Political Theatre: Zubir Ahmed on swapping the operating table for the House of Commons

He’s joking, of course but for vascular surgeon and now the MP for Glasgow South West a day in office at Westminster can be just as taxing as the hours he would spend in surgery – sometimes for up to 14 without a break – but perhaps with less blood spilt.

But then in the days between Zubir (Zub to his friends) Ahmed and I sat down to talk about his journey from NHS surgeon to politician, the scalpels have been out, metaphorically speaking, with his party tearing itself apart as the scandal engulfing Angela Rayner’s tax affairs eventually saw her resign as deputy prime minister, sparking a major ministerial reshuffle.

And perhaps the most shocking of the announcements for the local market was when Ian Murray, the popular Edinburgh MP who was made Secretary of State for Scotland following the 2024 general election after years of being the sole Scottish Labour MP, was axed by Keir Starmer and replaced by veteran politician Douglas Alexander. The move sparked a furious backlash resulting in Murray being brought back into government less than 24 hours later as a minister jointly in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. So much for the party’s workplace stance on banning fire and rehire. Other senior appointments were viewed as potential demotions such as David Lammy being replaced as foreign secretary by Yvette Cooper but being made deputy prime minister and Cooper being replaced by Shabana Mahmood in justice. A bigger role for Scot Pat McFadden as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions with the additional responsibility for skills in what is being dubbed a ‘super ministry’ and Peter Kyle replacing Jonathan Reynolds as business secretary. A cabinet of so-called ‘doers and fixers’. And while Starmer may not have picked the timing, what he has managed to do with his major reshuffle was to divert attention away from the Rayner resignation and onto a more interesting debate about his authority and his government’s direction of travel.

For observers of Scottish politics, there are now seven Scottish MPs in the UK Government – a secretary of state who will also co-chair the Scottish election campaign along with six ministers – not a bad tally of Labour representation ahead of an election in Scotland in eight months’ time, depending on how they focus their attentions.

For Ahmed – who was appointed PPS to the health secretary immediately after the general election last year in a move which he describes as a “dream job” – now being elevated to a junior health minister offers an opportunity to continue to work with Wes Streeting on a plan to radically overhaul the NHS, albeit in England rather than in his native Scotland where health is devolved.

In the days before the reshuffle, Ahmed greets me at Westminster, having come from a meeting he and Streeting have had with a group of doctors working in Gaza, and he is clearly affected by what was discussed. And it is on this subject that he most acutely feels the conflict between his professional skills as a surgeon and his relatively new role as a politician.

“I think what I feel mostly is just frustration. It’s frustration whether you’re a member of parliament, or a PPS, or a minister, and possibly whether you’re the prime minister, that we, singularly as a United Kingdom, do not have a way of unilaterally switching this [what’s happening in Gaza] off. And that’s a profound thing to say, because people who elect us think we have that power. And you know, what we can do in this conflict is work in coalition with others in other countries to put as much pressure to change the arc of this. And the arc of this, even in the last couple of months, has gone into places that are unconscionable, horrendous, and really are, you know, things I thought I would never see in a so-called western democracy. We have members of that government [Israel] who certainly have genocidal intent – members of that government indicted by the International Criminal Court. It’s an unprecedented diplomatic position to be in. And on top of that, you overlay that with the images that are coming out that I’ve not only seen on the television screens, but I’ve seen on my computer screen as a surgeon who on occasion has been asked to give advice remotely on blast injuries and vascular injuries and liver injuries.

“And today, I literally have just come from an hour-long meeting with Wes with Gazan doctors and they are showing me bilateral amputees, children, seven, eight years old, with a pattern of injuries that are very, very suspicious, happening to multiple children in multiple parts of their anatomy. A percentage of children being injured in excess of possibly 40 per cent when it’s about one per cent in Ukraine. And as a surgeon that’s particularly hard to take, particularly as a surgeon that works in those fields that could make a difference. And in fact, I was due to be with an emergency medical team with Map [Medical Aid for Palestinians] last May that was delayed because of the Rafa crossing being closed. And in another world, I may have been in Gaza as a surgeon when the general election was called, so I was that close. So, the conflict is very close in my mind’s eye. It’s very close in the mind’s eye of many of my constituents, 15 per cent of whom are from a Muslim background. But of course, that is not to say that the other 85 per cent are not contacting me just as much about this issue.

