WITHIN the space of just three weeks, Anum Qaisar-Javed has gone from teaching modern studies to being the subject of classroom lessons as Scotland’s newest MP.

The 28-year-old was elected as the new representative for Airdrie and Shotts on Thursday and tomorrow will be her first day on the job.

“In my National Five class we look at reasons for under-representation in politics,” she says on Friday, “And now I’m standing here as the only elected MP in Scotland of colour.

“Literally three weeks ago I was going over the role of parliaments. Today one of my friends, a teacher, messaged me that she had me on a powerpoint presentation and was teaching her class about me. That’s some transition, right there.

“I don’t just want just young women to look at me, or people of colour, I want anyone from a minority group to be able to look at me and say ‘if she can do it, so can I’.”

READ MORE: New SNP MP pledges to be a role model for minorities after by-election win

Qaisar-Javed is joining an SNP team that’s undergone big change since the snap general election of 2019, when her party won 45% of the vote and 48 seats. It’s since been thoroughly reshuffled and is also down to 46 members following the defection to Alba of Kenny MacAskill and Neale Hanvey.

The by-election was triggered by the resignation of ex-MP Neil Gray for his successful Holyrood election campaign. The SNP politician left behind him a 45% vote share to Labour’s 32%.

Qaisar-Javed – who famously campaigned for independence as a Labour member before switching parties after the referendum – came through with an increased share of the vote (46.4%) but a majority that’s 4000 down on Gray’s thanks to a resurgent Labour vote which saw it put on 6.5%.

Scotland in Union, the No campaign headed by Pamela Nash, the last Labour MP for Airdrie and Shotts, had urged unionists there to back Labour in a tactical votes drive aimed at keeping Qaisar-Javed out.

It was the first Westminster by-election in Scotland for a decade and coincided with the Muslim holiday of Eid ul Fitr. The special day comes at the end of Ramadan, and while fighting her Westminster campaign Qaisar-Javed was fasting. Ordinarily, Eid ul Fitr would have given her the chance to feast with family and friends. But with knock-ups to do, polling stations open until 10pm and her future on the line, this year was different.

“It was a strange Eid,” Qaiser-Javed says. “Normally we get up, go to the mosque, pray and visit family and have something to eat, but I felt too sick to eat. I think I had one or two samosas the whole day, it was stressful.

“I’ve never had an Eid like that but it’s an Eid we’ll never forget.”

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The result was declared at 1am on Friday morning and by the time Qaisar-Javed speaks to the Sunday National at Friday teatime, she admits she’s had just three hours of sleep.

The day’s been filled with calls, media bids and a photocall with her new line manager, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford.

She’s “really looking forward to the opportunity to be a young person from Lanarkshire representing the SNP” in the chamber, she says, and she’s “really looking forward to going down and getting stuck in”.

She’ll be sworn-in tomorrow and wants her office team up-and-running as soon as possible. First she’s got to pack, but she won’t be alone for the journey to London – her whole family is going with her, including her psychiatric doctor husband Usman, her two younger brothers Ahsan and Adil and her parents Naveed and Shanaz. She doesn’t know what they’ll do while she’s in parliament, but “they just want to be there”, she says.

“I talk about it a lot,” she goes on, “the fact that my dad immigrated to this country from Pakistan with very little, his first job was stacking onions. Thirty years later, his daughter is an elected representative. I think that sums up civic nationalism.”

The teacher’s new job comes at a pivotal time for another reason too. It’s happened 10 years after she joined the Labour Party as an 18-year-old. She left around four years later, never having dreamed of becoming an elected politician during that time, she says. “I was too young to have considered that,” she tells the Sunday National.

And while her campaign team was confident of victory, she says she hadn’t let herself believe them. “People were really confident, people kept coming up and saying ‘we think you’ve done it’, but I waited until we went into that room at the count and were told,” she says.

“I worked so hard, I didn’t take anything for granted. I want to be the MP for everyone, regardless of whether or not they voted for me.”