I’m not a kickboxing stop saying David
HERE are three things that you probably didn’t know about Ruth Davidson. She almost died, twice. She lives on Diet Coke. And she hasn’t kickboxed in years. But we’ll get to all that. First, the leader of the Scottish Tory party wants to talk about the referendum. Of course she does.
It’s all anyone in Scottish politics wants to talk about. She even has a setting on her phone that tells her exactly how long it will be until the polls open, and whips it out of her pocket to show me. ‘77 days, 16 hours, 23 minutes and five seconds,’ she announces.
Not long, then, to persuade people to vote No. Or as the little Better Together sticker on her lapel politely requests, no thanks.
We’re sitting in a quiet corner of Glasgow’s Grand Central Hotel, the place where her parents, Douglas and Liz, got engaged. She’s just off a plane from London and has a mild hangover (‘I was out late last night and up early this morning, never a good combination,’ the 35-year-old says with a grimace) and demolishes two Diet Cokes during our conversation.
‘I’ve never got the taste for tea and coffee,’ she says by way of explanation. ‘Which is possibly a treasonable offence in the Conservative Party.’
She’s bouncy and upbeat, her voice rising as she gets impassioned, her conversation peppered with phrases l i ke ‘ y’know?’ and ‘ kinda’, even punching her palm on occasion to emphasise a point.
She can be spiky, too – although I suspect she would prefer the word exacting – correcting me when I refer to David Cameron as ‘the boss’ (‘he’s not my boss,’ she says indignantly), always thinking carefully about the point she wants to get across, correcting her words as she goes.
From Monday, Davidson is embarking on a tour of village halls across Scotland, talking to people, getting the message across, persuading them to share it with others.
In the Scottish Conservatives’ Edinburgh office they’ve nicknamed it ‘ out and proud’, and Davidson, openly gay from the start of her political career, allows a knowing smile at the title.
She compares some people’s reluctance to say they’re a No voter with the ‘shy Tory syndrome’ that afflicted 14 million Tory voters in 1992 and thinks it’s time for unionists to come out of the closet.
‘For a lot of people, it’s not that they don’t know how to vote, it’s that they don’t know how to say that they’ll vote,’ she says.
‘It’s about giving people the tools they need to go out and recruit others, to advocate it, tell them some of the best arguments, make sure there’s information available so that we can give people confidence in these final few days to go out and sell this idea.’
Davidson has been leader of the Scottish Conservatives for two-anda-half years, yet people still seem slightly foxed about who she really is. They know she’s a lesbian, and that she’s a kickboxer, and that when she’s on form, she makes a formidable sparring partner to Alex Salmond at First Minister’s Questions.
They know, too, that she had a life before politics – as a BBC journalist – and that unlike generations of Tories before her, she is not a grey man in a grey suit.
YET there are two significant events in Davidson’s life which, perhaps more than any others, helped shape her into the person Cameron has repeatedly described as the Scottish Tories’ ‘ideal leader’, despite (or perhaps because of) her unorthodox credentials.
The first happened when she was five years old, and was knocked down by a truck outside her parents’ home in Lundin Links, Fife. Her leg was broken, her pelvis fractured, her femoral artery crushed.
At first, it was touch and go. She spent months in hospital in traction, had several rounds of surgery and pins put into her leg. When she left hospital it was in a full body cast, and when she got home, she had to learn to walk again.
What impact did all that have on
Ruth Davidson on coming out, nearly dying TWICE and how difficult it is to date when you are the Scots Tory leader. (Oh, and the referendum vote too...)
her? Davidson leans forward, elbows on the knees of her smart, royal blue trouser suit, and thinks.
‘Five is pretty young. You’re not fully formed at that age so you don’t know what you would have been like if you hadn’t had it. But I mean, in terms of, if I can’t do something – I just keep doing it until I can.
‘I certainly had to do that when I relearned how to walk. I’m quite, well, a determined individual is I think the nice way of putting it.
‘Cussed, dogged, anything else you want to say is probably true, too. If somebody tells me I’m not allowed or I can’t, that’s the one thing that’ll make me just show them.’
It also taught her how to construct a façade for the outside world.
‘I guess you have to learn to brush off criticism when you’re the only kid in primary school who’s got a Zimmer frame and you’re changing for games and you’re the only kid who’s got scars.
‘When there’s lots of people going “ew, that’s disgusting”, because that’s what kids do, and to be fair, it probably was.
‘But it doesn’t make you feel good about yourself. It does make you put on a face. You do have to put on a bit of a front.’
Teenage Ruth then, who at 14 years old wanted to be a physiotherapist and had a charcoal drawing of Martin Luther King on her wall, who was
outdoorsy and played tennis and squash, already knew how to keep certain elements of the world at bay and how to put on a happy face.
She was also developing an interest in current affairs – sparked partly, she says, by being allowed to stay up to see the news the night the Berlin Wall came down.
