know for local communities immigration was a big issue. I had lots and lots of young people saying to me, I cannot get on the housing ladder, I cannot get into schools.

“More and more schools in my constituency are having to put up portacabins every year because of the increase in students.”

She accepted this was not all down to EU migration, but said getting out of the EU was one way of controlling the overall number and the skills of immigrants to the country.

Mrs Caulfield, who won the Lewes seat from the Liberal Democrats’ Norman Baker at the latest general election, said she was disappointed at Mr Cameron’s resignation, and thought foreknowledge of it could have changed voters' minds.

She said: “As one of the MPs who signed the letter to ask him to stay, I was disappointed that he made that announcement, but I respect his decision.

“I think that if he had said as part of the referendum campaign 'if you vote to leave you are voting for me to leave as PM', then I think that would have had a demonstrable impact on the result.”

Among the issues on which Mrs Caulfield is now having to represent two sides is that of students, with some language schools concerned about restrictions on Europeans coming to study here and others looking at the situation from the opposite perspective.

She said: "I know places like South Downs College were relying on non-EU students for funding, and if they could not get visas, it causes problems."

She has also heard specific concerns about the UK's participation in Erasmus, the EU student exchange programme, which she said she hoped could continue.

She continued: "It is obviously going to be a very bumpy time over the next few weeks and I understand people who voted for Remain are very very upset at the outcome, but I urge them that whatever their issues are to go and see their local MP, and whether it is about students or anything else, they will try and address it."