“I think the position we have to play as a government is just a recurring kind of pressure on the Israeli government. But also, we have to be a convener. We have to be a convener of ideas across places like Canada, Australia, and France and do things in unison, because that’s when it seems to work. And I’m so pleased as a British government that in a few weeks’ time we’re going to recognise Palestine, because for me, it’s more than symbolic, it’s a recognition that that is the territory of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people are separate from Hamas. They’re separate from terrorist organisations and it’s important that we recognise their right to be human, to live in that space in a self-determined way. And I think the vitriol you’ve seen coming from the Israeli government at our prime minister, our foreign secretary and our government shows you the impact of that decision, because they weren’t so vitriolic about it when other countries did it. 

“But, you know, there’s not a singular military solution that the British government can enact to stop this, and that is a really, really painful thing to say, to be in the place of power like we are right now and to tell you that I am relatively powerless in this conflict. That does not mean I’m not responsible. It doesn’t mean I don’t have any agency and I don’t need to strive to make a difference, but to tell you that I feel relatively powerless in the place of power in the UK is painful.”

Sensing the personal angst this presents Ahmed, I ask him whether he thinks his skills as a surgeon would be best put to use saving lives in Gaza rather than sitting in parliament?

“I’ve reflected on that many times, and the conclusion I come to is that I could go out there and I could operate on one patient at a time, I could probably operate on hundreds of patients over a four-week period that I would be there. But in here, I’ve got the ability to coalesce groups of people, groups of parliamentarians, to work with ministers of the Crown, to kind of formulate decisions which will hopefully prevent those injuries happening in the first place to thousands of kids. And for me, that’s a more powerful position, relatively a more powerful position to be in. I have had to rationalise it. And still, at time, I think to myself, especially in recess, could I go and do this X, Y and Z? I suspect the truth would be if I tried to enter as a member of parliament into Gaza, I think I know what would happen and I wouldn’t be allowed in. But yeah, those thoughts cross my mind, and they crossed my mind today when I see colleagues of mine that I’ve known for many, many years sit across from the table of the secretary of state for health and tell me their stories. I almost want to be with them in the operating theatre with that solidarity, it’s very tempting, but when I rationalise it in the cold light of day, I know I can do more as a member of parliament, as a PPS with access to ministers, than I could as an individual surgeon.” 

Ahmed is a fascinating mix of clear intellect, a quiet confidence that comes with being a surgeon, and a refreshing humility that is rooted in the journey his own family made from Pakistan to Glasgow via Hong Kong. He is also very, very polite. He was brought up in a two-roomed flat with kitchen in Govanhill, the eldest of three boys and two girls. His father was, and still is despite being in his 80s, a black cab driver and it is his influence that has largely shaped Ahmed’s life. He talks about his father with real reverence, in awe of the journey both physically and culturally that he has taken going back to 1926 when his own father, at 21 years old and living in a small village now on the Indian side of the Punjab, heard about better prospects in Hong Kong and decided to uproot and go. He first went to Calcutta, sat some kind of assessment test, then went back to Calcutta to get on a boat and landed in Hong Kong, where he served as a policeman for the British Empire.

Zubir Ahmed photographed for Holyrood by Louise Haywood-Schiefer

“I suspect it was, like most stories of that time, a bit of necessity, but probably I suspect something restless in him. I didn’t get him to know him very well, he died when I was 11, but he was probably the most influential person in my life, certainly in my formative years during the first decade of my life, other than my own dad, in terms of male figures. And, you know, I was thinking there’s something in the genes that makes my family take those kind of big leaps and while by no means unique, particularly at that time and in that part of the world – in fact there are a few families in Scotland from the Punjab whose ancestors did that same move – but he made that massive life change and was there in Hong Kong during the second world war.

