Firstclass Newsline Special: Meeth Mhairi Black The 20-year-old who has become Britain's youngest lawmaker[MP] since 1667 '......SEE PHOTOs

Firstclass Newsline Special, 20-year-old SNP student has booted out
Labour heavyweight Douglas Alexander in one of the biggest coups by
the Scottish nationalists.
Mhairi Black overturned the shadow foreign secretary's huge 16,000
majority to win by a comfortable margin of 5,684 votes in the Paisley
and Renfrewshire South seat. She is set to be the youngest MP in
Parliament and the youngest since the 19th century.
This is an interview with Ms Black first published on 24 April:
With a smile, a chuckle and a little bit of youthful earnestness,
Mhairi Black, SNP candidate for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, sought
to persuade the wavering voter."This is a real chance," she said.
"Things like this don't come along very often."
They certainly don't. If elected, the 20-year-old will become the
youngest MP since 1667, when Christopher Monck, aged 13 and a half,
became knight of the Shire for Devon. She will go to London to be
enrolled in her first graduate job – member of Parliament – and a
couple of weeks later return to take her final Glasgow University
exam, on Scottish politics.
"It's a bit mad, innit?"
It would indeed be mad enough for any election. But it may not be the
maddest part of the battle unfolding here. Because if Ms Black is
elected on 7 May she may well become the poster woman for what the
polls are suggesting will be an earthquake in Scottish politics,
involving the collapse of Labour and the triumph of a rampant SNP.
The young politics and public policy student could claim the biggest
scalp of all: that of Douglas Alexander, shadow Foreign Secretary,
Labour Party election campaign co-ordinator, and MP for Paisley and
Renfrewshire South.
In normal times, Mr Alexander's 16,614 majority, requiring a 20.8 per
cent swing to overturn it, would be impregnable. But in February, a
poll by the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft put Ms Black eight points ahead.
And if that were not "mad" enough, last week another Ashcroft poll
suggested the student had extended her lead over the Labour big beast
to 11 points.
The seat was once solid Labour territory
Ms Black spoke excitedly of "a seismic shift" in Scottish politics. Mr
Alexander, rather less enthusiastically, told The Independent of being
"confident, not complacent", while admitting that some polls had
produced "a challenge".
From where we were standing, this was some challenge.Ms Black was
knocking doors in a council estate on the western edge of Paisley.
This was solid Labour territory, once. Now, giggling locals pointed
out the unofficial poster that had mysteriously appeared on their
street. "Do you struggle to pay the bills?" it asked, above an
unflattering . "I don't."
Margaret Donnan, 71, a retired cleaner, agreed with the sentiments.
"Aye, he is definitely one of the well-off Westminster lot. Labour are
too much like the Tories – for the rich and moneyed people, not the
working class."
Finding Labour voters here was hard. Meeting ex-Labour voters couldn't
have been easier. "I will never vote Labour again. Never," said Edward
Hay, 82, a retired factory worker. "I used to back them, a few years
ago, but I got sick of them because of the way they got the country
into such a financial crisis."
As for the youth and possible inexperience of Ms Black, "it doesn't
bother me one iota. Because she's SNP, not Labour."
It was, then, something of a surprise to cross town and find the
Labour team so cheerful – even after knocking on the first door and
finding another SNP convert. "I went off Labour at the referendum,"
said Eunice Woods, 53, a nursery worker. "I felt the big parties used
scare tactics to bully people into voting no."
"Labour have lost the Scottish vote," she added. "They are down in
Westminster, forgetting about the Scottish people."
Not to worry. The smiling, red-jacketed army was soon on to the next
door, and the next. While Ms Black and Team SNP employed a slower,
chattier style, their Labour rivals seemed to prefer brisk
professionalism: knock, don't waste much time waiting for a reply, put
the leaflets through the letterbox, move on.
It felt almost like speed canvassing at times. You certainly saw why
they were confident of achieving about 5,000 "conversations" with
voters each week in the campaign's
Perhaps, as things get serious, it will make a difference.They already
had the vote of Kenneth Brodie, 47, a logistics manager. "What they
are saying is right," he said. "If folk don't vote Labour, the Tories
will get back in."
His wife Lorraine, 50, also a logistics manager, was still toying with
the idea of voting SNP. "I just want us to have more say up here," she
said.
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