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Naz Shah found it thrilling when she was arrested on suspicion of murder. “I’ll be honest with you, I had fun. It was the most excitement I’d ever had in my flipping life. I’d never been to a police station before. I was 18 and wet behind the ears. I was this really sheltered kid who’d been arrested. And I was like, they’ve got it wrong, so in my head it was all going to be over soon,” the MP for Bradford West says. “They took my clothes and gave me this white suit to wear, and I was saying, ‘Ooh, I look foxy in this, don’t I? Can you imagine taking me on a date in this?’ I was having a right laugh with the police officers. Honestly, I was so naive.”
Shah’s beloved “Uncle” Azam had died unexpectedly in April 1992. An autopsy revealed that he had been poisoned with arsenic. Shah and her mother, Zoora, who spoke little English, had cooked the previous night’s supper. They were arrested and taken to different police stations. Shah was released. Zoora admitted that she had made the dessert that contained the arsenic. After a month-long trial, she was convicted of Azam’s murder in December 1993 and sentenced to 20 years in jail.
The excitement Shah had felt at the police station didn’t last long. She tried to kill herself twice following her mother’s conviction. But she is one of life’s great survivors. Despite leaving school at 12, being forced into an arranged marriage at 15, and having to bring up her two younger siblings after her mother was jailed, she became a celebrated campaigner, held down high-powered jobs and has been a member of parliament for 11 years. “It’s an interesting life I’ve had,” she says.
Over the next couple of hours, I discover Shah has a fine line in understatement. She was six when her wife-beating, heroin-dealing father traded in her mother for a younger model, and the shame it brought on the family led indirectly to her mother’s conviction.
Shah’s story has always been central to her relationship with the community. Before running against George Galloway in Bradford West in 2015, she published a blog about her family’s history: if she didn’t own her story, it was ripe for exploitation. But then she was telling it as a campaigner who had fought for her mother. Now she’s telling it in a profoundly personal way, as someone who lived through those horrors and was shaped by them.
Her memoir is called Honoured because she is honoured to be an MP, to have survived it all, and at its heart is the Islamic concept of izzat, Arabic for honour. But the book is as much about its bleak antithesis – dishonour. In her culture, a family without izzat is worthless. The day her father walked out, they lost it – and her mother’s attempt to regain it had terrible repercussions.
We’re at her Bradford home, a lovely stone cottage. There’s a fire roaring, her cat Ruby is juggling a couple of sticks and Shah is making us a cup of tea. I’ve arrived early and she’s not quite ready. “Give me a few minutes. D’you want some fruit? Should I put the telly on for you? Make yourself at home.” I sit marvelling at Ruby’s dexterity and at how Shah turned her life around.
Soon she’s back, fully made up, pack of fags in hand. “D’you mind if I smoke? When the kids are here, I can’t smoke in the house.” Shah has three children with her second husband, from whom she is now separated. He lives close by and they have a good relationship.
I ask how she’s feeling about the book. “I bumped into Sadiq Khan the other day,” she says. The London mayor and former Labour MP is a friend, and she gave him a proof to read. “Sadiq said, ‘That was traumatic’ and put his hand on his chest. I said, ‘Nah, you’re good!’ And he said, ‘No, Naz, it was traumatic reading that.’” What did she say then? “I went, yeah.” She might have as much front as the Pennines, but nobody understands what she and her family went through better than her.
Shah, 52, started the book in 2017 – then put it aside for six years: “I had healing to do, and writing it brought up a lot of issues.” Two years ago she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. In the end, she says, she had to write it to get everything out of her system and show people you can get through the hardest of times. “It’s not a misery memoir,” she says pugnaciously. “I’m sat here in my own home with the fire on. To have a fire on and not think about the token you’ve got to buy to put your electricity on and leave a light on, these are things you can’t take for granted. To have got to where I’ve got to, it’s in strength, not weakness.” Shah is short and slight, but she’s made of tough stuff.
“My fight started in the womb. I mean, because I was born a girl, my father didn’t pick me up till he had a son.” Shah’s father was so disappointed, he wouldn’t look at her for the first year of her life. Zoora immediately got pregnant again and gave birth to a boy who died within hours. Shah’s maternal uncle told her father this was God’s way of telling him he should treasure her. So he did. For a while. He would lift her on to the TV, twirling her around to Boney M’s Brown Girl in the Ring. She adored him. Back then her father was a regular businessman, doing well for himself. They were the only family in the street with a colour telly and video recorder. Then one day, when she was five, she saw him drag her mother by her hair and assault her. “I ran up two sets of stairs to the neighbours and was banging on their door to come and stop him.” It wasn’t the only time she witnessed his violence towards her mother. But she told herself this was an aberration, that he was a good man, and continued to love him.
