Tory who turned Nat
She’s the SNP hopeful in a hotly contested Perthshire seat. But Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh is a late convert to the Nationalist cause, having previously worked for the Labour Party... and standing as a Conservative candidate:
‘My marriage was part love and part arranged’ She said Salmond should ‘hang his head in shame’
AS she posed for the cameras with Alex Salmond in a hot air balloon this week, the mean streets of Glasgow Govan must have seemed a lifetime away. In fact, it is only 16 years since Tasmina Ahmed- Sheikh trod them – or drove them in her BMW. Back then a blue rosette was pinned to her lapel as she battled for Conservative votes in an area hardly noted for Tory leanings.
On her travels during that campaign, she crossed swords repeatedly with the SNP candidate – a woman the same age as Mrs AhmedSheikh but with a very different political outlook. She was Nicola Sturgeon.
In the event, neither woman won the Glasgow Govan contest for the inaugural Scottish parliament. It was Labour candidate Gordon Jackson who polled most votes. But while Miss Sturgeon progressed into the parliament through the list system, her Conservative rival just missed out on becoming the first Asian MSP.
Young, glamorous and reputedly a darling of Tory Central Office in London, she was said to be ‘very bitter’ about it. Not for political failure in Govan had she abandoned a lucrative acting career in Pakistan.
A decade and a half on, the wounds are healed and 44-year-old Mrs Ahmed-Sheikh is standing for election again, but this time in radically changed circumstances. For a start, she is no longer a Conservative – or, for that matter, a Unionist.
The candidate who stood against Nicola Sturgeon in 1999 and warned darkly of the SNP’s thirst for an independence referendum now wears exactly the same political colours as the First Minister.
She was a leading light in the Yes campaign, decrying Westminster as ‘not fit for purpose as a democratic chamber that represents the wishes of Scotland’s electorate’. As for her former crew the Conservatives, she pointed out the nation was ‘governed by a party who have just one Scottish MP’.
There are other important differences about this election campaign. It is a Westminster battle, not a Holyrood one – and Mrs AhmedSheikh is no longer fighting an inner city seat. This time she is the candidate for Ochil and South Perthshire, in the geographical heart of Scotland – and she is the front runner.
The largely rural seat was the SNP’s number one target constituency to steal f rom Labour in 2005 and 2010. Now, with Labour haemorrhaging support to the Nationalists, they are more confident than ever of taking it.
So just who is the former model, soap opera actress, solicitor and mother of four that many think is a shoo-in as the area’s next MP?
Well, few would be surprised to hear the Conservatives call her a ‘political butterfly’. But then, Mrs Ahmed-Sheikh’s political dalliances extend further than just the Tories and the SNP. She has been in the Labour Party too. Of the major parties, only the Lib Dems have failed to attract her. There is time yet.
It was as the ten-year-old daughter of a well-to- do university lecturer turned insurance broker that she developed her appetite for politics. Her father, Mohammed Rizvi, was standing for the Tories for the then Lothian Regional Council and she would shin up lampposts to adorn them with his election posters.
By the time she was old enough to join the party, Mr Rizvi was the first Asian regional councillor in Scotland and she was a pupil at one of Edinburgh’s most prestigious private schools, George Heriot’s.
She was bright, articulate and confident. Little wonder she was soon installed as chairman of Edinburgh Central Young Conservatives.
Any assumption she was a ‘hereditary Tory’, however, was quite wrong. At least, it was in those days.
Responding in 1999 to suggestions she had inherited her father’s politics, she said: ‘I am a Tory because I believe in Tory values: support for the family, the importance of education, the virtue of self-help but also the need to contribute to the community. Tory values and Asian values are the same.’
The story changed somewhat when she joined the SNP. ‘I didn’t choose the Conservative Party, I was born into it,’ she said this year.
For a time in the 1990s, she certainly chose the Labour Party – but, the way she tells it, there were extenuating circumstances there too.
By then she had wed her husband, actor and producer Zulfikar Ahmed, in a marriage that was ‘part love, part arranged’ and was living with him in Glasgow. His family were Labour supporters – staunch backers, in fact, of Mohammed Sarwar, who went on to become Britain’s first Muslim MP. At the time of Mrs Ahmed- Sheikh’s involvement, he was campaigning for a Glasgow City Council election.
She recalled that her Conservative Party membership had lapsed by the time her husband’s family persuaded her to join Labour. ‘My father-in-law asked if I would help out because of my electoral experience. Mr Sarwar told me I would have to be a member of the party to do that. I attended one meeting and helped out with one leaflet delivery and that was it. I never renewed my membership and don’t subscribe to the principles of the Labour Party.
‘It really was no big deal. Look, you ask any Asian female living in an extended family and they will tell you that they do their best to please the men they live with. This was a direct request from my father-in-law, head of the household and a man I respect.’
Nevertheless, by the time candidates were being selected for the first Scottish parliament election, she had jumped ship again and was back on board with the Conservatives. Her soundbites certainly sounded true blue – perhaps even too blue.
