The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
MSP claims SNP tried to grind him into ground
POLITICS: Ex-minister who breached code calls for others to reflect on actions
A former SNP minister has urged the rest of his colleagues to reflect on their own behaviour.
Mark Mcdonald resigned in November 2017 over allegations he sent an inappropriate text to a colleague.
He quit the party and was suspended from Parliament for a month in June 2018 over a second complaint, this time of harassing an SNP staff member.
The 39-year-old former Dundee University student has carried on as an independent but announced last week he will stand down when the parliamentary term ends next year.
Before he bows out, the former childcare minister intends to set the record straight, as he sees it.
He wants others to reflect on their own behaviour, in the same way that he has – not least his former party, and elements of the media.
“I made a mistake, I held my hand up to the mistake, I apologised for the mistake – and the SNP, instead of finding a way to perhaps talk about issues around redemption, apology and allowing individuals the chance to redeem for their mistakes – decided it would be better to essentially grind me into the ground,” he said.
“That’s what happened resigned from the party.”
He was found to have breached the MSP code of conduct by sending social media messages which created an “intimidating, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” for a woman, and which “involved sexual harassment”.
It was a dramatic demise for the Aberdeen Donside representative who, as childcare minister, had played a key role in launching the baby box.
Mr Mcdonald said he now tends to avoid eye-contact with most of his former friends and colleagues, only some of whom still speak to him.
He said at one point in 2018 he was consigned to the building’s basement because other Parliament workers did not want to be near him. Eventually, he was found an office on the third floor, but he always has to take the stairs.
He said: “I haven’t used a lift in the Parliament unaccompanied since I got back because I am afraid that somebody will complain about it, or it will cause some form of aggressive reaction.
“I avoid as much as possible situations
“
I have been caricatured as some sort of monster, when I am not.
MARK MCDONALD
after
Iwhere I am unaccompanied and might be in the presence of individuals. “There are some people who have been kind to me since I came back, so I’m not suggesting in any way that I don’t have conversations.”
Mr Mcdonald said he is not seeking sympathy, and many would offer none.
“I have never hidden away at any stage from the fact that I have made mistakes here, that I have upset people, and I have apologised for the upset that I’ve caused,” he said.
“But there is a part of me that is incredibly upset that I have been caricatured as some sort of monster, when I am not – and that people are willing to believe and perpetuate that caricature for the sake of either titillating headlines or for the sake of politics, basically.”
He has separated from his wife but said he had carried on at Holyrood for his children.
“I decided to stay on. I wanted to demonstrate, I guess to my kids as much as anything, that I could come back from what had happened, and to show them that people didn’t have to be defined only by the mistakes that they had made.”