'I'm collateral damage' Tulip Siddiq on facing a Bangladeshi corruption trial

There's no extradition treaty, I looked that up myself actually," says Tulip Siddiq, the MP for Hampstead and Highgate and a Treasury minister until her resignation in January.

- Daniel Boffey

Just over a week ago, Siddiq, 42, a Keir Starmer loyalist, learned via a journalist who had contacted her lawyer that she had been formally indicted in Bangladesh for corruption.

She has been charged with using her influence as the niece of Sheikh Hasina, the ousted prime minister of the south Asian country, to secure a plot of land for her mother, brother and sister in Purbachal in Dhaka, the capital. "Completely absurd," Siddiq says in her first interview about the saga. A trial date has been set for 11 August for her and more than 20 others. Could she make an appearance in person or by videolink?

"I'm taking advice from Hugo Keith KC, who's advising me on what my next steps are," she says. "I'm yet to see an official summons... I mean, I'm supposedly days away from a showcase trial in a foreign country, and I still don't know what the charges are against me. I feel a bit like I'm trapped in this Kafkaesque nightmare where I've been put on trial and I genuinely haven't found out what the allegations are."

The Bangladeshi authorities have said they will try Siddiq in absentia if necessary. For a few months last year, after Labour's victory in the July general election, Siddiq, a veteran of the party who was a councillor before becoming an MP, was in her element.

Appointed economic secretary to the Treasury and City minister by Starmer - a friend whose constituency neighbours her own - she got stuck into a review of the financial services. "I loved it, and I was good at it," she says.

Five thousand miles away, after 15 years in power, her aunt's regime was falling apart in the face of student-led protests.