‘I began hurting myself, cutting my arms and punching walls’
IT is absolutely wrong to say Ruth Davidson has no burning desire to run the country, nor has impending motherhood dulled her hopes of one day claiming the top job.
Indeed, the Scottish Conservative leader’s political ambitions, as she admits in a searingly honest interview, remain constant and lofty. It is just that the address she covets is not No 10 but Bute House.
To the undoubted chagrin of her growing band of supporters at Westminster, Miss Davidson chose the weekend to rule herself out unequivocally from any future contest to replace Theresa May. She told The Sunday Times Magazine that she will never run for the Tory leadership, revealing that she values her mental health too highly to seek the role of Prime Minister.
In an astonishingly frank account to mark the publication of her new book, she also reveals how her teenage years were plagued
‘I am coming back to beat Nicola Sturgeon’
by self-harm, suicidal thoughts and bouts of depression that resembled a ‘smothering black blanket over my head’.
She was equally forthright about the rumours of a possible leadership challenge by quashing notions that she is open to replacing Mrs May – but the hugely popular gay politician, kickboxer, and honorary Army colonel made it crystal clear that she is still gunning for Nicola Sturgeon’s post.
Expecting her first child has not dispelled her hopes of becoming Scotland’s first Tory First Minister at the 2021 Scottish election, and she declares confidently: ‘I’m coming back to do my job and beat Nicola Sturgeon.’
While her emphatic rejection of Westminster will dismay those on the liberal wing of the Conservatives who see her as the saviour of the party, the 39-year-old MSP for Edinburgh Central, who is eight months pregnant, insisted that she is putting family first.
And despite being tipped by David Cameron as a future successor, she dismissed claims that she might take a peerage or come south to become an MP as ‘b ******* ’.
News that she is staying put will put a spring in the step of Scottish Tory colleagues, whom she led to unprecedented success at the 2016 Scottish election, doubling the party’s number of MSPs and making it the official opposition at Holyrood for the first time.
With Miss Davidson at the helm at last year’s General Election, the party then doubled its share of the Scottish vote and 13 MPs were elected to Westminster.
Part of her appeal as a politician lies in her fearlessness, but Miss Davidson’s book, Yes She Can, still represents a massive risk by disclosing an unvarnished history of her battle with depression and alcohol abuse, triggered by the suicide of a boy from her home village when she was 17 and at university. She writes: ‘I went into a total tailspin. I started hurting myself: punching walls, cutting my stomach and arms with blades or broken glass, drinking far, far too much and becoming belligerent and angry, pushing people away.’
At 18 she suffered a major breakdown and was diagnosed with clinical depression, but her medication gave her ‘desperate, dark, terrible dreams’ and she now admits: ‘I started having suicidal thoughts.’
She slipped into a cycle of selfharming but told almost nobody what was happening: ‘You get very good at covering things up and you get very good at wearing long sleeves in summer and all that sort of thing.’
Of her scars, she added: ‘In some ways, it’s quite surprising that I’ve been in the public eye for years and nobody’s ever noticed. Or if they have, they’ve never commented. But they’re there for all to see.’
Miss Davidson has not suffered a significant depressive episode since 2006, but monitors her mental health closely and, given her history, she admits she may be at risk of postnatal depression. She and Irish-born Miss Wilson, who is six years younger and works for a charity, began the IVF process in July last year and were ‘very lucky’ when the first cycle proved successful.
But Miss Davidson would not go into any detail about the pregnancy, ‘just because our child is already going to have two mums and one is a politician and I think I’d rather they
‘I just know myself a lot better now’
asked me questions about where they came from, rather than Googled it’.
The couple have not asked if they’re having a boy or a girl: ‘Jen is a firm believer that there are not enough genuine surprises in this world, and she’s right. So we don’t know.’
And she scoffs at suggestions that the baby was a move to broaden her political appeal: ‘I’m not having a child for other people. This is something I have wanted for a very long time. Something Jen and I together have wanted. This is about us. This is about our family. This is not about my job.’
Her biggest worry about motherhood is that ‘I might be rubbish at it, I’ve never done it before’.
But she has no concerns about bonding with her baby: ‘No, I think I’m going to be a total mama bear. I’m a big softie, I’m not at all worried about that.
‘But I do need to be clear in my head how I’m going to do this job when I come back.’
She plans to take four or five months’ maternity leave and worries that when she returns to work, her absences may mean that ‘I’ll fall into the dad role rather than get to be the mum as well.’
Meanwhile there is always the fear that depression may return, although she feels far better equipped to cope now than she did as a naïve teenager.
‘I just know myself a lot better,’ she says. ‘If it starts to happen, I have confidence that I’ll be able to do lots of things I just wasn’t equipped to do back then, when it stopped me from being me.’
Yes She Can, by Ruth Davidson, Hodder, £20, is published on Thursday.