MOMENT OF RUTH ‘Deep-seated struggle with her sexuality’
She’s the poster girl for the Union whose revival of Scots Tory fortunes confounded critics. Now this first major biography reveals the heartache behind Ruth Davidson’s meteoric rise – and the childhood accident that almost killed her... Andrew Liddle
RUTH Davidson almost failed to survive childhood. It was a winter’s day, outside her parents’ home in Fife, when the lorry hit her. She was five years old. Her femoral artery was crushed, her pelvis shattered, her right leg broken.
Her terrified mother, Liz, rushed to her side. Her father, Douglas, who worked in the whisky industry and had previously played football for Partick Thistle, was at work.
‘I remember feeling someone put a blanket over me on the tarmac,’ Ruth said, recollecting the accident. ‘Then I remember opening my eyes in the ambulance and my mum being there and looking dreadful. She looked 100 years old. Then I blacked out again.’
The doctors were not sure Ruth would survive. Her terrified parents were told her chances were 50/50. She would stay in hospital for months, trapped in a full body cast, with pins in her leg.
Eventually, she would have to undergo reconstructive surgery and learn to walk all over again.
Such were the extent of her injuries that she became a subject for medical lessons at the local teaching hospital.
‘They’d wheel me out in front of 200 medical students almost naked and broken. I was terrified,’ Ruth said.
‘I remember getting my cast taken off and screaming the place down because they took it off with a circular saw and I thought they were going to cut through my leg.’
Back at her comprehensive school in Buckhaven, a working-class town in the east of Fife, Ruth suffered jibes and taunts from fellow pupils.
‘It’s tough when you’re the only child in your primary school using a Zimmer frame. I was covered in scars and I got teased,’ she said.
‘But it just made me want to do better than everybody else. If people tell me I can’t do something, then it makes me want to try twice as hard.’
The effects of the incident were not just physical, however. The accident and the experiences that followed it would prove a catalyst for Ruth’s early political development and an example of her unique brand of Toryism.
‘I was a young child but I will always remember the kindness of strangers,’ she recalled in 2015.
‘I still had a full body cast when I was discharged from hospital – but a man read about my accident in the local paper and sent us an old World War One spinal carriage so my mum could take me outside for fresh air.’
The ‘kindness of strangers’ was a notable advent in her recovery. While she received jibes at school, the community rallied round her.
The experience was something that stayed with her throughout her life and imbued her with a sense of duty to help others as she herself had been helped.
Such a life-enhancing experience of public service clearly had a profound effect on Ruth and would lead her not just into politics but also into the Army and journalism.
It instilled in her a sense of duty, a desire to help people – and not just for personal gain and advancement.
Ruth was not born with a silver spoon. She describes her background as blue-collar – and it is not far from it. Her parents, Douglas – who left school at 16 – and Liz – who finished at 15 – both grew up on council estates in Glasgow.
By the time Ruth was born, in November 1978, the family were living in Selkirk, where her father managed a woollen mill for Laidlaw & Fairgrieve in nearby Galashiels.
Ruth was three years old when her father, now a career-driven industrialist, took up a job in the whisky industry and the family upped sticks to Lundin Links in Fife.
It was from Douglas, Ruth would later suggest, that she inherited her moral compass, while mother Liz ‘dealt with the day-to-day stuff in the house’.
Ruth’s father had, in short, exactly the kind of ‘striver versus skiver’ personality that embodied Tory political views. He was upwardly mobile, but through his own hard work.
It was an attitude that clearly influenced Ruth and is reflected in her ruthless determination to succeed.
For her education, Ruth would attend the local primary and then the comprehensive secondary, Buckhaven High School, the motto of which is, appropriately for Ruth, Perseverando – perseverance.
‘Buckhaven High is quite a long way from being a private school,’ she said in 2012.
‘It takes its pupil base from what I believe is euphemistically called a socially depressed area, and it had all the attendant problems that go with that of drugs and violence and all the rest of it, but my teachers were amazing.’
The future Tory leader even admitted to smoking marijuana while attending the school.
In 2015, she told a general election debate audience at Glasgow University that she
‘Made me want to do better than everybody else’
had tried the drug ‘once or twice’. Like other party leaders, she suggested it made her feel ‘really sick’.
She was an active participant in school life. She played the clarinet and was a member of the ski club.
From an early age, too, she showed her love of taking centre stage, setting up a theatre group with friends. One of the productions she put on was The Sisterhood, an adaptation of a Molière farce, where she played a matriarch-type figure, a bit like Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.
She would later boast she was the first girl to be selected for the under-14 football team, while she also took up a parttime job as a kitchen porter during her teens. It did not take long, however, before politics became a part of Ruth’s life. ‘I’ve always been a Tory,’ she said in 2014.
‘I was outed when I was 16 when a newspaper ran a feature on “Saffy Syndrome” focusing on girls who were like the daughter in Absolutely Fabulous.
‘My school put me forward for it as I was so sensible, and so I was outed as a supporter of the Conservatives.
