Bone-crushingly sleep deprived!
Beaming with maternal pride. But as she returns to work, Ruth Davidson admits motherhood has left her...
GRINNING with delight at her baby son, motherhood certainly seems to suit Ruth Davidson.
The leader of the Scottish Conservatives – hailed by many as the great hope of the party and touted as a future Prime Minister – is cherishing the last days of her maternity leave with little Finn before she returns this week to fulltime politics.
For the past six months, Ruth has been living worlds away from Holyrood and Westminster in what she dubs ‘Finnland’, fully absorbed in meeting the demands not of petulant politicians but of her blueeyed, round-cheeked little boy.
Finn has arguably been putting her through her paces with far more rigour than her demanding political career ever did.
In short, she is exhausted. Or as she describes it, ‘bone-crushingly sleep deprived’ – something of a novelty for a woman who has transformed the fortunes of the party north of the border, and even saved Theresa May’s Government in the snap 2017 Election by securing a crucial 13 Tory seats, the highest number since 1983.
‘I naively thought that, because in the final few weeks of election campaigning you don’t sleep and are working 17-hour days easily, it would be like that and I would just have to get through it,’ she admits in an Edinburgh cafe, her son gurgling on her knee.
‘But it’s a completely different kind of sleep deprivation. It’s worse than people tell you.’
Davidson, 40, the first leader of a British political party to give birth in office – and with a same- sex partner – will now become one of the country’s 4.9 million working mothers, handing over the childcare reins to her Irish-born fiancee, Jen Wilson. But she insists: ‘I’m not doing anything that thousands of woman don’t do every year and it’s the same stresses and strains. I’m still coming home to dirty nappies and baby vomit.
‘I could’ve done with another few weeks, but there was never any suggestion that I would not be returning to do something I really enjoy. I will still give the job 100 per cent.’ Touchingly, she adds: ‘It’s just No 2 on my priority list now.’
The path to parenthood was not easy, and Ruth describes going to extreme lengths to hide her IVF.
She had to inject fertility drugs in the toilets at Geneva airport on her way to the World Economic Forum in Davos, she reveals, and boarded a flight to Helmand two hours after having an embryo implanted.
It worked first time but she was forced to have a caesarean section in October, two weeks before her due date, amid concerns about Finn’s size. ‘ The consultant was fairly insistent that it would be a better idea if he came out soon. Two days later, he was delivered early at over 10lb.’
Finn – ‘ a real chubster’, Ruth jokes – was exclusively breast-fed but now takes bottles of formula which she deftly prepares singlehanded. ‘Having always known that I wanted kids, I had no idea that I’d ever be any good at being a mother,’ she confides.
‘I manage to kill a houseplant once a month, so the fact he’s healthy and thriving is a big win.’
How motherhood will change Ruth’s political ambitions remains to be seen. Although she denies she has her sights set on No 10, there is an assault planned on First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s office in the Scottish elections in 2021.