PUT YOURSELF in Steven Purcell's shoes for a moment. You are 34 years old. Since leaving school at 16, having been deemed merely "average" by teachers, you have had just two jobs, one with the Abbey National, the other as a local councillor. At 22, you became Glasgow's youngest councillor. Since then, you have shot up the municipal beanstalk, rising to spearhead the development and regeneration of the erstwhile second city of empire. Two years ago, in what has been described as a bloodless coup, you replaced as city council leader Charles Gordon.

You are now responsible for an annual budget in excess of £2 billion and nearly 40,000 employees. Nice things are written about you in the Evening Times, big business hails you as the best thing to have happened to Glasgow since the QE2 and your future seems assured. So you decide that the time is right to grant an interview to The Sun.

Thus, a little over a week ago, you awoke to the following headline: "Could this wee gay Bhoy be your next king of Holyrood?" How do you feel? Sick to the pit of your stomach? Determined to wreak revenge on the scummy redtop? Inclined to pack up and move to Patagonia where more enlightened attitudes prevail?

For rarely can there have been a more unflattering portrait of someone in Purcell's position. According to The Sun, at just 5ft 7in he looks lost in his massive Victorian office. He is, apparently, an unassuming, bespectacled wee man dressed from head-to-toe in beige and brown, with a beer-belly, double-chin and a possible Abba habit. He is also a Celtic supporter, and a Catholic. Perhaps most pertinently, he recently revealed that he has parted from his wife, and admitted he is gay. The implication of the headline could not be clearer. Steven Purcell as a future first minister? Aye, right! Pat Lally has a better chance.

So let's set the record straight. By Scottish standards, Purcell is not wee, nor is he physically akin to Rab C. However, he is bespectacled and unassuming, with a voice that might inspire confidence if it were a doctor's. His office, in the marbled Medici palace that is Glasgow's City Chambers, would dwarf anyone, a symbol of an era when size was a statement of intent and ambition. On the walls are pictures from Glasgow's incomparable civic collection. He is wearing dark trousers, checked shirt and sober tie. Blue rather than beige is the predominant colour. In short, he is the very model of a modern municipal man, earnest, occasionally mischievous, deeply committed to championing Glasgow's cause.

Sportingly, he says he has come to appreciate that as council leader he is subject to scrutiny. "I've reflected on this a lot in the past few months and I think that's probably right and proper. If I'm asking people to trust me, then you have to accept that people expect to know a lot more about you than they would if you were the managing director of a large public company. It seems to be the public expectation."

But does that mean the public has the right to know the intimate details of a politician's private life, past or present? Does Purcell agree with David Cameron that his past life should be of no concern to those he hopes will elect him? He does not. It is, he says, naive to believe that the public will abandon curiosity. In Glasgow, he is often stopped in the street and challenged or congratulated on what the council is doing. As for his decision to come out, he decided it was time to clear the air, for his own peace of mind as much as anything else.

"I wanted to be fully open about the fact that my marriage had broken up last year and why it had. The past 12 months was a very difficult time in my life and for my family. When you go through a difficult time it becomes obvious to people that things are not well and, having come through that and dealt with it, I wanted to be entirely honest about it.

"What is important is that people make a decision that they're comfortable with, whether as a couple or as a family. In the last few weeks in particular the number of people who've said to me, what you do in your private life should be such, that your sexuality should be no bar in the job you do ... I've found that overwhelming, and I think it says something about how great Glasgow and Scotland are."

Put a coin in Purcell's slot and he will play like a jukebox stocked solely with hymns to Glasgow. It is, he says, enjoying "an economic boom unprecedented since the industrial revolution". Apparently, there are more jobs in the city than at any other time in its history. New homes, new schools, new leisure facilities are sprouting up everywhere, as are bars and restaurants. You can smell the feelgood factor in the air. The city has a spring in its step and a sense that after decades in the doldrums it is going places.

The morning paper seems to bear this out. Ambitious plans to transform a brownfield wasteland in the east end in time for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, which Glasgow hopes to host, have been announced. Two days after the council said it would clamp down on alfresco drinking and dining, it has done a U-turn. Now all bars and cafés intent on placing tables and chairs outside their premises will no longer require planning permission. Moreover, Glasgow is "no mean city no more"; in something called the Politeness Survey it has been named the UK's most polite city. In Glasgow, if you're six months pregnant or just pure dead doddery, you can be sure of a seat on the bus.