“My grandfather stayed in Hong Kong for 20 years, giving service to the British Hong Kong Police Service and speaking the native language. Dad was born there. And then, of course, Dad had his own journey to the UK in 1963 by road because he couldn’t afford an air fare. My grandfather was on good terms with a well-to-do family in the town that he ended up settling in back in Pakistan after partition and they had a guy who stopped by in a caravan that was going up to the Taj Mahal and my dad basically hitched a lift with this guy to the UK. Govanhill was eventually where he landed in the early 70s because it was the most convenient place to buy a flat, being right next door to the bus garage so he could roll out of bed, do eight hours of normal work, do eight hours of overtime, and, you know, sleep and repeat. And that’s where we all grew up.

“My mum came over in the mid-70s, and that’s a story in itself. In fact, that’s probably the first time British politics touched my family because her first attempt at getting a visa, a spousal visa as I presume as it was then, was refused and so my dad engaged his local MP, who was Frank McElhone, to help and I would be reasonably certain in saying, that if it wasn’t for Frank McElhone, a Labour MP in Glasgow, I possibly wouldn’t be here.

“And then there was also Donald Dewar who, when my granddad was having a terrible time accessing his Hong Kong pension, was instrumental in helping him. So there was that kind of institutional memory about the Labour Party being good for my family. I also vividly remember after the 1992 general election when I was in primary six where we had a conversation in class about which party our parents voted, and the hands went up. I think I was the only person in my class at Hutchesons’ Grammar School that said the Labour Party. I think that was another point I realised we were a bit different.”

Ahmed is the first generation in three generations of his family to raise the next generation – he has two children aged 11 and seven with his wife, a respiratory consultant in Glasgow – in the same place that he was born and says that he recognises the privileges that his children now enjoy are thanks to his own father’s sacrifices.

“I think my dad had a lot of unfinished business in him that was then filtered through us as his children and what he wanted for us to achieve. He was 25 years old when he came to the UK. He was British by birth, having been born in Hong Kong, but the family were back in Pakistan by then and it was not doing well in the early 60s. There weren’t jobs for young people like him. My granddad was also struggling, having lived a very regimented life in Hong Kong to then try to adapt to a lifestyle of essentially being a farmer and trying to just make ends meet every single day; it was very hard. So, my dad didn’t really educate himself well. He tried to do various things with my granddad to earn money, and I think for him, when we were born, it was unfinished business to educate us to the level that he probably would have wanted to educate himself.

“When he came into this country in 1963 he had very little English. Within a year he had sorted his English out, sorted a driving licence out for himself, sorted a public service vehicle licence out for himself, and started working on the buses. He did that for eight years until 1972, and ever since then, until now, he’s essentially been a black cab driver, albeit on and off with bouts of illness now and then, thankfully never too long. 

“I’m pretty certain he must have been the first black cab driver of colour to pass his knowledge test. I’m pretty sure, I can’t guarantee that, but he must have been. And he’s certainly the oldest black cab driver in Glasgow right now, if not ever. And you know, the things people must have said to him on the road at night, the situations he must have had to just manage just by his temperament, and he never talked about it.

“He will have suffered a lot of racism but the only time I got an insight into it was when I was about 15, and mum was away actually at the time in Pakistan because my granddad was unwell. So it was us, the older ones, with dad and he came out of the bedroom, and he had a cut above his eye, and I asked what had happened and he just said there had been a bit of trouble the night before and that was it. But basically, someone had just assaulted him because they were fare-evading.

