Kamala Harris - the steely senator who could become US vice president

“I commit that I will … pick a woman to be vice president.” With these words during the latest Democratic debate, Joe Biden - favourite to secure the party’s nomination - pledged to select a female running mate to battle Donald Trump for the US presidency.

Thanks to the coronavirus outbreak, there was no live crowd to greet the announcement, but people will have been watching at home, and no one more attentively than a 55-year-old, 5ft 2ins, half-Indian, half-Jamaican woman in Oakland, California.

That woman is Kamala Harris: a former prosecutor turned senator who, should Biden prove successful in his quest to unseat Trump, would be poised to become the 47th President of the United States in five years’ time.

Given that Biden, 77, would be 82 at the end of his first term in office, there are few who doubt that it would not be him but his vice president running for election in 2024.

Harris was herself a candidate for the 2020 nomination, impressing many with her flair and eloquence before being forced to drop out of the race at the end of last year after failing to raise the many millions required for a serious presidential run.

Now she is the bookies’ favourite to be selected by Biden to serve as his 'veep', despite having clashed with him memorably during her own appearance on the debate stage last summer.

Those differences have been put behind them and, with Harris close to Biden (politically, at least), she was among the many senior Democrats who rushed to endorse the former VP after his spectacular Super Tuesday victory against his left-wing rival, Bernie Sanders.

The prospect of a Biden-Harris ticket has led to great excitement among those whose hopes of a female president in 2020 were dashed last week when Senator Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the race.

Yet for all they are now united in their determination to oust Trump this November, that dust-up with Biden over the summer should not be forgotten too swiftly, for it serves as a reminder of how far Kamala Harris has come in life.

Controlled yet forceful, the California Senator berated Biden for his historic failure to support the policy of desegregating the education system by bussing black children to superior schools in white neighbourhoods, explosively revealing for the first time that she herself had been a beneficiary of the scheme.

The young Kamala’s home life took in a rich mix of influences; she attended Hindu temple with her mother, a cancer researcher, and a Baptist church with her father, an economist. Her parents met at university at a time when there were few black or Asian academics. They separated when she was nine but remained on good terms – Harris once said the only time she ever heard them fight was when they divided up their books.

Kamala and her sister moved to Quebec with their mother, who found work at a breast cancer research unit. Although she initially travelled back to California during the school holidays to spend time with her father, the pair gradually grew apart and are currently estranged. Her mother died in 2009.

The young Kamala - and her sister Maya, now a television pundit - excelled academically. She graduated from law school in 1989 and, having decided that the legal system needed more “socially-aware prosecutors,” became a junior district attorney specialising in child abuse trials at a time when, as she remarked, juries were more likely to believe adults than young victims.

By the time she was elected District Attorney of California, the first black woman to hold the post, she had gained a reputation as being tough on crime; the state’s high proportion of black prisoners made wooing black voters a challenge at the start of her campaign.

In 2014, Harris married fellow attorney Doug Emhoff; while the couple do not have children together, she is stepmother to his son and daughter from a previous marriage, Cole and Ella.

Elected the junior senator for California in 2017, she ran for the presidency from the centre, promising to unite the Democratic Party and forge a new path for women and politicians of colour.

With Biden’s campaign focused on “results not [the] revolution” promised by the left-wing Sanders, Senator Harris would bring more to the ticket than the symbolism of being the first black woman to serve as vice president. Like him, her selling point is competence, integrity and a fierce intelligence, qualities the pair would deploy to contrast their offer to American voters with the Trump years of bombast and bluster.

She is an unashamed defender of women's rights, and a champion of progressive policies from tackling climate change to health reform and gun control. She favours greater access to abortion, the liberalisation of immigration laws, gun control, universal healthcare and a Green New Deal. And, as a senator, she has gained a reputation for deploying her prosecutorial skills against members of the Trump administration, leading to the President’s nickname for her: “nasty”.

Democrats have another nickname: “the female Obama”. Like the former president, she is good-looking, upright, and clear-eyed.

It is true that Harris and Obama are close, but she rejects the comparison. Once asked what she would do as president to continue his legacy, she quipped: “I have my own legacy.”