Kate Forbes profile

At 29, Kate Forbes – the Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch MSP – became the youngest politician to deliver a Scottish Budget since devolution, and the first woman to do so in Holyrood or Westminster.

She did it despite having had less than 24 hours notice to prepare, in the wake of the shock departure of her friend and boss, finance secretary Derek Mackay.

Ms Forbes hailed the package of tax and spending measures as having “wellbeing and fairness at its heart”.

Cambridge graduate Ms Forbes worked as a trainee accountant at Barclays for two years before entering politics full time in 2016, when she was elected in the Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch seat aged just 26 – increasing the SNP majority from 4,995 to 9,043.

A comprehensive schoolgirl from Dingwall born in 1990, she went on to study at Cambridge and has already made history by becoming the first government minister who was born in the same decade that the parliament was created.

The fluent Gaelic speaker has been public finance and digital economy minister since 2018, but could now take Mackay’s job as finance secretary.

Ms Forbes also spent five years between ages ten and 15 in schools in India because her father was working there, helping to provide healthcare to locals.

In an interview with Holyrood Magazine last year, she described how her experience of living overseas had helped shape her politics.

“There’s nothing like being taken out of your home country to make you prouder of your home country,” she said.

“We were very proud of our Scottish heritage and my brother would dress up in a kilt and all the rest of it, so when we came back to Scotland, we were probably more Scottish, we acted more Scottish than normal Scottish kids.”