I would be very surprised if anyone in Westminster knows more than Naz Shah about the challenges and rewards of integration.

… ‘We’re not everything that you read in some papers. We’re very diverse’ … Naz Shah, Labour MP for Bradford West.

At 12, she was sent to Pakistan where she was forced into an arranged marriage aged 15.

She returned to Britain three years later and separated from her husband.

Then there is Miss Shah’s mother, Zoora, a woman she describes as her ‘rock’, an almost saintly figure who, she says, was raped, beaten and pimped by an abusive partner for more than a decade.

Ground down by ‘helplessness and hopelessness’, according to her daughter, Zoora eventually snapped. In 1993, at Leeds Crown Court, she was convicted of murdering her married lover (a drug dealer called Mohammed Azam) by poisoning him at a family gathering — not, it emerged, because she was being abused, but out of sheer greed to steal his house.

Zoora Shah, the court heard, had already made several unsuccessful attempts to obtain the property, where she lived with the children but which was in Azam’s name, by forging legal documents.

Previously, she had even hired a hitman — with whom she was having an affair — to kill him.

Zoora, who chose not to give evidence, was jailed for life….

At 25, Miss Shah, who once worked in a laundry and a crisp factory, returned to college, enabling her to embark on a career as an NHS commissioner. After leaving the NHS, she set up an all-female gym in Bradford in 2012. Mother-of-two Salma Kokab, in her early 50s, worked under her.

Miss Kokab, who suffers a painful condition which causes arthritis, did not receive a penny in wages for five months. Eventually, she was forced to go to court and Miss Shah was ordered to pay her more than £27,000, including legal fees.