Then he walked away, leaving the family destitute. By now, Shah had a sister, Foz, and brother, Imy. There had been rumours her father was having an affair with a neighbour. It wasn’t true: he was having a relationship with her 16-year-old daughter, whom he went on to marry. And that’s when izzat came into play. Shah was told she was dishonoured because her father had left home. Zoora, still only 24 and working part-time as a cleaner, was determined to restore izzat to the family and thought she could do this by selling her wedding jewellery to put a deposit down on a £10,000 house. But without a full-time job, she couldn’t get a mortgage.
This is when Uncle Azam came into the story. He was neither a real uncle nor a real friend. But he appeared to be both. “He brought fruit over for us, so he seemed like a knight in shining armour. But he was exploiting a vulnerable young woman.” Another understatement. Azam, who was married, told Zoora he would register the house in his name, she would make payments via him, and when she had paid off the mortgage he would transfer the property to her. But it didn’t work out that way. The first time he took Zoora to her new home, he raped her. And so it continued. When he went to prison for heroin dealing, his criminal associates started to come to the house with provisions for the family. Zoora took them upstairs out of sight while the children did their homework. When she came back down, she looked distraught. Sometimes she was bruised.
At 12, Shah was sent to live with relatives in Pakistan. “I thought I was going for a holiday. I didn’t come back for two and a half years, and I never saw the inside of a school again. They didn’t let me come back till I had my nikah done [a marriage contract in Islamic law].” The relatives told her Zoora had approved the marriage, even though she hadn’t. At 16, Shah’s husband joined her in Bradford. He was immature, abusive and controlling. Six months later, she walked out on him.
The teenager briefly took back control of her life. And then Azam died. In her eyes, he was still a good man. But when her mother was remanded in jail, rumours grew that she had killed Azam because he had been abusing Shah. This left her even more devastated. She knew she hadn’t been abused by him, and was convinced her mother, who pleaded not guilty, hadn’t killed him. Shah felt humiliated and lost. She took an overdose, and had her stomach pumped. “We’d just been arrested and were on the front page of a local rag, and it was overwhelming and I wanted out.” She pauses. “Looking back, I think that was probably a cry for help.”
She was 20 when her mother was finally tried. Shah sat through every day of the month-long trial, and can still see the verdict being delivered in Technicolor. “Her right hand was on her mouth, as if she was trying not to scream, and the other was grasping the rail in front of her. Her eyes were locked on mine. It’s like she was trying to hold me tight. And that kills me, even today.” Shah gulps. When she was doing the audiobook, this was one of a few parts she simply couldn’t read out.
There are so many memories she struggles with. At 20, she found herself homeless, sofa surfing wherever she could. After Azam’s death, 11-year-old Foz had been sent to Pakistan. In 1993, with their mother remanded in jail, Shah sent Imy to bring Foz home, but without the money for a return flight, they got stuck there. She was now alone. “I was in a crack den at one point; I can still smell that horrible, sweet, sickly smell.” Then there was her first Eid alone: “My cousin Pini rang me and it hit me my sister wasn’t there, my brother wasn’t there, my mother was locked up, and I just felt overwhelmed.”
That was the second time she attempted suicide. This time it was for real. “I had nothing but the clothes on my back. I was homeless, I didn’t have a job, and I didn’t want to live.” How did she feel when she came round? “Numb. I’d had my stomach pumped again. I was in a mental health crisis.” Had she come close to killing herself? “Very close. Had I not been found, I think I’d have died. Nobody’s asked me that question.” She sounds remote. “I was out for days. When I came round, my mum rang. She cried and I cried. I thought, what the fuck was I doing, because I was her only hope. I felt guilty. She was like, ‘If you go, what’s left for me?’”
That was the last time she contemplated suicide. She now had a purpose in life: to fight for justice for her mother. Of course, Zoora was innocent. There was no way she could kill anybody, let alone a good man like Uncle Azam. Imy and Foz finally got home, and the three moved into a council flat. Shah made connections with campaigning groups, lawyers and miscarriage of justice experts. Zoora had still never said what she knew about Azam’s death. But she began to talk to Pragna Patel from Southall Black Sisters, and in 1995 told her exactly what had happened. She said Azam had raped her repeatedly and when he was in prison he had sent his friends to rape her. When she told him she was going to expose the truth, he threatened something even worse. “He told Mum, ‘Remember the grass is always greener with that daughter of yours.’ I realised she had sent me to Pakistan to keep me from his clutches.”
