Naz Shah, Labour MP saw the harrowing beatings from her father to her mother, and stood by her side and fought for her mum’s freedom after she was jailed for murder in 1993
When Naz Shah was five years old, she saw her father attack her mother. “I remember in technicolour my mother’s eyes looking at me in absolute utter helplessness,” she says. “She was so helpless she needed a five-year-old to get help.”
Little Naz ran to get the neighbours, who helped to stop the assault, but she understood something important that day. Looking after her Zoora was her responsibility – and for years her life was dedicated to saving her mum.
Now the Labour MP for Bradford West, Naz was 20 when her mum went to prison for murder. By now her violent dad had deserted them, leaving the family destitute. Sofa-surfing in squalid homes where Naz and her siblings caught tuberculosis, her mum had accepted help from a community leader, Mohamed Azam. But Azam began raping and beating Zoora, and then inviting his associates to do the same.
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When Zoora saw her abuser taking an interest in her daughters, she began lacing halwa sweets with arsenic. Naz – initially arrested treated as a second suspect by police – would later discover there were traces of arsenic in her own blood from kitchen contamination.
The day Zoora was jailed for life for murder at Leeds Crown Court in December 1993, Naz remembers her mother’s eyes signalling to her once more. “I’m starting at mum and her eyes are begging me not to cry,” she writes in her extraordinary memoir, Honoured: Survival, Strength and My Path to Politics. “They’re hugging me and trying to protect me from afar but not quite reaching me…. I’ll never forget that look of utter fear, defeat and helplessness.”
When I met Zoora in 1998, she was in Holloway Prison. I was 26, Naz would have been 24. As a young reporter, I’d read all about the “arsenic murderer” who had killed an upstanding member of the Bradford Asian community out of greed. The activist group, Southall Black Sisters, had approached me with a different story. Zoora, they said, had killed in self-defence and to save her daughters.
That February, I went to Holloway Prison under a pretext with Hannana Siddique of SBS and a tape recorder somehow missed by prison searches. In the visitors’ room, other inmates whispered loudly as Zoora was brought in. The arsenic murderer sat in front of us – a tiny, shivering woman with a hollowed-out face, wiping away tears with her headscarf.
Hidden deep in their sockets, her eyes signalled to me too. Over the rest of the visit, her terrible story came tumbling out, translated by Hannana, recorded by my hidden device, as the warders looked on.
Zoora told me about the rapes and the still births that followed the beatings. One detail I never forgot was that she said Azam had punished her by taking her to the cemetery where her stillborn children were buried and raping her there.
Convinced her daughters were now in danger, she said she had been told by a relative in Pakistan that arsenic in small amounts could make a man temporarily impotent. Putting tiny amounts in Azam’s food gave her a month’s freedom from being raped, she said, but his impotence had caused him to beat her so badly she was hospitalised. She upped the dose of arsenic.
“I didn’t care whether he lived or died,” she said. Zoora’s three children – daughters Naz and Foz, and their brother Imy – gave a statement for the piece, that ended, “We love her.”
My editor Rosie Boycott – founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib – ran the story on the front page of the Independent on Sunday magazine. It brought fresh attention to the case, but it took another two years of campaigning by Naz, her siblings, and SBS, for then Home Secretary Jack Straw to reduce Zoora’s 20-year tariff to twelve years. Incredibly, even now Zoora is still on ‘licence’ so can’t be interviewed, but she is in good health and able to be there for her grandchildren in a way she never could be for her own children.
“Writing the book absolutely broke me,” Naz says when I meet her at her office at the Houses of Parliament. She is now 52. We have never met before, and her journey to become an MP – and UK trade envoy – seems so extraordinary as to be almost from a Hollywood script.
On Sunday, International Women’s Day, she will launch the book at a special Bradford Literary Festival event. “I asked for the book to be published on IWD,” she says. “I wrote it because my mum isn’t the first woman or the last woman to be in that situation. I hope it will allow other women to tell their stories.”
She is doing it for the other five-year-old girls who have to save their mothers. “When it’s happening to you, you don’t understand, you’re just in it, and you just survive it,” she says. “It’s the only truth you know.”
Naz has lived so many lives. To try to save her, Zoora sent her to Pakistan as a 12-year-old. Relatives there tricked her into a wedding aged 17 which it took her years to realise was a forced marriage. Her second marriage, while loving, was scarred by her trauma, and broke up under the toll of endless campaigning.
At times in her life, the past overwhelmed Naz. She has twice had her stomach pumped after overdoses. But there’s something in her eyes that reminds me of her mother’s all those years ago. Not just pain, but a spark of something else – a flash of defiance.
“Well, where do you think I get it from,” she laughs. “When Angela Rayner asked me to sign a copy of the book, I wrote ‘from one hustler to another’,” she says. “We’re both still hustling, but in beautiful buildings.”
Zoora was finally released in 2006, having served two years longer than her reduced tariff. Her daughter, who left school at 12, went from a job packing crisps and sleeping on a dog’s mattress in a crack den to the corridors of power.
“Before Parliament, I had a really successful career commissioning services with a budget of over £5 million,” she says. “But I always wanted to be a voice against injustice and inequality, and that’s why I stood to be a member of Parliament.”
Naz laughs. “A friend of mine says that I’m like Sonic the hedgehog. They said that as the hills gets steeper, I collect extra energy and keep going. Some of what propels me is anger and pain.” She looks up. “But the hill keeps getting steeper. The Epstein stuff – it’s all much steeper than you thought it was.”
Naz’s three kids are 21, 18, and 14 now, a similar age to her and her siblings when their mum was in prison. “I look at them and see the things they have, and it makes me happy,” she says, “but it’s hard because sometimes I think, that ‘should have been me’.”
When she sees them living normal teenage lives, she also sees something else. “I’m so happy for them because I know I have broken that bastard cycle of trauma,” she says.
“The kids give me such good hugs. And there is such comfort in that hug.” She offers me a bar of chocolate, a gift from a colleague. “I’m actually one of the luckiest people I know,” she says. “That might surprise some people.
“But look at my mum. She was 15 when she came to England, married to a violent man, and beaten not just by him, but by other members of his family. Then her husband went off and left her with three children, in squalor so bad we caught tuberculosis, only for her to be abused by another man.”
She shrugs. “So, I have three beautiful children, I was gifted the job of my life my by constituents – what more can a girl ask for, right?”
Honoured: Survival, Strength and My Path to Politics by Naz Shah is available now in hardback, eBook and audiobook.