Audrey Gillan

James Millar was born by the sea in 1965. His father ran his own building business and his mother taught children with learning disabilities. His sister Sarah was six years older and always had her head in a book. Three times a year they would go on holiday, once to another part of England, and twice abroad. The Millars liked their English lives. They were well enough off to spoil their son, who has strong memories of being taken sailing when he was three, of having a Chopper bicycle at the height of their fashion, and of loving Gary Glitter at the height of his. James’s favourite toy was the Six Million Dollar Man, which had a bionic right arm that could lift things. When you peered through the back of the doll’s head you suddenly had bionic eyes, too, eyes that could take in a magnified, wide-angle version of the world outside. James is a child again when he talks about the doll, its bright red jumpsuit, the way the bionic eye made things look different.

Ferteze Nimari had lost two of her brothers and her husband was forced to bury all the dead in one grave. Later, packed into a stifling bus with sixty fellow Kosovars, the couple held onto each other as he clutched a strap suspended from the ceiling. The bus stopped in the Stan-kovac I refugee camp in Macedonia and they told their story. ‘The tank came to our village of Sllovi. The Serb neighbours said not to worry – it was just there to observe us. But by lunchtime the next day a teenage girl lay dead in the street. Then another 15 people were killed. They told us to run into the woods and they started shooting us.’’‘

I went to see Mohammad Sarwar one March morning in 1996, a good 14 months before he became Britain’s first Muslim MP. I drove to the office of his cash and carry firm that day, quite sure he was every bit the coming man. I had no sense just how coming – or indeed how going – and little notion of what my own part would be in this Clydeside drama of a man on the make. But I knew I had to see him and seeing me changed everything for him.’