From the seat in which I’m sitting, the real problem with Davena Rankin, the Conservative candidate in the forthcoming, and already surreal, Glasgow East by-election, is that she does all the work on one’s behalf. She’s a black female trade unionist. She grew up on the fearsome social-experiment housing estate of Drumchapel, the bit in the west of Glasgow where the city gives up the will to live, as opposed to the seat she is contesting, which is where the city gives up the will to live in the east. She’s a single mother. Did I mention that she’s a black, female trade unionist?

All things considered, she isn’t so much a candidate as material for a tired comedy routine. All her biography lacks is a rag-and-bone man for a father and a whippet named Aneurin or Che. In terms of Tory anathema it’s a biography with everything but the kitchen sink, in which the young Rankin would bathe as her mother typed a column for the Morning Star. You can picture Baroness Thatcher waking up in terror after a night of uneasy dreams on the future of the Conservative party, dreams that might well be haunted by a figure not wholly dissimilar to Rankin.

How did this political cuckoo land in Glasgow East’s nest? Nobody has troubled to find out. In Glasgow East, there are more pressing concerns. The by-election on July 24 was such a political five-car pile-up already, with Labour’s emergency substitute candidate and the possibility of a rout in the party’s safest Scottish seat, it has barely registered that the Tory candidate ought to be campaigning for the opposition.

Glasgow East has proven adept at generating oddities — it needs little help from the candidate, who somehow ended up in the wrong queue. It doesn’t help clarify things that Rankin is keen, young and biddable, the kind of defender who is content to play in the reserves until their team goes up a division. Glasgow East is clearly a political training exercise for Rankin, 35. She’s being blooded, although in Glasgow East there’s always the possibility that the bloodying could be literal, particularly if you’re a Tory — the party is at 100/1 to take the seat. But one day, she obviously hopes, a new dawn will rise in which black female trade unionists suddenly seem to make plenty of sense in the Cameron-shaped, wipe-clean Notting Hill Carnival Conservative party.

“I fought my first election in Glasgow Kelvin against George Galloway and that was as fearsome as it gets,” she says. “I had my first hustings in front of a hostile audience of 300 with Galloway and Tommy Sheridan on asylum. That’s a baptism of fire.”

Rankin is rigidly on-message. Even off-the-record you can’t imagine her revealing anything more racy than the fact she had an egg-and-cress sandwich for lunch. She talks with the focused self-possession of someone trying to remember a long list of groceries. The sole flashes of informality come in the body language — it acknowledges wearily the obvious points about the poor fit of her background and her beliefs.

The Tories’ chances of victory in Glasgow might be nugatory, but, for Rankin, the stakes still remain high: survive this and everything has to be a doddle afterwards. A measure of her optimism lies in the fact that she has booked a holiday for her and her son, Bryce, 5, the week after the by-election. In the meantime, Glasgow East must be a soul-sapping, why-bother grind, a spell on the political chain gang, lightened only by the

expectation of a glorious eventual parole, perhaps in a constituency with a life expectancy greater than in the Gaza Strip. “No, I find it really easy to jump out of bed and get going in Glasgow East,” she says.

“The motivation is hearing the voters tell me I’m the first candidate who’s asked them what they’re worried about. In this by-election the people say they’ve never been canvassed. That’s what drives me forward, that Glasgow East is finally having this amazing chance to have its issues aired.”

By now you might be beginning to see what I mean about her unerring ability to stay on the political piste. Still, the campaign affords her the chance to reacquaint herself with the tattier side of life first tasted during her six years in Drumchapel. “To begin with there you needed a lot of points on the council’s list to get a house,” she says. “By the time I left you needed a lot of points to get out.”

Her election office is on Tollcross Road, a grey and dusty corridor of tanning parlours, butchers and hairdressers. There is a huge beehive of hairdressers in the constituency, hairdressing being the one type of business people can set up with a swivel chair and minimal training.

Rankin seems to like it. She is keen to explain about The Village, a little Tollcross arrondissement where sandwiches can be bought and the locals stop to complain about Gordon Brown. The Tory constituency office, meanwhile, has modelled itself in tribute to its host area. It’s a cluttered, ramshackle room that looks as though the council will be around at any minute with a skip. The phone lines take only incoming calls, you can’t dial out — there has to be a metaphor in there somewhere. It’s all hands to the pump, even if the well, for the Tories at least, contains only dust and old crisp packets.

Times Recommends

• Forces chief faces new battle - the economy
• Seven days that shook the world
• Icelanders wake up and smell ... the fish