“And the number of times people fare-evade is getting worse now, and I say to him, ‘why on earth are you doing this to yourself, you’re in your 80s now, you don’t have to do it any more.’ To be honest, it would probably kill him if he stopped and actually, and he kept this very quiet, but I have realised that any money he’s making now out of his taxi work he’s sending to Pakistan to fund the healthcare of a person he knows, a neighbour. And so, he never stops. I think possibly that’s why I never stop. I owe it to him.

“Dad is the biggest influence on me, but I couldn’t have ever done everything that I’ve done in any meaningful way had it not been for the quiet service of mum. My mum is a very traditional Pakistani housewife. Now that’s in some places seen as a derogatory term to use in the modern world, but actually that’s what she is. She raised five children almost entirely on her own. She had a rudimentary grasp of English then and even to this day, but she was absolutely focused on her children getting on, to the point where mum really has no hobbies. Everything was about us. And for her living in a very difficult environment in Govanhill, where at that time, there weren’t many other Asian ladies around, and in the 80s, particularly the bit we lived in, there was a more than a touch of discrimination. It’s only in retrospect now as I got into my 40s and after you become a parent yourself, you realise the totality of what she did for us. And the way she must have had to suppress her own wishes and wants beyond any imaginable level. Realistically, she probably did herself, you know, a bit of physical and psychological damage by it, being so fixated on her children and her efforts at shutting out any of the bad influences, of which there were many in Govanhill at the time, so they didn’t come creeping at our door. In some ways, I feel sad that she didn’t enjoy that part of her life. I feel like she enjoys more of her life now and I wish we could have made that different for her, because it was just so focused on us rather than anything for her.

“I think for both mum and dad, these were the sacrifices they accepted they had to make; for him it was living in a smaller house so he could spend more on educating his kids. And that’s fine, but I think it takes a toll on a woman, especially if she’s not working. Her home is her castle and if it’s not big enough or sufficient enough for her to do the basics that she wants to do, it’s hard. I think if you ask Mum, honestly, she would say, ‘it wasn’t an enjoyable time’. But I hope as we’ve got older and we’ve come of age and we’ve qualified in things, that gives her some sense of pride. But also, the first thing me and my sister did when we qualified as a dentist and a doctor was to put in a deposit and get them a house that we thought was worthy of where they should live.”

Ahmed’s father worked hard to send his eldest son to the fee-paying Hutchesons’ Grammar in Glasgow, but as fees spiralled Ahmed was put forward and won a scholarship to stay on and he graphically describes how he essentially lived two lives – life at a fee-paying school among some of the most wealthy families in the city and life in a cramped flat in Govanhill. “At that time, there weren’t many folks from Govanhill going to Hutchesons’ and when I first started I was the only person of colour in my class, and I think I was one of two Muslims in that year. 

“I came out the door of my tenement in Govanhill, very sheepishly in a Hutchie school uniform, ran the gauntlet of Govanhill Park, crossed Victoria Road into Kingarth Street and onto Beaton Road, and then I was a different person. I came home at night and I took off my school uniform, put on my shalwar kameez and I went to mosque for two hours every night. They were just separate lives. Equally as important in terms of my development, but separate.

“You didn’t talk about school at home or home at school. None of my friends at school came to my house, like it wasn’t a thing, and therefore, I never went to their houses. I never went to a birthday party. I was invited but we didn’t do birthday parties at home, so I didn’t feel I missed out. It just was not a thing we did. I was totally happy with it although I was curious sometimes to wonder what went on at birthday parties, but truly it didn’t bother me.  

“You didn’t really ever have to talk about your background or why you were there, that was never discussed or disclosed, thankfully. It’s not like I would pretend not to come from Pakistan or that I was a Muslim – it just wasn’t mentioned. But I remember my dad used to drop me off at the school gates in the taxi, and to my shame, I was ashamed that my dad was a taxi driver but the funny thing was some of the kids thought I was so posh that I used to come to school in a taxi and we never corrected them of that assumption.