Until that day, she had insisted on her mother’s innocence. “Pragna sat me and Foz down and said, ‘You know your mum killed him, girls. She has admitted it.’” Did she still regard Zoora as a victim of a miscarriage of justice? “She served 14 years for killing someone who was destroying her and threatening her daughter. But she did kill somebody. There’s no grey area there. The grey area is she was a woman who was destitute and driven to kill the man who had abused her for years.”
Another Technicolor memory. Shah is driving on the M606 with Foz and Imy. By now Shah and Foz have known for months that their mother was abused by Azam, but they haven’t told Imy. Shah decides the time is right – because she’s driving, it will moderate his response. “I will never forget the sound of his fist on that windscreen. I was shocked it didn’t smash. I said, ‘Mum killed Azam because she was abused and she had forced abortions.’ My sister was bawling, I was crying, and he had broken down.” Did he punch the windscreen because she had killed Azam or because she’d been abused? “Because she’d been abused. That was so painful for him; that our mother had suffered so much.”
Southall Black Sisters helped the family to appeal against the length of the sentence. The Guardian’s crime reporter Duncan Campbell was the first national newspaper journalist to cover the story in depth, in 1998, under the headline “Murder appeal: despair drove woman to kill”. In the same year, Shah was awarded the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize to honour women and groups working to end male violence against women and girls. Although the 1998 appeal had been dismissed, in 2000 an intervention by then home secretary Jack Straw led to Zoora’s tariff being reduced by the lord chief justice from 20 to 12 years (she eventually served 14). Lord Bingham said, “This was the conduct of a desperate woman threatened with the loss of her home and with destitution in what remained for her a foreign country.”
When her mother was initially remanded to New Hall prison near Wakefield, Shah visited her five days a week – a six-hour round trip. After being convicted Zoora was moved to HMP Durham, where Shah saw serial killers Myra Hindley and Rose West. “I remember Rose West getting on her moral fickin’ high ground. She said, ‘There’s a poisoner working in the kitchens’ and wouldn’t eat Mum’s food.”
I ask Shah if what happened to her mother politicised her? “Oh God yeah. What about this wouldn’t politicise me? I felt the sheer injustice of what happened, and what really pissed me off is when you presented this story to judges, they just didn’t get it. These were people high on their perches, especially in those days.”
In 2006, Zoora was finally released, at the age of 54. Shah writes that she was timid and broken, “hollowed out, nervous like a tiny shivering bird”. She was so used to seeking permission for everything, she asked Shah if she could use her toilet. But after working in a charity shop, she gradually reintegrated herself into the community.
Zoora is now staying with Shah, but she’s not here today; she is still on licence and is unwilling to talk to the press. How is she doing? “Mum is doing good.” Has she forgiven herself for what she did? “Yes because she’s been to Hajj. She also had lots of counselling in prison, and she knows she was driven to do it. Does she regret it? Yes, of course she does.”
As for Shah, she went from strength to strength, from broken girl to a formidable campaigner with a successful career. After packing crisps, she went on to become a social worker and ended up as a commissioning manager for public health, responsible for a £5m budget.
In 2014, Shah was one of five women invited by Labour MP Khalid Mahmood to attend a meeting above an Indian restaurant in Bradford. None of them knew why they were there. They discovered it was to address the “Galloway problem”. In 2012, George Galloway had won Bradford West for Respect. Labour had decided to opt for an all-women shortlist, and the guests had been invited to see if they fancied taking him on. The four other women declined to stand. Shah had never considered running for parliament before, but told Mahmood, “I could chew him up and spit him out.”
Sure enough, she saw him off. “After I won, Galloway made this flipping bizarre speech about the hyenas dancing on the grave of a lion. And I was thinking, get over yourself, mate, you were the pussycat who lapped the imaginary milk on Big Brother.” Three general elections on, she’s still representing Bradford. In 2019, she won 76% of the vote, making hers the safest of the 28 Labour seats in the Yorkshire and Humber region. But in 2024 she got a shock, holding on to her seat by only 707 votes when challenged by two independents standing on pro-Palestine tickets. The result said more about her constituents’ anger towards Labour over its stance on Gaza and Israel than it said about her.
