Sagal Abdi-Wali said she was the constituency’s first Spurs-supporting MP 

After the long Holborn & St Pancras by-election battle, Richard Osley watches Camden’s new MP from the gallery of the House of Commons

A LITTLE glance to the gallery in the House of Commons and Sagal Abdi-Wali could see her mother and other family members smiling back.

This was the next big step on a journey which began with the heart-breaking decision to flee war-torn Somalia in the 1990s as refugees; she was six and couldn’t have imagined that one day she would be sitting here, ready to take to her feet as one of the 650 representatives who make British law.

The life story of the new MP for Holborn and St Pancras will not shield her from challenge over policy and direction, but it can’t be denied that this was a historic moment for the borough.

“It is also an extraordinary honour to become the first woman, black person and Muslim to represent Holborn and St Pancras in Parliament, and the first British Somali woman to sit in this House,” she said.

“I take great pride in those milestones, and in being elected during Black History Month in a constituency whose Town Hall proudly commemorates Claudia Jones, the pioneering black woman who founded and hosted Britain’s first Caribbean carnival there.

“I take pride in those milestones because of what they might mean to a young woman or a young girl growing up in our constituency today. I want her to see that her background does not define the limits of her ambition, that there is no ceiling to what she can achieve, and that public life belongs to her, too.”

More left-wing readers often offer a smile when Ms Jones is mentioned – and wonder what a communist would think of the Labour Party in its modern form.

Ms Abdi-Wali, who is staying on as a councillor in Camden (without an allowance), is often talked of as being part of a moderate – maybe centrist– wing of her party.

Sagal Abdi-Wali is getting used to the confusing corridors of the Houses of Parliament

Old colleagues of the late Lena Jeger, who represented the old constituency of Holborn and St Pancras South, might also quibble about who was the first female MP here.

But the selection and election of a black British Somali woman – with a refugee past which sticks two polite fingers, as it were, up at Reform’s Zia Yusuf – was something Parliament hadn’t seen before.

Many of the MPs who had helped on the doorstep during her high-profile ballot box battle with Green Party leader Zack Polanski stayed late on Monday to see her speak.

As she praised Frank Dobson and Sir Keir Starmer, her predecessors, she also mentioned another first – Holborn and St Pancras now had its first Spurs-supporting MP.

“Like so many young people growing up in Camden, I spent my time making friends through the universal language of football,” she told the House of Commons.

“On the football pitch, you quickly learn that it does not matter where someone comes from, what language they speak or what their family does for a living. What matters is whether they turn up for their teammates.

“Those friendships taught me something important about community, long before I entered politics: that we are stronger when we look beyond our differences and recognise what we have in common.”

Tottenham Hotspur, as it happens, have won every match since her polling day success – a sparkling turnaround from the club’s dismal start to the season. Maybe she’s a lucky charm, maybe she’ll be invited to an executive box soon. Maybe they’ll win the league in the Abdi-Walian era.

The history she wasn’t making, of course, was to be the first Camden councillor to be elected to the Commons. Even as she made her speech, former Kilburn councillor Lloyd Hatton sat behind her murmuring encouragingly.

Sagal Abdi-Wali reiterated her commitment to eradicating homelessness

Opposite sat the Green MP Sian Berry, a councillor for many years in Highgate, and on the government front bench there was the beaming smile of Georgia Gould – formerly a Camden Council leader. There could have been more, given how many MPs have Camden on their CVs.

Our Town Hall is something of an MP factory, which people see in two different ways: one, that some only seek to be councillors so they can one day bid to upgrade to the Commons; or two, that local government is actually the perfect training ground to be a good parliamentary representative.

Your view depends on how cynical you want to be, but there are certainly critics out there who will need to be convinced about what she can achieve, and will be looking to see if she can come good on big by-election pledges to bring Thames Water into public hands and the issue she has put at the centre since her first day as the candidate: homelessness.

Our pledge ticker may be a bit of a tabloid cliché, but these are the things she herself made bold promises about.

Good news for her, then, that new prime minister Andy Burnham has also staked some reputational risk with claims of getting everybody off the streets this winter. It’s perhaps more urgent than anywhere in a place like Camden, where we’ve reported on cases of vulnerable people dying in the cold.

In her speech, Ms Abdi-Wali praised Mr Burnham and the government’s “essential” financial choices, adding: “This budget turns determination into action, with nearly £900 million to tackle rough sleeping and an additional £1.5 billion to support the delivery of social and affordable homes.”

The speech then went on a familiar history tour of all the things that make Camden great but in a whizz her first contribution was over. The family giggled upstairs.

Then the smile that everybody mentions came out, and Natasha Irons, the MP from Croydon who helped her through the by-election campaign, gave her a knowing tap with the initiation now done.

This is a nerve-wracking moment for any new MP, perhaps especially one used to the cosier confines of Camden’s council chamber. But with big challenges ahead, Ms Abdi-Wali probably knows that’s the easy part done.