Michael Kelly: Nicola, you gambled and it backfired. Just admit it

NICOLA Sturgeon is my MSP. At least, I think she is. I've not seen much of her in my part of Govan – known locally and internationally as the leafy suburb of Pollokshields – since she stood at the last election.

But I do vaguely remember shaking her hand in the Kelvin Hall or some other draughty public hall after midnight. That was back in the days when returning officers were more interested in getting the results declared than in getting to their beds. I guess she must have won.

In retrospect, I am delighted for her. Because I now know that, if I ever cop a conviction for drunk driving, bank robbery, murder or blowing up a pylon on the Beauly-Denny line, she will be in there batting for me.

She believes it her duty to make "reasonable representations" on behalf of any of her constituents unlucky enough to fall foul of Her Majesty's constabulary. Ibrox Stadium is also on her patch, so this will be welcome news to those Rangers supporters still being hunted down by the Manchester police for the high spirits they exuded in wrecking the city centre after their defeat by Zenit St Petersburg in 2008.

That's the nonsense of her position, which she will try to explain to the Scottish Parliament today. Alex Salmond tried to dress it up as merely fulfilling an obligation to a constituent.

She has no duty of care to every criminal that turns up on her doorstep. The truth is she made a horrendous error of judgment. It might be difficult for an outsider to understand how this happened. How could a smart politician not see the embarrassing consequences that might follow from entering a plea in mitigation for a convicted benefit fraudster? But I've been there myself in the public eye, and I sympathise with her failure to think things through. It happens even over trivial matters. And as fury breaks around you, you sit at your desk kicking yourself that you didn't see it coming. You agonise over ways you might be able to turn the clock back. Generally, anything you try to do to rescue the situation makes things worse.

I was chairing an interview panel in Glasgow City Chambers when I decided to exclude first the Tory and then subsequently the SNP representative because both of them turned up late. In taking what I thought was the fairest course as far as the candidates were concerned, I overlooked the fact that my party, Labour, was in a minority in the council. As a result, we lost a vote of confidence and the whole administration came crashing down.

No matter how experienced you are, sometimes you just don't see it coming. In my last weeks as lord provost, I decided to wear the official robes – against council policy – to be installed as rector of the University of Glasgow. It would be an appropriate symbolic gesture to swap one gown for another. I thought nobody would bother. It was only as I processed into the university chapel to the click of cameras that I realised that I might have walked into controversy. Sure enough, the next day in every paper alongside the photos were old quotes from me condemning the robes as "the urban equivalent of the grouse moor image".

You make mistakes. And I can see why Nicola made this one. It's simple. She wants to hold on to her seat. She was lucky to win Govan in the first place, because it was only the decision of the Scottish Socialist Party not to field a candidate after the Tommy Sheridan debacle but to vote en bloc against Labour that allowed her to squeeze in. Naturally, she's determined to hang in there next year. She doesn't want to suffer the humiliation of again having to rely on a list seat. For her to win, the ethnic vote is vital. About 9 per cent of Glasgow Central's voters are Asians. It was about 13 per cent in Nicola's Holyrood seat and has now risen to more than 20 per cent as a result of boundary changes.

I know the ethnic community very well. I am in their shops every day. The Kenyan Asian family who own the paper shop deliver my Scotsman. I'm even trying to learn the language. Over the years, I have watched the community develop from shopkeepers with basic English to ophthalmologists and pharmacists with Glasgow accents. As well as arguing politics with them as chair of the local Labour Party, I now golf with them as they become members of Glasgow's elite clubs.

This integration and absorption is bound to affect how they vote. I don't believe someone born in Karachi really cares about Scottish independence. Kashmir is more of a burning issue. Asian Scots have voted SNP in increasing numbers because issues such as Iraq have turned them off Labour. But young Scottish Asians born here may well have a different outlook. One thing that has been established is that ethnic voters have looser party loyalties. Personal affinity with candidates carries a lot more weight with in their community.

So the SNP is right to woo them. And woo them it does. The Scottish Government has funded the Scottish Islamic Foundation to the tune of 450,000, while its chief executive Osama Saeed (reported salary 40,000 a year) just happens to be the SNP's parliamentary candidate for Glasgow Central. The "access lunches" auction took place in Nicola's constituency. And she accepts immigration cases, even although the Home Office has told her the UK Border Agency will engage only with MPs. Naturally, Nicola is loath to pass these cases on to Labour's Mohammed Sarwar.

She has made her mindset clear. "If people come to me for help, I am not prepared to turn them away," she writes in Awaz, "the Voice of the Scottish Asian".

But, in the case of Abdul Rauf, she has, as they say in Chewin' the Fat, taken it too far. It was a blunder. She judged the political advantage to be worth the risk of criticism. Turns out that it wasn't. Never mind the broader fallout, I doubt that hardworking Asians are happy with her defending a benefits cheat. Her best course of action at Holyrood today is a sincere act of contrition and a firm purpose of amendment. If she'd done that right away, she would have avoided calls for her resignation. She shouldn't try to tough it out. But if she does and gets away with it, then the next time the police collar me for double parking in Albert Drive, I'll be on to her asking for help.