Ironically, Shah’s greatest crisis as an MP had come eight years earlier because of her hostility to Israel. In 2016, she was suspended from Labour when social media posts from 2014 resurfaced, one featuring a graphic that superimposed Israel on to a map of the US under the heading “Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict – Relocate Israel into United States”. Underneath she had written “Problem solved”. In another post, she had written “#IsraelApartheid” accompanied by the quote “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’”, the suggestion being that Israel’s behaviour was comparable to that of Nazi Germany.
Does she think it was right that she was suspended? She nods. “Shall I be honest with you? I said to Jeremy Corbyn two days before I was suspended, ‘Let me resign my whip.’ Here’s the thing for me: after I shared that bloody meme, I knew I’d hurt a community, so it was like, I need to apologise. It was about the transportation of Jews, like they did in the Holocaust, that’s what the inference was. So I stepped down from my position as PPS to John McDonnell and said, ‘I want to go in the chamber and make a statement’, so I made the apology.” Later that day she was suspended, despite the apology.
“I’ll be straight with you,” Shah continues, “when I got suspended, my understanding of antisemitism wasn’t what it is today. I thought it was a hatred of Jews and I was like, well, I don’t hate Jews. The previous week I’d been at a seder with [senior rabbi and inclusion and development coach] Laura Janner-Klausner, so I can’t be antisemitic. For me it was genuine ignorance. A lovely guy called Mark Gardner from the Community Security Trust [a charity that protects Jewish people from antisemitism and terrorism] came to see me, and I’m forever grateful for how he explained it to me.” What did he say? “He said it was the concept of how people talk about Jews leading to hatred of Jews, then it leads to the persecution of Jews, which led to the Holocaust. Hitler talked about Jews having money and power, and these are antisemitic tropes, right? I then understood it as the other side of the coin to Islamophobia.”
In 2019, Shah was called a “grooming gangs apologist” by the pro-Brexit group Leave.EU. She sued and won, but is still furious. “Before the Tommy Robinsons of this world were talking about grooming, I was talking about it. Even before I had political ambitions, I was talking about grooming – about how livid the Pakistani community is and how it stands with victims of abuse because it’s just not who we are. Any society has its bad apples, but it doesn’t mean that’s the whole of a society.”
Does she think Britain’s Pakistani community has a disproportionate problem with grooming? “I think there is a model of grooming that is pertinent to Pakistani men. There is no doubt about it. They are over-represented in the street model of grooming, which accounts for a small percentage of grooming and is one Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe have an issue with, but they don’t have an issue with any other kind of grooming. For me, abuse is abuse, and it’s all horrific.”
Shah is sitting on the floor by the fire. “I love my fire.” She’ll never forget how she struggled to keep warm. I ask how she thinks her Labour government is doing. “Pfftttt,” she says, dejectedly. “We’ve got a challenge. We’re not good at communicating the brilliant things we have done. Parts of me are pleased. One of my staffers has just had a baby and said the free childcare she gets is worth an extra £1,000 a month. And when you hear that’s what it does to your life, having a Labour government, that makes me smile.” So why the pfftttt? “We should have been better at things like the two-child benefits cap. Own goals like the winter fuel allowance. And the noise of Reform doesn’t help. We need to stop contributing to that and get our message out there.”
Is Labour trying to out-Reform Reform? Look, she says, migration is a real issue. “My constituents are pissed with illegal immigration. The idea that it’s not a thing that affects people of migrant heritage or of colour just isn’t true. But we need to do more telling of the positive migrant story; their contribution to the economy. If we didn’t have migrants, the NHS would collapse tomorrow.”
What did she think of Labour refusing to let Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham contest the forthcoming Gorton and Denton byelection? “I was one of 50 signatories to say it was the wrong decision.” Who would she choose between Starmer and Burnham? “If they’d been contesting the leadership together, I’d have gone for Burnham. Right now, I’d have to think about it.”
Despite the government lurching from calamity to calamity, Shah says she adores her job. “I promise you I feel like I’ve found my calling. I love what I do. I love it with a passion. There’s not a day I don’t wake up looking forward to it. I’m not politically ambitious for position and power. I don’t want to be a minister. I hold my power in a much more authentic way as a backbencher.”
She still blinks at the idea that the girl who was forced into a marriage at 15 and fought so long to get her mother out of jail has represented her community for 11 years. I ask when she felt she recovered her izzat; her honour. Her eyes light up like lasers. “In my eyes I never lost it. Because izzat for me is standing against inequality and injustice, and I’ve done that all my life.”
