'I'm certainly more tearful that the men I know. Is it a weakness? No'

FRIDAY afternoon and Wendy Alexander is sitting in the Labour party offices in Glasgow, a multitude of expressions flitting across her mobile face. Underneath her jacket, her light top is scattered with dark hair from the haircut she has sandwiched in between taking her two-year-old twins to 'bounce and ride' music class and political meetings. As she talks, her words paint deft little cameos.

There is, she observes wryly, only one way to get in and out
of your house when you are pushing two small children in a buggy
and are weighed down by a load of supermarket shopping – even if
there IS a journalist trying to doorstep you as you struggle inside.

A woman, a leader and a mother. Alexander has broken a few taboos. She has also admitted breaking the rules with regard to political donations, though this week she was cleared by the Electoral Commission of any intentional wrongdoing when her leadership campaign team accepted a donation of £950 from the Jersey-based businessman Paul Green. The Procurator Fiscal has still to rule on whether she has any case to answer for not declaring small donations to her leadership campaign. The case has been an interesting divider of public opinion. We live in a blame culture. That old line, "To err is human," belongs to an age other than our own. It was inevitable that Alexander's opponents would shout: "Off with her head". But was this about corruption? Or political pedantry?

When the shout of "fight!" goes up in any playground, there are two human instincts in the onlookers: curiosity to see how far it will go, and relief that they are not the ones with the bloody nose. It's not so different in the political arena. But after what she describes as the bruising political experience of the last few months, Alexander is calling for a less cynical style of politics in the Scottish Parliament. The pursuit of her has not been about standards in public life, she believes, but about political point scoring. "Corroding people's faith about politics and politicians… we are all the losers in that," she insists.

Do people really think she couldn't have thrown mud at Alex Salmond over the Aviemore 'sleaze' accusations? Over Donald Trump? Cynics might point out that since she was already embroiled in the donations rows, there was no moral high ground available for her to stand on. "It's not that I don't want to stand up and take Alex Salmond on, but do I fundamentally think he is a corrupt politician? No I don't. If we feed that beast where does it stop? To our dying day he and I will have a different view about the future of Scotland. That doesn't make me think he's corrupt."

But if politics is to have the moral heart she suggests, why then did she not resign over her mistake – not because political opponents called for it, but just because she thought it the right thing to do? There is a long pause. "Because I don't think it right to criminalise people for trying to do the right thing. I think it's honourable to raise money for causes you believe in but of course, when we went about it, a mistake was made by the team."

The problem for Alexander is that if she is not guilty of corruption, then she at least stands charged of incompetence. Interestingly, those who actually know the political set-up at Holyrood well are among her fiercest critics. "It's a terrible indictment of her judgment," says one ex-colleague who worked closely with her when Alexander was a minister. "Any politician in the Scottish Parliament with any sense knows that if you are in any doubt, make sure you declare it." It was after all, the Labour Party who brought the current legislation in. "If you set yourselves up to be the standard bearers of transparency and openness in Government then you'd damn well better make sure you do it."

Alexander is glad her children are too young to read the newspapers. Hardest for those close to her has been the implication that she has somehow been lining her own pockets. When she talks about it, frustration finally bubbles through her political cool. "People who know about these things tell me that the public expect us to have our noses in the trough – but if you have a sex scandal, then they'll care, Wendy. And actually, the thing is that, goddammit, I am poorer now than I have been in 20 years. I earned more in the public sector than I ever earned in politics." (She is a former high-flying business consultant.)

"I have a husband who has gone part-time to bring up my children. I pay for a nanny for 40 hours a week at local authority levels. I have help to get my house cleaned and now I have to have help at the weekend so I can deal with the Saturday papers. And you have to look the part as well, goddammit! I never had my hair highlighted in my life before. Whatever this is, it's not a gravy train."

Alexander's case is interesting. Beneath the heat of the furore there are some cold facts about our attitude to adversarial politics, to public standards, and perhaps to female politicians too. (A newspaper recently ran an article about Alexander's weight. Is it conceivable the same piece would run on Alex Salmond?). When I ask Alexander if the fact that she is a woman is an issue in politics any more she hesitates, then says yes. If she'd said no, I'd have known she was a liar.

When Thatcher came to power in the late Seventies, the glass ceiling seemed to tinkle into broken shards. But she made it by beating men at their own rules. Spitting Image depicted her as the most masculine person in the cabinet. Thatcher was Queen Bee. She was the only woman, not the first woman, and that suited her: she did not change the rules of political engagement one bit. Thirty years later, we've had only two female political leaders in Britain since: unmarried Annabel Goldie who leads the Scottish Conservatives, and Alexander. Even now, Alexander at first emphasises the politician's prerequisite – toughness during adversity. "I think all women in politics have a steeliness that isn't always visible and I have tried through this to demonstrate a strength of personal character that people want to see in leaders without being diminished by the mud slinging."

