Kate Forbes can pinpoint her moment of truth when she knew she had to quit politics. It had come in 2025 during a visit to India, a country that’s been very close to her family’s heart for several generations. Her parents had both worked as missionaries there for the Free Church of Scotland, providing free healthcare in poor communities and Ms Forbes had attended local Indian schools.
“Since November 2024, I’d been feeling really unsatisfied with the conflict between being a good mum and member of my family and being decent at my job,” she says. “I often felt I was getting through by the skin of my teeth. I recall setting off to meet an important international guest essentially having to abandon my child in a flat with my stepdaughter’s university flat-mates. I had just felt it was my responsibility to prove that you could do it and to find ways around it, because I’ve never been someone who thinks you should walk away when it gets hard.
“And then last summer in India, we visited a tiny little village in the middle of nowhere. It operates an orphanage which takes slum children: five-year-old and six-year-old boys who’ve been found wandering around the slums and are extremely vulnerable.
“I’ve always wanted to expose my daughter to the true realities of life, and so we visited and stayed there. And I was watching my daughter mingle with these little boys and I began thinking that society has massively demeaned mothers and has taught them what I was practising, which is that motherhood is of course important, but don’t let it screw up your career.
“And in that moment, this model flipped for me. What a privilege it is to be a mother, but what a great privilege it is as a child to have a parent, because there are 40 or 50 boys there who don’t have one, which means they have no-one to advocate for them.
“For me, it elevated motherhood and reminded me how I value not just my daughter, but my three older stepdaughters. How I invest in them may matter more for this country than the decisions I make in government. And while a lot of the things I do in a week are very important, many aren’t really and history won’t remember them.
“But my daughter will remember her history, and that represented a profound shift for me. I returned from India and tested this – as I always do – with my parents and my immediate family. And for the first time ever, they were like ‘yeah, you’re not quitting by leaving; it’s actually just a greater calling, or a greater pursuit’.
“It gave me great joy to make that the reason I was leaving, honouring all mothers everywhere who are like superwomen. You don’t have to be the Deputy First Minister to have value.”
When smart, high-achieving women are forced to choose in these situations it can seem that politics is reduced. Holyrood was set up to be more family-friendly than Westminster, and yet 25 years later women like Kate Forbes are still being forced to make that choice. “I bristle at the hyperbole of Holyrood being family-friendly,” she says, “when, in the course of the last few elections, multiple senior women have quit, citing the impossibility of juggling family and children. I can think of Gail Ross. Aileen Campbell. Jenny Marra. Ruth Davidson. It’s not a small group. And what particularly got to me over the last few years – almost like the straw that broke the camel’s back – was the ridiculous situation around the Holyrood creche.
“This was a wonderful facility, fitting with Holyrood’s stated desire to be the most family-friendly parliament in the world. Yet, when I returned after maternity leave, I was told I could only access it for four hours per week. I was told some nonsense that this was based on guidance that had been designed by the Scottish Government and implemented by the Scottish Parliament. They’d merely initiated a sub-contracting arrangement, where it was run by an outside organisation, which required that all children must make their own way outside.
“I was enrolling my child of five months; she was unable to go anywhere, let alone outside. It meant I could only access the creche for four hours a week, and only through some lobbying did that increase.
Read more
Collette Stevenson and Transport Scotland: a major overreaction | The Herald
SNP has turned Scotland into a rotten borough not fit for independence | The Herald
East Dunbartonshire Council criticised over Lennoxtown works | The Herald
“It was essentially just a facility for Edinburgh mothers who fancied a coffee in the Parliament to drop the kids off. It was one of those examples where everybody can see that something’s wrong, but we can’t find the owner to fix it … which may be an insight into everything that’s wrong with Scotland right now.”
She knows too that her critics will accuse her of advocating for a bygone era of reducing a mother’s role to the home. But she points out that this applies also to an increasing number of men who have assumed that role. She also believes valuing motherhood can only be progressive.
“There are decades of examples of how motherhood has been relegated. I see it in the support for pregnancy, the support for new mothers, the high number of maternal deaths in this country; I see it in the lack of investment in health-related issues with motherhood. And that’s before you start talking about work.
“Work generally becomes the focus of conversations about motherhood. How do you support mothers who are working and caring for children? But right across society, there is an undervaluing of mothers, and this affects outcomes for children. I was struck by research I read that basically spoke to the developmental value of children who spend a lot of time in the family home with a family member.
“It doesn’t need to be a mother or a grandmother, just an alternative to an institutional setting where a child is one of many being cared for by others people. Childcare is really important, but there is clear evidence that children develop in a different way when they’ve had that sense of love. It’s why we talk about the importance of skin-to-skin contact.
“A child who knows they are loved and valued by a family member in the home is so important. Through faith, I strongly believe in the importance of valuing my parents: looking after them when they age and valuing my children who are entrusted to me for a season to bring up and care for.”
Her departure has left a massive hole in John Swinney’s administration that hasn’t yet been filled. She was acknowledged across the political spectrum as a genuine intellect with an inner core of deeply-held political and personal values. When she spoke, people listened.
Yet, this didn’t shield her from a campaign of overt religious discrimination and vindictiveness conducted by many in the SNP when she decided to contest the leadership in 2023. Economically illiterate Cabinet colleagues whom she’d helped in her role as finance secretary turned on her because she wouldn’t betray her Free Church articles of faith.
It seemed not to matter to her foes that her faithfulness to the Free Church had never compromised her job as finance secretary. They wanted to punish her for being an authentic Christian. Being a rather less charitable Christian, I try to cajole her into giving some of her betrayers a right good kicking, now that she’s beyond their orbit. She won’t do it though and chooses the better way of forgiveness and understanding, but with a little jag here and there of passive aggressiveness.
She’s proud of having served in cabinet at a very young age and with no support base of natural allies. She reached high office so early not because she’d bent the knee to the prevailing cultural ideology, but because other people knew she was good. Yet, her greatest sense of pride derives from something else entirely.
“There’s always pressure to compromise elements of your faith in order to get ahead and be more popular, and I didn’t. Now, for some Christians I didn’t do enough, but I was never there as a church leader or as a preacher. I was there for my constituents. When I look back, that for me is the area of eternal significance. Everything else will come and go. I was very proud of helping tech start-ups by setting up scalers and I was really proud of finding the money to start a respite centre in Inverness. And I’m really chuffed that me and my team were able to help constituents.
“But I often meet people who all tell me the same thing, almost verbatim. ‘I disagree with you, but I value genuineness and honesty in our politics’. To leave with the reputation of character matters more to me than competence or status.”
Tomorrow in part two of the Kate Forbes interview: Why the SNP have become bogged down in ‘cultural’ issues
Share