I pity George Galloway for being so desperate'

Mr Galloway was defeated by Labour's Naz Shah, left, who secured a majority of more than 11,000  

Exclusive: Newly elected Labour MP Naz Shah tells Radhika Sanghani she thinks that her opponent George Galloway led a 'sexist smear campaign' but she will not let him stop her doing her job

Today is Naz Shah’s first official day as Labour’s MP for Bradford West. After a long exhausting campaign against her opponent, George Galloway, she should finally be enjoying her victory.

But she can’t, because Galloway won’t let her.

Instead of quietly walking away, the former Respect MP has launched a legal battle to overturn his election defeat. He claims he has evidence of ‘malpractice’ in postal voting and wants a recount.

This would be difficult for any new MP to deal with on their first day of the job, but Shah is used to it, because this isn’t the first time Galloway has come after her, she claims. During the election campaign, he claimed that Shah had lied about being forced into marriage aged 15, and thus disputed her entire back story.

“It was a nightmare but you just get on with things, don’t you?” Shah tells me. “My side of the campaign was fantastic. It’s the other side which was the smear campaign, which was a horrible nightmare.”

The trouble started after Shah penned an open letter about her life. She wrote about her mum going to jail for murder, and how she was sent to Pakistan at the age of 12 to escape her mother’s violent partner, only to be forced into an arranged marriage with her cousin “through emotional blackmail” aged 15.

After the letter went viral, Galloway approached her at a local hustings where he said: “You claimed – and gullible journalists believed you – that you were subject to a forced marriage at the age of 15. But you were not 15; you were 16 and a half. I have your nikah (Islamic wedding certificate) in my pocket.”

He suggested the age difference mattered because it “slandered” the Pakistani community and played into “every stereotype”.

• Labour's Naz Shah: ‘My family blackmailed me into marriage at 15'

Shah has totally refuted those claims, but instead of being furious with Galloway, she tells me: “I just pity him. I don’t have any anger towards him, I’ll be honest with you. I pity him for having to stoop to that kind of level and being that desperate. That desperation was quite evident.”

_{Naz Shah pities George Galloway, pictured here (Reuters)}

What about his fight for a recount now she’s won? “It’s a pathetic attempt from someone who doesn’t accept defeat. I have got a job to do. I need to work for the people of Bradford. I fought him on policy and as far as I’m concerned my work can speak for itself. I’ll let the Labour party deal with that.”

This fighting spirit is what got Shah through the smear campaign, though she says she never sunk to Galloway’s level: “I wasn’t fighting Galloway – I was just fighting for Bradford West. I got into fight mode. Of course I’m human and it does impact you. It was difficult at times. I’m not going to deny that but I’m probably one of the most resilient people I know.

“The more he did the more my resolve was strengthened. He’s used to fighting people. He’s used to personalising stuff. I refused to do that. I only responded when I had no choice.”

She never expected the campaign to be so gruelling back when she first became a parliamentary candidate (“I knew it was dirty but I didn’t know it was going to be that dirty”), and nor did she think Galloway would act the way he has.

“He’s a very bad example of political leadership," she says. "I also think he really needs to reflect on the kind of campaign he ran. He’s demeaning democracy. It was really very wrong for him to do what he did, and to continue the way he’s continuing. He really needs to understand it for what it is – a defeat.”

_{Naz Shah}

Shah thinks that a lot of what Galloway focused on in his battle against her was primarily because she’s a woman: “A huge amount of it was sexist. Having my marriage questioned, that was sexist. That was politics at its worst. When a man does something nobody questions it, but when a woman does, they do.”

But even so, she doesn’t feel like it will put women off from considering a career in politics. There are now more women than ever in Parliament – almost a third of MPs are female – and she thinks her campaign will help inspire even more women to join politics.

“I like to think by doing what I’ve done and achieving what I have achieved - it reinforces that any woman who comes into politics shouldn’t be subjected to what I was, but [if they are they] can keep that conviction,” she says. “People have realised that actually justice is always done and the fact that I got the majority I did and I’m heading to Parliament now is indicative of what triumph looks like.”

It is a triumph that she will not let Galloway take from her: “If he thinks any of this will stop me doing what I have promised and the job I have been appointed to do, he’s very, very mistaken. What he did was pick the wrong woman to fight with.