Mhairi Black is the youngest MP for 350 years – and she is tired of hearing about it. And there’s much more to her than that: an SNP MP who genuinely doesn’t want to be in Westminster, but has a serious, fearsome approach to the bigger, longer game

Mhairi Black was 19 when she joined the SNP and 20 when she casually relieved the seat of Paisley and Renfrewshire South from the Labour party’s time-honoured, glass-eyed discipline-keeper, Douglas Alexander. “I thought he was very respectful on the night, I can’t fault him,” she says, from her constituency office in Paisley, a room containing nothing but three chairs and a two-bar fire, straight out of a Smiths song. “If anything, that’s the bit I didn’t like, thinking: ‘This guy’s going to lose his job.’” The slightest pause, and then: “I mean, he was poisonous during the campaign.”

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She was 20 when she made her maiden speech, which by the end of that day had won her 11m online views and was trending in Nigeria. It was wry, acute, humane and memorable: “In this budget,” she said, “the chancellor also abolished any housing benefit for anyone below the age of 21. So we are now in the ridiculous situation whereby, because I am an MP, not only am I the youngest, but I am also the only 20-year-old in the whole of the UK that the chancellor is prepared to help with housing.” She hadn’t left the Labour party, she said later; the Labour party had left her. She’s 21 now, and says, but not ill-temperedly, “people keep asking me about my age. It’s the least interesting thing about me. I literally cannot help when I was born.”

She’s right, of course, that it’s the least interesting thing to ask her to talk about, and the fact of her being the youngest MP in parliament for 350 years is more a pub quiz answer than a conversation. But between them, she and her friend/assistant/spad/helper (they don’t really trade in titles), Declan, 22, are incontrovertibly an interesting sight: a different kind of political class, a different kind of 20-something. They look plenty young (all young people look the same to me, they could be tall 14-year-olds), but they are not carefree. Black is serious, fearsome and without a trace of detachment. She says she has no eye on her career, and I believe her. “I didn’t want to be a politician. I am aware of how it looks, at this age, to say ‘I don’t want to be a career politician’ when I’m a politician, but I don’t.”

The constituency office is on Wellmeadow Street in Paisley, opposite a branch of Subway, and it looks defunct. It’s bright yellow, you’d give it that, but the windows are rustily barred and the lock on the door hasn’t been troubled for years. The actual entrance is one door along; if you can picture Under the Skin, the spooky film in which Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who murders Glaswegians in run-down houses, you’re in the right ballpark. She shrugs, totally unconcerned with how it comes across: “We’re still sorting it out. The thing that I’m really grateful for right now is that I’m absolutely surrounded by folk who I really trust, and folk who know me really well, so I don’t worry about developing an ego or becoming a Westminster politician and getting really up myself.” This is roughly what everybody who has ever found fame from anywhere says, for at least the first five years, but the lack of hierarchy in her dealings is tangible. At one point, as she scorns the idiotic women’s magazines who wanted to do interviews with her, when she’s only interested in policies and not personalities, Declan says – not even gently – “and also, you’d already done a load of profile at the start”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mhairi Black, Britain’s youngest MP, gives maiden speech - video

“OK. But the book deals!” she continues. “I had people wanting me to write an autobiography: I was born. I went to school. I left. I fried a fish. And now I’m an MP. They were offering me a four-book deal!”

She would probably say her experience in Westminster since May has been mixed – the triumph of the speech, the exhilaration of the possibilities, balanced against the stiffness, the pomposity. Though reading back through our conversation, there is more bad than good. “If one more person pats me on the back … it was all the time: ‘How are you, are you alright? How are you finding it?’

“I was expecting to be patronised, but it went to a whole new level.” She wryly half-laughs. “After the maiden speech, there are quite a few of them won’t even look at me anymore.” Labour or Tory? “Tories. A lot of Labour wouldn’t look at me in the first place.” She talks about the Conservative party in a way that you won’t have heard anyone in opposition doing for years, uncompromising and trenchant: “I look at it as a really dangerous party. Conservative policies, quite often, if you were to look at them in one sentence, make perfect sense. If somebody’s claiming taxpayers’ money in order to sit on their backside and watch Homes Under the Hammer every day, why the hell shouldn’t they be made to get a job? It’s an excuse that has been used to justify so many brutal cuts. They’re talking about people who are working harder than a lot of MPs are. The Conservatives are really good at this, and they always have been, and they always prey on what I would call the worst bits of human nature. The ideology always comes down to selfishness. I’m alright, Jack. I just hope that there’s enough people switched-on enough to go: ‘They’re at it.’”

She says this a few times, of a few people, before I finally ask: “At it” – what does that mean? Declan helps me out, here: “If you’re at it, you’re deliberately doing it, and fully aware, but you’re pretending not to be aware. You get a lot of this in Glasgow – you can’t explain a single word of it but you know exactly what it means.”