But when you scratch the steel you find something more interesting underneath. Her marriage in 2003 to economics professor Brian Ashcroft, a widower 15 years her senior, and the subsequent birth of her twins, has changed her she says, both as a person and a politician. But in the current political arena, it's hard for her to discuss that. "Partly because things have been so bruising, you don't want to wear your heart on your sleeve," she says, "and there's a risk for women doing that. In that sense Gordon (Brown] doesn't turn up saying it's made a huge difference having Sarah and the kids. Tony Blair didn't say: 'God, Leo kept me going during the war,' though I'm sure he did. That was my reservation about doing this interview. It's just not the done thing." Wouldn't it be a bit worrying if she tried to claim nothing affected her? "Well exactly. But the guys don't admit that. You want to have enough humanity to say, of course it's been embarrassing for me, difficult for the family. And you wouldn't be human if on one level you didn't question yourself. But on another level you say… but I didn't do anything wrong here."

Alexander hasn't seen enough of her children this week. She's been away in London and Edinburgh and yesterday, the day the Electoral Commission cleared her of intentional wrongdoing, she had to record Newsnight when it was their bedtime. So this morning's music class was a little window of normality. She's seen the other mothers there on an almost weekly basis for the past year. "Gosh, Wendy," they said to her, "this is awful. Why do you do it?" It's a question every bit as pertinent as any cleverly constructed challenge by Jeremy Paxman. Why does she?

Back in 2001, Alexander backed out of a leadership election with Jack McConnell and in 2002 resigned from his cabinet. She said she wanted a personal life and, with her job, there was no prospect of meeting anyone. Back then, she had a reputation for being abrasive and demanding. A former colleague says: "She was very demanding, but also unreasonable in her demands."

Another colleague says: "She was still a youngish woman who wanted a family but she didn't have anybody, so her frustrations were put into the job, into wanting things done. She drove people too hard. Her great ability was to make you enthusiastic, to make you feel you could fight with her and win. But there came a point where that tipped over into berating everyone. When civil servants are working to 9pm and are still being told what they're doing is shite, loyalty begins to wear a bit thin. She was pushing herself too hard and she had a huge portfolio so she worked even harder and longer days, getting less sleep and being less happy."

It's the culture of politics. And as more men take on family roles this political culture increasingly affects them. One male MSP has a reputation for being "lazy" because he insists on time at home with his young family. Alexander herself quit her ministerial duties and the following year met Ashcroft. She smiles when I say it seems scarily efficient, almost Thatcherite, to say you want a family and children and rustle them up a year later. Twins too. One of her ex-colleagues says she tends to tick boxes of achievements.

In 1999, she said the responsibilities of leadership would "crush" someone like her. And if the time wasn't right in 2002, surely the timing is even more difficult now that she has the children she gave up high office for in the first place? Why now? "Because this was always going to be the big challenge for Labour. We hadn't lost for a long time in Scotland. Turning things around in a company is much easier when things have gone wrong. Five years ago, I was acutely aware there was a desire for stability and I am not really a politician who is about stability. I am a politician who is about change."

At 44, Alexander is also an older mother. "As an older mother you have lots of friends with kids much older than yours. I have friends with kids up to 18 or 20 who say the point at which your children need you most could be anywhere between 0 and 18. When do I really want to be there for my children? When nobody else can be me, and arguably that's still a few years ahead." They might not need her right now. But is she personally missing out? "Yes, undoubtedly. There are compromises, but the same compromises every working woman makes."

But it's not simply the donations row that has threatened Alexander's leadership. So far she has barely dented Salmond and the Nationalists. It's not all her fault. Labour party organisation has collapsed, disillusioned activists have disappeared, finance is problematical… the infrastructure simply isn't there. But in front of the cameras, Alexander sometimes has the manner of an infant teacher teaching sums. She also has a tendency to refer to herself as, 'Wendy'. "The electoral commission says Wendy did this or Wendy did that…" The careful enunciation, the slightly bossy tone – it's as if the nation is her class of slightly dim six-year-olds. While a similar quality translates in Alex Salmond into a slightly pompous gravitas, even the physical timbre of Alexander's voice makes her seem more hectoring that authoritative.

In person, she is far more appealing, much less strident. As one ex-colleague says: "If you see her on a bad night on Newsnight, you think Jesus Christ, who the hell made her leader? But if you see her on the street or talking to journalists one to one she can be funny and personable and very enthusiastic and that rubs off on people." Certainly today, sitting in the office, she is cheerful and very committed to ideas of social justice and welfare. She seems good company and she laughs a lot. While Salmond uses laughter to mock (usually when his opponent is scoring a point), Alexander uses laughter like a lot of women – to buy time and to cover embarrassment.

Her personality is not yet connecting with voters. Last week, she was pilloried for Labour's disastrous strategy in dealing with the SNP's budget. Salmond threatened to resign if the vote went against him. Having won an amendment, Labour then abstained. The line was seen as weak, ill-advised and inconsistent. Alexander claims that it's in exactly matters like this that having children has changed her. She can no longer be bothered to the same extent with political nitpicking, but prefers to look at the bigger picture.

