When Islamists shot dead 12 journalists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Galloway stood outside Bradford City Hall and declared it a “racist, Islamophobic, hypocritical rag”.

Shah has seen the harsh side of the culture that Galloway appears to celebrate uncritically. When she was six years old her mother Zoora, an illiterate women from rural Pakistan, was left with two young children and pregnant with her third after her husband ran away with the 16-year-old daughter of a neighbour.

The family moved into one room with nothing but black bin-liners stuffed with clothes and a few possessions. Zoora eventually sold her wedding jewellery but was unable to get a mortgage, so the local drug dealer, Mohammed Azam, who had befriended her, offered to take out a mortgage on her behalf.

When Shah was 15, she was taken out of school and sent to Pakistan to enter into a forced marriage to her cousin. “He was violent and abusive,” she says, “using his fists to settle arguments.”

In similar fashion, Azam physically and sexually abused Zoora throughout their relationship, and she began to fear that he had designs on her daughters. In 1992 she killed him by putting poison in his food, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Shah, then only 18 years old, was forced to became a mother to her two siblings, who were 11 and 13 at the time.

I first met Naz Shah in 1997, when women’s groups from all over the UK came together to help her campaign for Zoora’s release from prison. By then, Shah had learned to lobby MPs, write campaign leaflets, speak to the media, and hound lawyers into helping put a case together to challenge her mother’s conviction.

When Shah told her extraordinary life story in a local newspaper, days after her selection as a parliamentary candidate, it quickly went viral. But at the first hustings of the election campaign, Galloway admitted he had ordered an intermediary in Pakistan to locate Shah’s marriage certificate (nikah) in order to try to prove she had been 16, not 15, when she was married.

I have seen a copy of Shah’s nikah, which clearly states she was 15. Shah explained that a second nikah was issued when her husband was applying to come to the UK to live, because it is illegal in both Pakistan and Britain to marry below the age of 16. Galloway rejected Shah’s explanation at the hustings, and described Shah as a “big loser” and a “liar”. Abid McKay, Galloway’s spokesman, said that because Shah’s mother attended the marriage it could not have been forced. “Forced marriage is a crime, whatever age the victim is,” says Shah, “and it is common knowledge that it is usually one or both parents who pressurise their children into such unions.”

I go to a food bank with Shah and the Labour team, where I speak to Bradford West constituents. I ask whether they would ever vote for Galloway. They all say “no”. Reasons given include that Galloway is rarely in Bradford; that he has a poor attendance record in parliament; and that he promotes himself more than he does his constituency. “Parliamentary records show in 2014 he earned well over £200,000 on top of his MP’s salary, working for Russian, Iranian and Lebanese TV,” says Shah. “He’s a one-man band, and more a celebrity than a politician. If your MP has the second-worst record for attendance, and that’s not because of his ill health, I’m sorry, that doesn’t resonate.”