Davidson had to ‘encourage’ partner to allow her to return to Tories’ frontline
● Temporary leader takes aim at exam results in England
Ruth Davidson had to rely on all her powers of persuasion to get the go-ahead from partner Jen Wilson to return to frontline politics, the former Scots Tory leader has revealed.
It emerged last week that Ms Davidson had been appointed leader of the Tory group of 31 MSPS at Holyrood by new Scots leader Douglas Ross. He can’t realistically fulfil this role because he is currently an MP at Westminster, but will seek a place at Holyrood in next year’s election.
It had been known that Ms Davidson would face Nicola Sturgeon at the weekly First Minister’s Questions joust between the party leaders, but her appointment as group leader came as a surprise. And Ms Davidson has revealed her partner took some convincing.
“I did not need to be encouraged to come back nearly half as much as my partner needed to be encouraged to let me come back,” Ms Davidson told Times Radio yesterday.
“So the party wants me for the next nine months, and then she wants me for the next ten years, I think, in terms of allowing me to do this. So that’s something that we have to work out.”
The couple had a son, Finn, together two years ago and Ms Davidson will be stepping down as an MSP next year to take up a place in the House of Lords.
And after the recent exams fiasco in Scotland, which saw the Scottish Government climb down over the “marking down” of more than 120,000 estimated grades for students, Ms Davidson warned English education secretary Gavin Williamson he must take control of a similar situation that is now engulfing the system south of the Border.
“This needs gripped,” she warned.
“This is not just one of these bubble issues. This is something that cuts through everything. MPS should be telling the chief whip, including conservative MPS, that this will absolutely be one of the things that, even people who don’t even pay attention to politics, will be all over because this is their child’s future.
“The education secretary needs to get out on the television, he needs to be telling people what’s going on, he needs to be telling Ofqual what is going to happen and he needs to grab this .”
The anger in England, as with the recent Scottish experience, stems from students from poorer areas being disproportionately penalised, because the system used to moderate grades takes into account historical performance of their school.
Ms Davidson said: “You get to the point where there were children who had absolutely worked the hardest, bright kids, but in schools from poorer areas who literally could not have succeeded.
“There was no way in which, even had they answered every single question correct, they could have succeeded, in every piece of module that they’d worked in every mock exam that they’d sat, because the computer would have said no.
“And that is against absolutely every sense of natural fairness that we have. There are kids out there who have worked hard, who have done the right thing. And now, basically, fate has dropped on them from a great height.”
She added: “It’s impossible to handle exam results for exams that were never sat. It was never possible to sit the exams, because of Covid. But surely there must have been a better way than this.”
“So the party wants me for the next nine months, and then she wants me for the next ten years, I think, in terms of allowing me to do this”
RUTH DAVIDSON
Former Scottish Tories leader