"You had Alex and his vacuous brinkmanship saying he would resign when he actually knew he had the votes in the bag. Then there was this huge debate about whether we should have abstained or voted against. And you know, having two two-year-olds makes you think, the verdict on this budget in years to come will be nothing to do with the parliamentary tactics adopted by either side and everything to do with the outcomes. It will be … this was the budget that missed the opportunity to create more modern apprenticeships, missed the opportunity to give vulnerable two-year-olds nursery places, missed the opportunity to give pensioners water rebates."

If it's that bad, then why not vote against it? Alexander says it was immaterial. "I think the strength of being a mother who is sometimes belting for the Glasgow train in order to get home and put the kids to bed is that actually the bar-room gossip about parliamentary tactics stays in perspective. When you are trying to get home to make sure there's someone to look after the kids, you know that having flexibility in childcare matters, or extended GP hours, or whatever." Having children grounds her. "Children are such happy little creatures that it does root you to what's important and decent and what public life should be about. It also gives you a sense of what is ephemeral and what will endure."

Alexander has had to tough it out these past few months. Politics on the whole has been run by male rules and male rules dictate that you don't show emotion. So I'm curious to know what she makes of Hillary Clinton's supposed "tears". Clinton was criticised for "letting women down" by crying. Does Alexander agree? "No, I don't think she did. I just think women cry more easily." She points to a male aide who is sitting in on the interview. "Are we more likely to cry than him? Absolutely. I am certainly more tearful than the men I know. That's just part of who I am." Is it a weakness? "No." She smiles. "I regard this as an insurance policy for the future when I inadvertently blub. There are lots of women who cry when they don't mean to, however hard they bite their bottom lip."

However much her performance has fallen short so far, Alexander is regarded as the Scottish party's main thinker. In the same way that Keith Joseph was Thatcher's ideas man, Alexander was ideas woman for Donald Dewar. "She has the ideas, but not maybe the political acumen to know when they are going too far," says an ex-colleague. "She'd have 10 ideas before lunch," says another. "One would be good and nine would be rubbish. The problem as a minister was that she was getting all 10 off the ground so there was always a trail of destruction in Wendy's wake."

Interesting then to know if she would go for the solid experience of Clinton or the charisma of Obama. Alexander groans. "That's the hardest possible question." Her aide says he would just like to point out that Gordon Brown's response is that it is a matter for the American people. We both shout him down and Alexander laughingly says she's her own person. Then she thinks in silence. "I think for the rest of the world to see a black man elected who has spent some of his time in Indonesia, and gives the lie to some of the worst claims of al-Qaeda just by his person, his visual image…. that makes Barack a good thing for the world. He's helped progressive America find a voice again and goodness knows that's good for the world. But in terms of domestic policies, I greatly admire Hillary's grit and determination, her willingness to face the issues. And her endurance." So which was that – Obama or Clinton? Alexander is her own person. She's also a politician.

Time, says Alexander, for a new style of politics. Issue based. "Politics at Holyrood," she says, "is seen through the prism of point-scoring and attack, whereas I think most women in politics are interested in results and delivery." But to deliver, she has to challenge Salmond. Many see him as the more natural politician, the more natural leader. "I think he's a natural politician," she concedes, "but fundamentally he wants something Scotland doesn't. The reason he gets up in the morning is to take Scotland out of the United Kingdom. That's the reason his party exists. It's the reason he got involved in politics."

How personally intimidating does she find it facing him in the chamber? She hesitates momentarily. "I don't think it's intimidating. I don't admire a technique that is about evading the question and always about put-downs and always about attack. My own view is that the public find that a turn-off." Politics, she says, "is not the sort of world where the Buddhist mantra of 'is it true, is it necessary and is it kind' is very often applied to a political speech. But I do sometimes give thought before I speak to whether those tests have been applied."

The trouble is, polls suggest public satisfaction with Salmond is actually very high. Does that mean the public might say they are tired of old-style politics but what they actually admire is the traditional political bruiser? "The donations row has been a fiasco," she admits. "I have no doubt it's been a distraction but that's partly because we have ruthless political enemies who have slung mud." Not just her political enemies. Someone in her own party leaked documents to the press. Does she know who? She looks uncomfortable. "No, I… leaks are just part of the political world and one lives with that. I think the important thing is that you demonstrate with your own personal style the highest possible standards."

The donations saga is a case in point. "It is not appropriate," she maintains, "for the First Minister to say the Electoral Commission's report was not proven or for (SNP MSP] Alex Neil to say it's a whitewash. They haven't been prepared to let due process take its course and when due process has taken its course they have not been prepared to accept the outcome. I think the public will ultimately judge whether they think that's right."

They will also judge her. Asked how long she gives herself to turn things round, she says things will be clear by the next election. But I think she's well aware there are question marks. As the first young, female political leader in Britain, she treads an unworn path. There are plenty of voters – perhaps women in particular – who would like to see her do well for that reason. But is she the right person for the job? Alexander insists she is but however upbeat she appears, she must be very well aware that the L plates are still on her leadership car. She has yet to prove that she is capable of passing her test.