She declared: ‘All those who came here from the Asian nations 30 or 40 years ago had to sustain themselves without any handouts: if you wanted to put food on your family’s table, you had to find a job.’
It was hardly the political language of Nicola Sturgeon.
But it was the story of her family. Her father had arrived in London from Pakistan in the 1960s and taken a job as a lecturer in English at London University. By the time he met her mother Yasmin, a Welsh-Czech former Royal Shakespeare Company actress, he had moved into insurance and she had taken a job working under him.
‘He was shy and passed her a note on the Tube one day in London, asking her to marry him,’ Mrs AhmedSheikh said.
She was born in Chelsea, but soon moved north to Edinburgh when a new opportunity arose for her father.
Life as a mixed-race child in a Scottish primary school in the late 1970s was not always easy. She and her sister Seema both endured namecalling. Yet, perhaps owing to their parents’ example, they grew into assured, high- achieving young ladies.
Mrs Ahmed-Sheikh took degrees at both Edinburgh and Strathclyde Universities, gave birth to her first
child days after her LLB graduation ceremony and forged a career as a model and actress i n Karachi, Pakistan, all with apparent ease.
Her key TV role was in the 13-part drama Des Pardes, made in Scotland by her husband and screened to a massive audience in Pakistan and other Muslim countries.
As her father had always insisted she spoke English, she had to learn Urdu in only two months for the role. She mastered it with aplomb and a Bollywood film followed. Yet it was politics in her homeland that really motivated her. She would say: ‘I don’t expect to be starring in any more TV programmes. I will be far too busy working as an MSP at Holyrood.’
It did not pan out that way. But at least, by the time she knew she was not going to be an MSP, she had succeeded in making her views known about Alex Salmond. She said his criticism of Nato involvement in the Kosovo War as ‘unpardonable folly’ was ‘hopelessly naive’ and he should ‘hang his head in shame’.
She went further, saying the then SNP leader’s comments exposed ‘the stark truth’ about him, that ‘he is hopelessly out of his depth in the arena of real politics, national, and international’.
Little over a year later – in perhaps the most spectacular political volte face of the age – she was throwing in her lot with him.
It was, she explained, because then Tory leader William Hague was taking the party too far to the Right and his tough stance on asylum seekers was encouraging racism. Oh, and also because she now beli ev e d i n an i ndependent Scotland.
Mr Salmond was jubilant. But the famous grin faded somewhat when Mrs Ahmed-Sheikh admitted that she was also a former member of the Labour Party too. Lib Dem MSP Keith Raffan said at the time: ‘My only serious worry about Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh is that she might join us next.’ Annabel Goldie, then deputy Scottish Tory leader, said: ‘She is clearly pursuing her own vigorous agenda. The fact we welcomed her, and her father, into the party rejects any accusation of racism. To switch from being Unionist to separatist shows the confusion is not with the Tories, it is with Tasmina.’
There were some, certainly, who suspected the switch had more to do with personal advancement than ideological conviction.
Her election agent for Glasgow Govan, Clive Schmulian, said: ‘She was desperate for a high profile and has a huge ego, but she was very politically naïve. The SNP are welcome to her. She has very Right-wing views and will never fit in with the SNP.’ In fairness to Mrs Ahmed-Sheikh, she has now been faithful to the Nationalists for 15 years. It is also worth noting that Mr Schmulian himself l ater backed Scottish independence.
But if the defector’s plan was to find as quick a route as possible to elected office, she would probably have been better staying with the Tories. Despite a closeness to Mr Salmond – he even made a cameo appearance in a Pakistani TV series she was producing – it was many years before she was selected as a candidate for a major poll.
That was in last year’s European Parliament election. By the time she stood, she was a mother of four and a successful lawyer, having become a partner at Glasgow firm Hamilton Burns. She had also founded the Scottish Asian Women’s Association and received an OBE for services to business and Scotland’s Asian community.
Come the election, however, it was Ukip’s David Coburn who took the sixth and final Euro seat on which her heart was set. It was a deep disappointment – and a bitter irony for a mixed-race candidate to lose out to a man she suspected of racist tendencies.
Last month, after Mr Coburn waded into a racist row when he joked that he referred to SNP minister Humza Yousaf as Abu Hamza the terrorist preacher, Mrs AhmedSheikh herself waded in.
She said: ‘During last year’s European election campaign, I was faced with David Coburn’s ignorance as he repeatedly got my name wrong. During the days and weeks of the campaign, he called me Pashmina, Jasmine and Tamzin before eventually settling on a combination of love, dear and honey.
‘I found his remarks sexist – and possibly racist.’
Come May 7, the former Conservative who has journeyed all the way to Miss Sturgeon’s way of thinking may well have the last laugh.
Equally, she may not. Her Labour opponent Gordon Banks reports much talk of tactical voting on the doorsteps. He suggests natural Lib Dems and even Tories plan to vote for him as the only candidate who can keep the Nationalists out.
Politics, as Mrs Ahmed- Sheikh well knows, is riddled with divided loyalties.
‘A huge ego and desperate for a high profile’