Good luck to anyone who takes Kezia’s job
IHOPE Kezia Dugdale has something fabulous planned for this weekend. A couple of days pampering at a spa perhaps, or a slap-up meal and a night out with the other half.
Or maybe she’ll just lie down in a darkened room for a bit and stare at the ceiling. After the two years she’s had, no one would blame her.
Because who, frankly, would be a political leader in today’s Scotland?
I know there are worse jobs to do for a living – pet food taster, portable toilet cleaner, Alex Salmond’s manicurist – but leading a political party in Scotland in 2017 has to be up there.
Endless abuse on social media, a country still fractured from the referendum and Brexit, barely a whiff of a private life and a revolving door of party leaders in London who may, or may not like the cut of your jib.
It’s hardly a recipe for job fulfilment.
Whether or not you agree with their politics, both Ruth Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon deserve medals for soldiering on as long as they have, never mind looking like they might still actually vaguely enjoy it.
OF the worst jobs in Scottish politics, being the leader of Scottish Labour might just be the worst of all, the crème de la crème of political purgatory.
It’s a poisoned chalice that comes complete with a fractured national party, a diminished presence in Holyrood, a lingering fuzziness on policy and a country that still, when it comes to voting for MSPs at least, seems dizzily swayed by the SNP.
No wonder the candidates aren’t exactly queuing up to replace her.
We will likely never know exactly how much Dugdale’s rocky relationship with Jeremy Corbyn played into her departure, but given the tone of Dugdale’s resignation letter, in which she cited the death of her close friend Gordon Aikman earlier this year from motor neurone disease as one of the things that had spurred her into this decision, I suspect that it was the personal stuff that got to her in the end.
On Thursday, Dugdale claimed that she was unwillingly outed as gay by a Left-wing magazine.
If true (the journalist responsible strongly denies it), it sounds like just the sort of personal frustration to grind you down when all you’re trying to do is get on with the job.
There’s a lot of it about. Davidson has spoken eloquently about the homophobic abuse she has received on social media, while Sturgeon has condemned the endless misogyny she receives online.
Where once political leaders were protected, almost distant entities, now they have become vessels for the population’s hatred and prejudices, two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs that even the most mildmannered of individuals think it is acceptable to sling the very worst insults at.
Of course it has always taken a certain type of person to be a politician, and an even more distinctive brand of individual to want to be a leader. That, though, is no excuse.
Through her resignation, and her deeply personal reasons for it, Dugdale has reminded us that underneath the bluff and bluster of every politician there is a three-dimensional human being, as sensitive and fallible as the rest of us.
Whoever takes over from Dugdale will have an even bigger mountain to climb than she did.
The general consensus is that Dugdale did a reasonable job in difficult circumstances – leaving the party in better shape than she found it, handsomely boosting the number of Labour MPs and trying (not always successfully) to draw a line in the sand between the Westminster party run by Jeremy ‘what’s beyond the Watford Gap’ Corbyn and her own.
Add in the non-stop hurly-burly of modern political life and it’s not the most enticing job advert in the world.
I hope they’ve got their tin hats – and darkened rooms – ready.