'I'd bet on me still being here in June'

For the record, Oona King is NOT having an affair with a prominent Cabinet minister who may or may not be Jack Straw. "I'm intrigued," she says, with a wry smile, "by the suggestion. I am honestly,

The rumour, probably the handiwork of an internet prankster, according to King, has become part of a political mythology that makes the 37-year-old MP for Bethnal Green and Bow currently one of the most colourful characters in British politics.

She says she is "not a woman for gossip" and stays clear of the Westminster rumour mill; to her credit she shows no indignation when it comes to salacious talk of affairs and her now infamous admission that a Labour MEP once offered her ?10,000 to sleep with him.

The story broke last December when she wrote a newspaper article. In it she said: "When I worked as an assistant speech writer at the European Parliament a British Labour MEP offered me ?10,000 out of his cost allowance if I'd sleep with him. I told him to go to hell and I complained to some other politicians, who had a go at him. But it was because of this same man that I decided to go into politics.

"In Brussels one day he said to me: 'Oh, Oona, love, can you go and ring my constituency office? I don't know how to get through to the UK from here.' He'd been a member of the European parliament for over ten years. And I thought: 'You know what? I can use a telephone - I can do this job. I can be an MP'."

Now King tells me: "It was more for me a lesson in media handling, or lack there of, than anything else." She does confess, however, that she finds the media's fascination with such tittle-tattle mildly "entertaining".

But for all her magnanimity, as we sit in a cramped office at her constituency HQ, she has other more pressing concerns. Such as how to thwart the Tories and George Galloway's anti-war, anti-Blair Respect party at the next election.

"If I was a betting person I would place a bet on me being here in a few months' time," she says. "But it's absolutely true that Respect could take just enough votes to let the Tories in."

Indeed, it has already happened, at least in the local council chamber. As a warning, she adds: "People voted Respect and they got a Tory." Respect also out-polled Labour in the European elections last June. New Labour feels sufficiently wary of ex-party boy Galloway, the Tories and King's propensity to make the odd indiscreet remark that they have assigned a "minder" to sit in the corner of the room during our conversation.

The minder's presence adds to the sense of drama slowly unfolding in King's seat, which she has represented since 1997 and has the second highest Muslim population in Britain. There are 55,000 Bangladeshi Muslims in the constituency ) half the electorate. Whoever gets the Muslim vote wins.

"Galloway is quite straightforwardly, if not cynically, targeting Muslim votes. And that's why he's here in Bethnal Green and Bow." says King. "The reason I'm here is because I want to move things forward for various groups in the constituency, including the Muslim community, the white community, the Afro-Caribbean community, the Somali community; and the thing that I am concerned about is poverty reduction."

It is this point that King wants to fight the forthcoming election on, not the "racially divisive policies" she accuses Galloway of promoting, vis a vis the conflict in Iraq.

"I don't think that Iraq will be the only defining issue of this election. Obviously George Galloway hopes that it will be, because he's a onepolicy practitioner.

"The fact is there are many Muslim people, not to mention others, who take a range of policies into account; and even if they disagree passionately about Iraq, they agree passionately about other things, like investment in schools and hospitals, the huge amounts of money that have come into Tower Hamlets. They don't want to see that jeopardised, they don't want to see reversals in educational achievement, or reductions in the police, one of the biggest issues in recent years."

Oona King was born in Sheffield in 1967. Her father, Preston King, an African-American who won a scholarship to the London School of Economics, was exiled from the US for decades following a trumpedup prosecution for draft-dodging (he was eventually pardoned by President Clinton after the trial judge confirmed his conviction had been racist); her uncle was Martin Luther King's lawyer; and her grandfather a founder of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People).

King's father met her mother at the LSE. The pair split when she was four; her father lived in Kenya and Australia and now lives in Atlanta. She and her younger brother spent a lot of time with him during extended visits, but it was her mother, a Jewish teacher from Newcastle, who got her interested in the Labour movement. "I joined the Labour party when I was 14 because I felt at a fairly young age that there was a lot wrong that had to be put right."

She studied politics at York University, had a year-long scholarship at Berkeley, joined the Socialist Workers' Party (and heckled from the sidelines), became a research assistant at the European Parliament (by accident), in part thanks to Labour MP Bernie Grant, and worked for the GMB union before being selected to fight Bethnal Green and Bow six weeks before the 1997 Labour landslide.

She became one of the original "Blair's Babes", a distinction she finds irritating but far less galling than the lack of female representation in Westminster.

"There was some incredibly sexist and juvenile behaviour," she says of her early days in the House, "because the men were just so shocked at having women there." Male MPs would refer to new female MPs as "melons".

"They were just so pathetic," she adds, laughing. "Oh boys get out of your cradles! I mean really pathetic. On an individual level I don't face any sexism. But on a collective level I am often outraged that I will sometimes be in the chamber of the British parliament and be the only woman there.

"The most invisible group are Asian women. There's not a single Asian woman in the House. There's only Diane [Abbott] and me on the African descent side; but none in terms of the other large ethnic minorities in Britain."

King favours Blair's drive to get more female MPs in the Commons via all-women shortlists. With women making up 18 per cent of Labour MPs, he has a long way to go to reach parity. For the other main parties the picture is even worse. Just 10 per cent of Tory and eight per cent of Liberal Democrat MPs are women. King, however, thinks all three main parties are missing a trick by not having more women in the Commons.

"It's certainly true that research shows that women candidates get more votes than male candidates, other things being equal," she adds, "but I really don't think that was the reason [Blair wanted more female MPs].

"The reason was that it was shocking that you had a system that for 500 years, virtually had no women elected ever. In 1992, there were more MPs called John, David and Michael than there were women. Now that's just unbelievable and I don't think that you have to be a radical feminist to think that's totally bang out of order. And I think Tony Blair thought it was wrong and he acted on it, which is why we have more women in Parliament today."

She is urbane, charming, cosmopolitan - qualities I'm sure her Italian husband Tiberio Santomarco must have found engaging when they met while working for the European Parliament. Dressed in a sharp grey check trouser suit, chunky black pullover, funky kung-fu style shoes, righteous hairdo and deep soulful eyes, King has the style but has she got the content?

After a short discourse on a " Darwinist approach to feminism" she'd recently read about she launches into her election pitch.

"I brought millions of pounds into the borough for housing, which I think is the most important issue facing a lot of my constituents," she says, suddenly serious and forthright. I got the first parliamentary inquiry ever into affordable housing. I'm the only one who can help make that goal of affordable housing a reality in the East End."

On asylum and immigration, she favours a liberal approach for allowing migrant workers into the UK. "We do not have a large enough workforce in Britain to keep our economy on the road," she says before accusing the Tories of using the issue as a "political football" in the run up to the election.

Over the coming weeks King will have a battle on her hands defending her constituency.

But the smart money is on her retaining her seat - and some pride - at the expense of Galloway, with whom she recently had to make an out-of-court settlement [paying his legal costs and making a £1,000 donation to charity] over allegations she made in a press conference and press release last year about sexually improper behaviour.

In a letter of apology to Galloway she accepted that he had never "used, or been accused of using, charitable funds to pay for sex with prostitutes in expensive hotels". Despite this dent to her ego and purse, King is still taking pot-shots at "Gorgeous" George.

"He can bluff and bluster as much as he wants," she says. "At the end of the day [if he is voted in] he will never persuade the Treasury to spend an extra ten pence in Tower Hamlets because he has no influence at all. And that worries many local people."