‘The other kids didn’t care, but some of the teachers got a bit sniffy.’
As well as developing an interest in politics, Ruth was, and remains, deeply committed to God. A member of the Church of Scotland, she believes Christianity can provide a ‘moral compass’ for youngsters.
If Ruth’s determination and belief in the individual came from her father, then her faith came from her mother.
Douglas was religious but not hugely committed, attending church only for major festivals like Christmas and Easter.
Liz, on the other hand, was a firm believer and committed Church of Scotland activist. She was the superintendent in her local congregation and imbued Ruth with a love of God.
Ruth’s faith is therefore not ‘casual’ or a mere question of identity.
On the contrary, she has been regularly and actively involved in church life. She would, for many years, follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a Sunday school teacher. Yet despite her strong grounding, Ruth has often struggled with her religion. Her key issue was trying to grapple with – or perhaps marry – her devout religious faith and sexuality.
Conventional marriage designs would have been instilled in Ruth from an early age. As a member of the congregation, she would have been surrounded by people who believed – in a religious sense – that marriage could only take place between a man and a woman.
It was not until her mid-twenties that she came out as gay, but her comments on the subject reflect the deep-seated struggle she endured with her sexuality.
She told the BBC that she had ‘known for a few years’ that she was gay before she made it public, suggesting that in her teenage years she struggled to come to terms with her sexuality.
A friend said that, not unusu- ally, she engaged in heterosexual relationships before coming out as gay.
All of this is not at all unique or surprising, but there is little doubt that Ruth’s conservative background – not to mention her own views – would have made the process more difficult.
After finishing at Buckhaven High School, Ruth went to Edinburgh University, studying English as well as American political history. It was not her first choice.
Ever the tomboy, she would rather have joined the Army, but the injuries she sustained as a child ruled her out of officer training at Sandhurst.
Ruth suggested she ‘found it really tough’ ingratiating herself in the society of Edinburgh University.
She experienced mixed feelings about studying in the city – particularly about some of her fellow students.
‘They are going to end up married, in the Home Counties, with a lovely wife called Tilly – he’s got a Mercedes, she’s got a Land Rover and they have a pony called Trumper for their daughters. It was intimidating, that level of self-confidence,’ she said.
Having graduated, and with a military career seemingly now ruled out because of her childhood injuries, Ruth instead returned to her native Fife to begin a career as a journalist, first at the Glenrothes Gazette and later at the BBC.
It was during her time at the broadcaster that she was sent to cover the aftermath of the war in Kosovo.
The assignment rekindled her love of all things military. On her return, she signed up to the Territorial Army as a signaller, inspired by the troops she had met in the Balkans.
‘I was sent to the Balkans at the end of the Kosovo war as a reporter and I have never been more proud of being British in my life than watching British troops with a Union Jack on their arms, believing in something, pulling their weight,’ she told a Wembley audience in 2016.
‘That’s what caused me to join up and serve,’ she added.
The Territorial Army was, in Ruth’s own words, the making
of her. Her role taught her the value of leadership and teamwork.
Her motivation to sign up was clearly down to the sense of duty and community that had been fostered in her from such a young age.
One of her commanding officers, Colonel Steve Bargeton, remembered Ruth as a plucky and determined soldier. He said she was marked out at the start as a potential officer – a potential leader.
While she was not the fittest of the candidates, Bargeton says, she showed great mental resilience.
‘It was often very gruelling. You’d spend hours carrying heavy kit, planning attacks, marching – it takes it out of you.
‘Some other people were perhaps physically fitter and Ruth had to work harder. But she had the mental strength to deal with it. Anyone can train more, but Ruth had something that can’t be taught.’
Amid the gruelling training, Ruth gained a reputation for looking out for soldiers who were struggling, Bargeton says.
‘She was a banker,’ he added, meaning that Ruth was dependable.
‘There’s this way of commanding men – ultimately, you have to get people to buy into what you want to do – and Ruth had that.’
But her time as a signaller was to be brutally cut short. During her training to become an officer at Sandhurst, her frailty from her old injuries came back to haunt her.
‘I never saw active duty overseas, but I did the officer training in Scotland and then the real exams at Sandhurst – which is where I badly injured myself,’ she said.
‘For the physical courage test we had to jump through a glass window and I volunteered to go first, as I do, but the sandpit behind the window had frozen solid. I landed awkwardly on my neck and cracked vertebrae. I spent almost two weeks in hospital and had to wear a back brace.’
Despite being keen to continue in the forces, Ruth was told she was now an insurance risk. Once again, she suffered not just a physical scar but a mental one too.
Her sense of disappointment at not being able to do something she was so passionate about would have been palpable.
If joining the Army was the making of Ruth, then having to leave was the making of her political life.
Casting about with her military career in tatters, Ruth returned to the one constant in her varied life: politics.
Adapted from Ruth Davidson and the Resurgence of the Scottish Tories by Andrew Liddle, published by Biteback on May 24 at £18.99. © Andrew Liddle 2018.
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