“Oh God, I’ve become institutionalised.” A year after entering the House of Lords, Paralympic athlete and 11-time gold medallist Tanni Grey-Thompson seems to be more than at home.

She recalls telling her husband about a recent exchange of “political Top Trumps” in the chamber she’d found particularly amusing. He replied, “That’s not really funny,” at which point she realised just how accustomed she’d become to the rarefied atmosphere she now inhabits.

Coming from the relentless competition and interminable training that dominates the life of a professional athlete, Grey-Thompson had more adjustments to make than many who enter the House.

“There are just so few egos here, and coming from sport, which is full of incredibly egotistical people – including myself – where it’s all about one-upmanship and about beating everybody else. It’s just not like that here.

“If I’m honest, I expected it to be much harder. I expected to have to be here 20 years before people spoke to me, and it’s not like that at all.”

While she’s explaining why she’s constantly worried about breaking one of the many “unwritten rules” of the Lords, a fellow peer dashes over and proves just how welcoming the Lords have been to her. She is introduced to a guest as “our Olympic heroine”.

Naturally, in the year since she became a peer, quite a bit of Grey-Thompson’s activities have been centred around the forthcoming London Olympics. Before entering the Lords, she was at the heart of the team that worked on the bid for London 2012, and now sits on the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. As an athlete, Grey-Thompson competed in five different Paralympic Games, and worked at a sixth, in Beijing in 2008. She recounts when the reality that the Games were coming to London really dawned on her.

“It was very early on after we’d won the bid. I was taken on a trip to the site of the Olympic Park. It was November-time, cold, wet, really muddy. I sat in this pile of mud, and they told me that I was sitting on the finish line for the 100m. At that point, I decided that this was kind of cool.”

As a nation, our inclination to be pessimistic about our chances of making London 2012 a success is too strong, she says.

“From the beginning people were saying ‘our bid is never going to beat Paris’. And then it did. I knew we could do it.

“Actually what we’re really good at doing in this country is organising stuff, but we’re not always very good at believing enough in ourselves.”

It’s not just the success of the few weeks of the Games themselves. She’s hopeful that holding the Paralympic Games in London will have a long-term impact on the infrastructure for disabled people, and the attitudes we have towards them.

“Just the fact that you’re going to have 5,000 disabled people in London will make a big difference. It’ll make people think differently about how disabled people use buses, for instance. And the fact that the Paralympics is on during school time is great. If you can change the attitudes of children to think, ‘OK, so what, they’re in a wheelchair’, that’s something that’s long term.”

“Ghettoising” disabled people is her biggest fear regarding the government’s proposals for welfare reform. From the abolition of the disability living allowance, which she says for many people in care homes was their only way of having any kind of independence or mobility, to the portrayal of disabled people as “benefit scroungers”, she’s worried that we could be making things worse, not better.

To see the difference in treatment of disabled people compared to other historically marginalised groups like ethnic minorities or women, she says, you only have to look at Philip Davies MP’s recent suggestion that disabled people should be allowed to work for less than the minimum wage.

“If you said a woman should be allowed to work for less than minimum wage, all hell would have broken loose. There was a bit of media coverage around it, but not huge amounts.

“That’s where we have a real fight in terms of understanding disability because people just don’t get it.” She thumps the table, emphasising her words. “I don’t want people locked away from society, I really don’t.”

With less than a year to go until the opening ceremony, there’s still a lot Grey-Thompson has to contribute to the preparations. She’ll soon be helping to taste the menus for the athletes’ food. There will be 10,000 athletes in London for the Games, all with specific dietary requirements. As she puts it: “I’m just going to eat every single thing. That’s going to be a really tough job.”

The temptation is to dismiss Grey-Thompson as a single-issue politician – sportswoman turned peer.

But she works away from her husband and daughter four days a week and is often in the House past 9pm. She is determined to make this a truly ‘working’ peerage. Far from becoming institutionalised, the longer she spends in the Lords the more she’s going to defy such an easy categorisation.

Tags: London 2012, Olympics, Paralympics, Tanni Grey-Thompson