ALL of which is enormously cheering. But, as Purcell makes plain, there is still much to be done. Within the space of a few blocks, one can go from Knightsbridge to Soweto. Poverty and wealth live cheek by jowl but those who experience the former are much more likely to live for far fewer years than those who enjoy the latter. Also, it is a fantasy that Glasgow is mean no more. Violence and belligerent behaviour in the city centre are commonplace and every weekend come reports of another death by stabbing or shooting in a no-go estate. A recent Canadian television documentary described Glasgow as "one of the most dangerous cities in the developed world" and compared it to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Look, says Purcell, with regard to such social problems, Glasgow is no different to anywhere else, except in terms of scale. And, he acknowledges, there have been several false dawns in the past, namely the Garden Festival and the 1990 City Of Culture. Regarding this last, Purcell agrees that perhaps not enough was done to capitalise on it. Certainly, many Glaswegians felt that it was an imported, ersatz festival that had little to do with the city's indigenous culture. Like Dubliners, Glaswegians are simultaneously passionate about their city and cynical about attempts to remodel it. Nevertheless, the City Of Culture inspired Purcell, then 17, to feel much more confident about Glasgow and to want to fashion a new future for it: one heavily dependent on tourism and the service industries. Culture is the carrot, which will bring visitors flocking to the Dear Green Place.

It is this which has inspired the controversial decision to surrender control of the city's arts and leisure facilities - including galleries, libraries, museums, and sports facilities - to a new, unelected charitable trust, whose venerable members include George Reid, presiding officer of the Scottish parliament, Sir Angus Grossart who, as well as running a merchant bank, is chair of the Museum of Scotland, Lord Macfarlane of Bearsden, and former Tate Gallery director Lord Stevenson, all of whom are taking on the responsibility for free.

Cheerleaders for the trust say it will allow Glasgow to compete for lottery and other funds which a local authority cannot legally do. It's also believed that Glasgow will save millions by avoidance of non-domestic rates from which charities are exempt. To all intents and purposes, the trust will be a business, albeit one run on behalf of the electorate. Opponents, however, smell a rat and fire a lot of what-ifs. What if every local authority followed Glasgow's lead? What if the chancellor did not like the idea of councils' imaginative evasion of tax and decided to close the loophole? What if lottery funds mysteriously disappeared into a black hole, otherwise known as the London Olympics, leaving Glasgow to forage for crumbs from a cake which had suddenly shrunk? Then there is the conspicuous lack of public debate on the issue, in contrast to the almighty stushie that surrounded the transfer to a trust of Glasgow's housing. Don't Glaswegians care who is running the Kelvingrove Gallery, Burrell Collection or Mitchell Library? Or have they had the wool pulled over their eyes?

Purcell rejects all of the above. The new trust, he says, will be "100%" accountable to a committee of councillors. Everything it does will be scrutinised meticulously. Management will be "very robust". That such eminent people, several of whom do not live in Glasgow, have agreed to serve on the trust is a mark of the esteem and affection in which the city is held. In a sense, says Purcell, Glasgow is catching up with other local authorities which have already handed over their cultural and leisure services to trusts. He ignores the fact that Edinburgh has not, and does not mention that there is much disquiet in the public library service over future provision. What if, say, the trust decided to hand the running of Glasgow's libraries to Waterstone's or WH Smith?

STEVE Purcell's sincerity and desire to do what he thinks is best for Glasgow appears undeniable. He, like his east coast counterpart Ewan Aitken, may make diplomatic noises about an Edinburgh-Glasgow partnership but his raison d'être is to make Glasgow flourish. It has been his aim from the outset when, as a teenager at St Thomas Aquinas in Yoker, he heard Donald Dewar talk about social justice. "He came along to speak to the modern studies class," he recalls, "and I was immediately won over as a huge fan. He had a piercing passion about how he wanted to change the face of areas in his constituency".

At 15, Purcell joined the Labour Party. Soon after he was delivering leaflets in Dewar's Garscadden constituency. Once, he missed the last period of the day to accompany Dewar to Dundee in order to campaign on behalf of John McAllion. Years later Dewar returned the favour and helped Purcell win his Blairdardie ward. It was due to the late first, first minister, he says, that he voted in favour of devolution. "I was persuaded by Donald it was the right thing to do." He has since warmed to the idea but how far is he prepared to go, given that Dewar himself said devolution was a process? Would he, for instance, now be prepared to consider independence?

"Well, it was devolution, it's now evolution. That's the way I look at it. It should be allowed to evolve, in a way that the country is comfortable for it to go. One of the biggest assets of having the referendum in 1997, was that there was a clear view across the whole country that this was the right thing for the further governance of Scotland. It's the parliament's job to continue that evolution and if it's able to do that on a much more cross-party basis then I think that would sit much more comfortably with the general public.

"There may very well be an argument to be had about independence. Yes, let's have that debate, but it's too soon to come to any conclusions about how our parliament will evolve. But I am convinced it will continue to evolve, that devolution in itself is not the status quo. Why? Very simply, we live in an ever-changing world. Everybody talks about interdependence now, which is true, although it was always true. But we do live in a world where the pace of change is unprecedented and we can't pretend that if you're in Scotland everything will always remain the same."

This morning, mindful that local and Holyrood elections are weeks away - and of Dewar's advice that one should always secure one's own backyard - he has been out leafleting in his ward. Whatever happens in May, change is coming, to Scotland and Glasgow, where it is unlikely that under the new voting system, Labour will enjoy an overall majority. Thus the tectonic plates of power shift, though it would take an earthquake off the Richter scale, one suspects, to unseat Purcell. The Sun notwithstanding, his prospects look bright.