“I think my dad knew about that, but he didn’t think about it too deeply thankfully and his focus was purely on the education I was getting. Nothing else mattered. He had such a reverence for those teachers, and what they were doing for me. His view was ‘you will go to the school, you will bow your head, and you will learn’. And to be honest, that lesson has stood me in pretty good stead.

“I wouldn’t call what I felt imposter syndrome – I think that’s an overused phrase by some politicians – but it was difficult sometimes feeling like a fish out of water, but to be honest, the more difficult it was, the more energised I was to try and fulfil expectations. My English was pretty poor at the start of primary school because I was the firstborn to a Punjabi household where we spoke exclusively Punjabi. Punjabi and Urdu are my first and second languages. I didn’t speak English until I was four-ish. But I remember my dad realising this was a problem and thinking he needs to sort this out. So, typically, he just drove a tank through that problem. We had a neighbour upstairs who was one of the few we could talk to, a former teacher, so basically my dad pushed me up there every night for half hourly conversations in English and that fixed it. That’s how he saw things, a problem to be fixed to get to the end result.”

Similarly, when Ahmed briefly flirted with the idea of taking arts subjects rather than science at school, his father soon persuaded him otherwise and Ahmed says when he started studying medicine at the University of Glasgow he not only found ‘his tribe’ in terms of friends and his future wife, but also himself. He says university and studying medicine is where he felt most comfortable in his own skin.

“I wasn’t really into student politics when I was a uni. I had my head down. And after I left medical school I just engrossed myself in postgraduate training and surgery. I loved every single minute. I was one of those guys who literally, if you left me in the operating theatre operating all night, I’d just be like, ‘this is so good, why am I getting paid for it?’ Something just clicked for me. The idea you just go in, you fix a problem, and then you get to see the whites of the eyes the following day or that night of the person that you fixed. And it’s instant. I suppose part of it is instant gratification and instant feedback. It’s harder with politics. It is definitely harder with politics. And actually, the definition of success is harder as well. The definition of success when you’re a surgeon is how many operations you’ve done and what changes you made to people’s lives. And just as I am loath to use the term ‘imposter syndrome’, so too I’m loath to use the term ‘saved lives’ applied to me, because it’s a team effort, and I’m just part of that team. But, yeah, there’s an instant barometer of success and indeed, of failure, which you can chart in surgery. But in politics, it’s the campaign, it’s the debate, it’s the manifesto, it’s the policy, it’s the implementation of the policy. And even if you’re a member of the cabinet or the prime minister, you haven’t really got the full agency to control that delivery plan. So at the end of the day, when you go home, you sit down, you’re going to bed, you’re reframing what that definition of success is, some days that might just be that you’ve talked to a bunch of colleagues, pivoted them off one position to another position because that’s best for that policy to work and for the government to work. And actually, that’s harder. That’s more tiring than operating on someone. I’ve sometimes done operations lasting 13, 14 hours without a break, and then be back in the following morning or six hours later. And done that repeatedly. And I would say I found that less tiring than aspects of my job in the last year as a politician, but I still feel like I have landed on my feet.

On the campaign trail with Anas Sarwar in 2021 | Alamy

“What powers me is not so much learning from points of failure throughout my life because every single step was just a really hard grind, and I think that’s probably what I learned most from because I never got anything easy. I have no issue with people who get it easy either, because they have their own challenges, but what has spurred me on is just the fact that every single step I’ve climbed has been a grind, whether it’s Govanhill Primary to secondary to getting into specialty training as a surgeon, to defending a consultant job to losing the election in the Scottish Parliament, to getting selected for this one in a tight selection, to Gaza being a major issue on the doorstep, to expecting this to be a relatively easy first year in power and it has not, I genuinely believe nothing worth having comes easy but it’s worth fighting for.

“And all of this – my grandfather, my parents, the whole journey – it’s part and parcel of who you are. You can’t shed it, even if you wanted to. I know some of my political colleagues are trying to shed parts of their identity at the moment, but you do a disservice to yourself, never mind your family that nurtured you, when you try and deny bits of yourself and this is me.”