SHIMMERING on a sun-soaked London evening, there's a palpable end of term feeling on the House of Commons terrace overlooking the River Thames. MPs mingle on the eve of Westminster's summer recess but Labour's recently-appointed shadow Scottish Secretary, Lesley Laird, isn't taking time out to join other members sipping drinks as she arrives to speak to the Sunday Herald between meetings with colleagues.

"It’s probably been the way you’d imagine it and it’s been a bit of a whirlwind and really exciting," says Laird, who was elevated to Corbyn's shadow Cabinet just six days after she was elected as an MP in June, a meteoric promotion.

Laird believes Jeremy Corbyn's popularity was largely responsible for her election as the MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, where she overturned an SNP majority of nearly 10,000 in a decisive swing to Labour.

"People were really inspired by the fact that here was someone talking about what could be done as opposed to what couldn’t be done," she says of Corbyn's reception in an area Gordon Brown represented for 32 years until his retirement in 2015.

“There's no doubt on the doorstep that there were people who were coming back to Labour who had come from the SNP," she adds on how Labour won back Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath after it fell to the SNP in 2015.

She added: "I think people want a progressive socialist party in Scotland. After all those years of austerity people saw that as a way forward and I think that people saw that socialist agenda and I think that did attract people."

So how has Laird fared with being plunged in at the deep end in the job that Corbyn had previously been forced to appoint a north-east English politician Dave Anderson, after the previous occupant Ian Murray quit in last year's attempted coup against the Labour leader?

Laird, a former Scottish international runner, replies: “I take a very focussed view that goes back to my running days, which is don’t worry about some else’s race focus on your own."

The former deputy leader of Fife council is fresh from Scottish questions in the Commons where she has been pitted against Scottish Secretary David Mundell at the dispatch box, flanked by the dozen new Tory MPs elected in Scotland last month.

“I would never comment on anyone else’s performance and it’s not my place to criticise people," says Laird when asked how she views Mundell's record as a minister.

"You asked what kind of person I am. I’m not that kind of person," Laird says directly and insists she will adopt a similar approach to Corbyn's during the election campaign by attempting to focus on issues rather than personalities.

Laird was elected by a wafer-thin majority of just 259, but again claims that the six seats Labour gained in Scotland was due to a Corbyn bounce and the party's UK manifesto.

“My role is clear and it's delivering on our manifesto and really just putting forward that alternative approach (and helping it) to get some traction in Scotland," she puts it.

On Corbyn appointing her above the more well-known and experienced MP Murray, Scottish Labour's only representative at Westminster in the last parliament, she says, "That’s a decision for Jeremy."

She continues diplomatically, “Ian has a full part to play and has got so much experience and he’s been great with the six new additions," she says of the relationship she and the new Scottish Labour MPs have with the man who has represented Edinburgh South since 2010.

Talking about her labour movement roots, she says: "I was born and brought up in Greenock, where my dad [John Langan] was a trade union official. He became president of the STUC (Scottish Trades Union Congress) in 1984." He died just before Christmas, aged 91.

"Tea time chats were all about politics in my early days. My early days were spent on May day marches, ferrying people to polling stations, serving apprenticeship in the local Labour Party office and doing whatever jobs needed to be done."

But it's Laird's background as a runner, who represented Scotland internationally in her youth, that stands out as a real talking point and also one that's largely been unreported. Asked about comparisons with Olympian turned Scottish Tory MSP Brian Whittle Laird laughs, saying: “I was not up to Brian but I can show a clean pair of heels."

As more MPs and guests arrive on the Commons terrace it's as if the the drama of recent weeks has dissipated, with the Tory-DUP pact to sustain Theresa May's government now merely background music.

However, Laird says that “the Barnett formula will continue to be a tension point" and suggests she will continue to press Mundell over Scotland being refused extra funding while Northern Ireland receives an additional £1 billion as a consequence of the deal. Under Barnett the Treasury provides grants to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales according to population size.

"I think most people find that an unusual partnership and it’s not a pact that I think most people are particularly happy about as it’s keeping the Tory government in power," she adds.

After the recess Labour will keep hammering away on this issue she suggests. “The expectation from all parties was that there would be money coming in from Barnett consequentials [additional cash in line with that given to Northern Ireland]," she says. “We have to got to understand why that decision changed because I think early on David Mundell suggested there would be Barnett consequentials."

With Laird firmly of the view that she and her colleagues in Scotland largely owe their election victories to Corbyn, landing a few punches on the resurgent Scottish Tories over the issue is clearly something the Labour leader had in mind with her surprise appointment.

But her enthusiastic backing for federalism – "something we believe in and that needs to be explored and discussed," she says – as an alternative to the SNP's vision for independence may also have something to do with Corbyn's decision.