By the time she left school bound for the University of Edinburgh, she thought she wanted to be an English teacher. By the time she graduated at 21, she’d decided to go into journalism.
‘I was a bit foreign and war correspondent mad,’ she says. ‘I read a lot of Martin Bell, Martha Gellhorn. Kate Adie was my own personal hero.’ Knowing she was gay, coming to terms with that and all it meant, followed.
‘I came to it quite late. I was in my 20s,’ she says, of her decision to come out as a lesbian while she was working at the BBC.
‘There was a lot of thought and consideration. But you do question yourself. And you do question a lot of the people around you. And you question your faith.
‘I’ve always gone to church and had faith and been an active and practising Christian, so, yeah, there was a lot of questioning.
‘I’m quite an open person. I wear my heart on my sleeve. I’m terrible at keeping secrets, I’m a dreadful liar. But there was a sense of, once you know, it’s not a genie you can put back in the bottle.’ Were her friends and family accepting? She chooses her words carefully. ‘They are accepting.’
There were 20 years between that first, life- changing event, on the road outside her Fife home, and the second.
A work trip to Kosovo in her early 20s sparked a love affair with the military and, ever the outdoorsy type, she joined the Territorial Army.
She was on a training weekend when she went head first through an open window on to hardened snow. She broke her back.
‘I ended up back in hospital lying flat. I was staring at the ceiling thinking, “I’ve done this before. This isn’t right”.’ It was a cruel blow. She spent eight days in hospital and wore a back brace for three months. Her TA career – she had ambitions of taking a couple of years out of journalism to go full time, and wanted to deploy, likely to Iraq or Afghanistan – was over.
‘When they told me I was surplus to requirements and an insurance risk and was too breakable to stay in after they broke me, I wanted to do something else.
‘I miss the TA but, then, if I hadn’t broken my back, if I was still doing it, I wouldn’t be doing this.
‘It’s funny because I would have wanted to go and serve in the Army and now, in a wholly different way, I almost feel like this campaign that we’re doing now is my opportunity to fight for my country.’
She took voluntary redundancy from the BBC and threw herself into the Tory party full time.
She failed to win the 2009 Glasgow North East by- election and bided her time, working behind the scenes at the Scottish parliament until she was elected as an MSP herself.
The leadership, when it came, was a surprise. She was only 32 and, despite having spent nine months running her predecessor Annabel Goldie’s office, she was still a relative newbie to politics. She’d only been an MSP for six months and there were mutterings of inexperience, even naivety.
The doggedness and the façade, not to mention the fighting spirit, came into play.
‘It is in turns hugely frustrating, and exciting, and tiring and energising and fun and just really hard work and not fun,’ she says of the job.
‘You kind of set your own pace and lots of things run to the tempo you set. I like to think that when I took over, I wasn’t the most experienced in the world, I wasn’t the most knowledgeable in the world, it was a really steep learning curve for me, but I like to think that even my worst critics would say I’d done nothing other than give it a full whack.’
The media moniker she was given when she entered politics – ‘Ruth Davidson, the kickboxing lesbian’ – has stuck.
This despite the fact that the kickboxing, she says now, was never more than a passing whimsy, some- thing she hasn’t actually practised for years. ‘In 2009 I happened to mention to a journalist that I did a bit of kickboxing.
‘I wasn’t particularly good at it, it was just a fitness type thing, and it has hung around my neck ever since.’
Well, possibly. Having your fellow politicians, and indeed the electorate, believe you’re a kickboxer can only help bolster a certain type of image: tough; no nonsense; not to be messed with. It is perhaps telling that it is only now, two-and-ahalf years into the job, that she feels comfortable enough to let the veil slip.
SHE broke up with her l ong- t erm partner 18 months ago. They’d been a couple for more than five years, l i ved t ogether, shared a life. Davidson was devastated.
‘The relationship ended in part because of the way our lives had changed and we’d grown apart.
‘I did have a little bit of a crisis that I would never be able to date again, as leader of the Tory party in Scotland. I thought, “It will never happen for me”.’
But, and she brightens considerably at this, she’s met someone.
‘I don’t know where I’ve managed to find the time, but I have managed to start dating again,’ she says.
‘Completely out of the blue, somebody who I’d known a number of years ago who had moved abroad walked back into Scotland.’
It is still tentative but she’s clearly happy, even on the difficult days.
‘This morning I had a bit of a moment,’ she says.
‘I was at a cashpoint and I dropped my tablet, it fell out of its case, my money was coming out, I had bags, and you know how you just have those moments of “Aaargh!”’
‘I heard this bloke in a car pull up and shout: “Haw, Ruth! You keep on going, hen”.
‘And I thought, you know, today’s not such a bad day after all. I will. Seventy-seven days to go. Come on. We can do this.’
And off she goes, smiling broadly, the phone inside her pocket silently ticking down the hours.