RUTH Davidson has ruled out ever taking on the Conservative Party's top job for the sake of her mental health and relationship.
The 39-year-old Scottish Tory leader, who is pregnant with her first child, has told how she self-harmed and had suicidal thoughts when she was younger.
Ms Davidson's personal popularity and electoral success has seen her frequently tipped as a future leader of the UK party. Once again at the annual party conference at the end of this month it had been expected that the Edinburgh MSP would be feted by her supporters as a potential leader of the UK party and prime minister.
But she has now explicitly ruled out such a move and dismissed claims she could take a peerage or move south and become an MP as "bollocks".
Asked if she would ever run, Ms Davidson told The Sunday Times: "No. I value my relationship and my mental health too much for it. I will not be a candidate."
She added: "On a human level, the idea that I would have a child in Edinburgh and then immediately go down to London four days a week and leave it up here is offensive, actually offensive to me."
Speculation about her running for the UK party leadership has gone on for years. At first, she played down the prospect but has given more recent interviews where she appears to have left the door open.
Last December in an interview with the Spectator magazine, she pointed out how she had been the Scottish Conservative leader for six years and by the time of the 2021 Holyrood election would have been at the helm significantly longer than her predecessors “and then we can start other conversations”.
Asked directly if that meant going to Westminster, she replied: “I haven’t ruled it out. If devolution is going to work, then actually there has to be the ability to move between chambers and parliaments.”
However, her latest remarks appear to definitively rule out a move from Scotland.
In extracts from Ms Davidson's memoirs, printed by the Sunday newspaper, she tells how the suicide of a boy from her home village when she was 17 sent her into a "tailspin".
A year later she was diagnosed with clinical depression but the medication gave her "desperate, dark, terrible dreams".
"I started having suicidal thoughts," she wrote.
Ms Davidson said she was "still frightened" of going back to the "psychological place I once inhabited".
She said she turned to "structure, exercise, forward momentum, measurable outcomes" when she was feeling anxious.
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