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Of the pre-Jeremy Corbyn Labour party, she is equally, possibly even more scathing. “It was the finance bill, just before recess. It was partly because we were all knackered, I was ratty, I was stressed, we put so much work into it, we were picking it apart and saying how horrendous it was. And Labour folk werenae there. Didn’t turn up. It was late on, alls of them were sitting in the pub downstairs. They just didn’t vote. They all seem to be terrified to be in opposition. They think: ‘The Tories won, so we need to be more like the Tories.’ Get off your hands, and get out in that lobby and vote! You’re a Labour MP. People voted for you because they want you.” Of Labour under Corbyn she is more approving, but no cheerleader. “Give him a shot. But a Lord in the cabinet? And then Trident, you’re not even going to debate it? Where’s this fresh, new, straight-talking politics? Everything they’ve done so far, they’ve disappointed.”

I am vaguely suspicious that she is slightly overstating her disappointment in him, in order to avoid the question of what, exactly, is wrong with the Labour party now that there’s a socialist in charge. But that turns out not to be true: her goal is, above all else, independence. The days when she might have divided loyalties are emphatically over. “I don’t think Scotland can reach its potential or get the society it deserves until we’ve got independence. I don’t see the Labour party backing that any time soon, and that’s a fundamental difference between us. It’s a big one.”

But the real problem is at a level beneath policy. Scotland and Labour have fallen out of love. “It’s where the fundamental problem lies – their ethos seems to be: ‘We have to be in the middle of the road to be electable’, but in Scotland, they have to go left. For years it was OK, because Scotland was buying the line – vote Labour to get rid of the Tories. But Scotland’s not buying that anymore. It’s almost like somebody who’s been caught having an affair.” It’s a little dispiriting, that just at the moment when progressive ideas are gathering force everywhere, old animosities and new nationalist fervour stand between natural alliances. Black insists: “We’ve always said that if we agree on an issue, we’re more than happy, we’re enthusiastic to work with you. What’s frustrating is that they don’t seem to want to work with us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mhairi Black with Labour’s Douglas Alexander on the night she unseated him from his Paisley and Renfrewshire South seat in May 2015. Photograph: Lesley Martin/AFP/Getty Images

While in Westminster, Black stays in a flat in east London, but never goes out because she doesn’t have time. In a typical week, she’d arrive at noon on Monday and be sometimes working until midnight, always working way past office hours; she is keen to reassure me, though, that she’s staying healthy, eating properly; reflexively, endearingly, she’ll often tell you whereabouts she had her lunch in the middle of a story. I get the impression she is still quizzed about whether or not she’s looking after herself. Not by Tories, though, by her mum.

I had quite a romantic vision of MPs – that they were always together, plotting in bars, going for curries, a bit like adult students. It’s a life that this very recent graduate (she got a first in Politics and Public Policy during the summer) wouldn’t recognise at all, which is probably a good thing – there’s almost nothing she can do, in London or elsewhere, that wouldn’t get her plied with attention. “I think there are quite a lot of MPs that have either the luxury of having a safe seat or the luxury of not being scrutinised. The SNP are clearly disliked by so many people that they’re going to be incredibly scrutinised, and on top of that, I’m going to be incredibly scrutinised personally.”

That scrutiny varies wildly: for the three days after the election, she and her family had to move into a Travelodge because the press were climbing over their back fence. And in pubs: “You know when you get folk that say, ‘I’m not racist, but …’ and then they say something racist. I get that on a Saturday night, it’s quarter to two, somebody will come up and say: ‘It’s your night off, but … ’”

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There are moments when it sounds as if her election will be the – maybe prematurely – defining point in her life, such as when she declares an unexpected liking for Jacob Rees-Mogg. “I could sit and listen to him all day, I disagree with him 99.9% of the time, and that wee percent is just because he’s got good manners. But I love listening to him, his knowledge is incredible, and he’s so polite.” To her, though, this parliament is just a waypoint in a different journey altogether. “Once we’ve got independence, I’ll do other things. I know I’m not going to become comfortable in Westminster because I’m fundamentally uncomfortable there. I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to make decisions there. I don’t like being away from my home for four days of the week.”

There can’t be a new parliamentarian on earth, even the ones who went to the public schools on which the palaces were premised, who feels comfortable with the conventions, built up by time but guarded by people who enjoy the feeling of gatekeeping in the in-group. Yet Mhairi Black’s objection goes deeper than “half the rules we were breaking, it’s because we didn’t know they were rules”. Hovering over everything – her lack of bedazzlement, her industrious, sleeves-up, instrumental attitude – is the idea that Westminster will do while it lasts, but the long game is elsewhere. For her, it’s independence; it makes me wonder what it is for us.

• This article was amended on 12 October 2015. An earlier version said Black achieved a first in law in the summer. This has been corrected.

