IT IS a fairly surprising admission for someone who now has one of the most visible roles in Scottish local government, but Susan Aitken never really fancied a career in frontline politics.

The new leader of Glasgow City Council, wrestled away from Labour’s 36-year-long iron grip by the SNP in May’s elections, says her 17-year-old self would have been astonished to learn how things have turned out.

“My romantic, teenage ideas of politics usually involved storming the barricades in my DMs (Doc Martins),” she says.

“Both sets of grandparents held radical political views and my parents met through the Young Communist League, so, growing up, I was surrounded by it.

“It all had an impact on me – I was a CND-supporting 13-year-old, and my Higher English dissertation was about Clare Short’s bill on banning Page 3 girls. I was a precocious young feminist who insisted on everyone addressing me as Ms.”

She rolls her eyes. “I must have been insufferable.”

Ms Aitken grew up in the small Lanarkshire town of Biggar, with her parents George and Doris and her brother Andrew, but she always planned to move to Glasgow.

“It seemed to me a proper city, where proper things happened,” she says. “I loved the variety of it, the diversity of it – it felt like what life was supposed to be.

“There is always something to stimulate you here; new experiences to discover. The city feels like you can make it your own.

“There is a reason people become addicted to Glasgow.”

After graduating from Glasgow University, she completed a postgraduate degree at Strathclyde – “handy to have studied at both when I’m speaking to the chancellors,” she laughs – and worked in a number of third sector roles before redundancy set her on a different path.

“I worked for the Scottish branch of the NHS Confederation, which represents health boards and trusts in an attempt to liaise more closely with government in getting the balance of care right,” she explains.

“When it folded, I went freelance for a while and wrote articles for a variety of health and social policy journals.

“Being made redundant was not pleasant. I was fortunate in that I could freelance and had a small redundancy package as a cushion, but it does knock your confidence.

“I got a job as a researcher in the Scottish Parliament and then ran the Central Research Office for a few months. If it hadn’t been for that I could easily have stayed in the third sector, working for campaigning charities.

“Sometimes you take a circuitous route to get to where you need to be.”

Originally a member of the Labour Party, Aitken became disillusioned with what she calls the “deeply unpleasant in-fighting” that went on and switched to the SNP in 2000.

“My partner was involved with the SNP at the time and it annoyed me some people thought I joined just to follow him,” she says.

“I heard whispers, and read some social media chat along the lines of ‘she just joined the SNP because her man did,’ which infuriated me.”

She gives an exasperated sigh. “That’s ridiculous,” she adds.

“I just didn’t like the way things were being done.”

Persuaded eventually to stand for election, Ms Aitken won the Glasgow City Council Langside ward seat in 2012.

“I love being a ward councillor,” she says.

“I have always been very serious about how we can advance public policy in health and social care, and I feel very strongly about eradicating inequality – whether that’s gender, or race, or economic.

“I get very frustrated by the waste of potential that inequality can cause.”

In March 2014, she was made leader of the SNP Group in Glasgow, when her friend and colleague Graeme Hendry stepped down.

“It was daunting – after just over a year as a councillor, being asked to step up to be group leader? My first instinct was ‘don’t be ridiculous, it shouldn’t be me’,” she admits.

“I did hesitate – I was 40 before I was even an elected councillor, despite being actively involved in politics since my teens.

“It’s the fear of being out there, of messing up – and you don’t get over that, but you do learn how to ignore it and get on with it.

“And so I thought – why shouldn’t it be me? When you are given the opportunity to do something to make your mark, you really have to have a good reason for turning it down.”

Now that she is very firmly centre stage in Glasgow, Aitken is excited and positive about what the future holds.

Over iced water in the leader’s office at Glasgow City Chambers, she is relaxed and cheerful, keen to chat about her recent romantic trip to Paris to celebrate her 20th wedding anniversary and enjoyable engagements such as the presentation of the Evening Times Streets Ahead awards, run by The Herald’s sister newspaper.

“That was a joyful, lovely evening – though I completely messed up by losing a page of my speech and forgetting to invite all the finalists up for a photograph,” she groans. “They won’t ask me back.

“One of the best bits of this job is being invited along to events like that, getting to see what is happening in communities around the city.”

The SNP group remains a close-knit team, something Ms Aitken is keen to preserve, even though the physical circumstances have changed.

“In Opposition, there were a handful of us in a wee corridor somewhere – now we are much bigger, of course, and more spread out,” she says.

“But I don’t want us to lose the esprit de corps we have always had and we’ll continue to support each other.

“It’s been really exciting – people in senior roles have just stepped up and I think that’s fantastic. When I was first elected, someone took a leap of faith in me, and I wanted to do the same for others.”

When Ms Aitken became group leader, she says, it was not immediately obvious the SNP was on course to be the biggest party in the 2017 elections.

“We had lost a couple of by-elections, we hadn’t had the groundswell of support from the independence referendum, so at the time the team was focussing purely on what we wanted to achieve,” she says.

“It was incredibly exciting, as the results came in.

“I think the moment it became real was when there was no challenge to me or to my deputy David McDonald.

“It was an acceptance we had earned the right to be here.”

Now, she says, the focus is on improving services in Glasgow for its citizens.

“I’ve always been very clear we are talking about a five-year term here,” she says, firmly. “Politics in Britain is in such flux, certainly more than at any other time in my lifetime, that we do not take anything for granted.

“And at the end of the five years, we don’t want the people of Glasgow saying – why did we bother? We want to make a difference, we want people to feel the impact of positive change on their lives.”

“Of course we have long term plans – we are not going to overturn health inequality or eradicate poverty overnight.

“But for us, the worst thing would not have been losing the election, it would have been winning the election and not knowing what to do next.”

Now that she is leader of the council, Ms Aitken is keen to pay tribute to those who helped her get there.

“I’m grateful to those who pushed me and encouraged me to take the opportunities that came along,” she says.

“It really is a privilege to be part of the life of this city – I can’t emphasise that enough.”

If her teenage self would have been taken aback by her rise to the top of local government, what do her radical politics-loving parents make of it?