Kate Forbes: I'm standing down because I want more children

Times

2 days ago

It was graphic evidence of the threats today's politicians face. As Kate Forbes, Scotland's deputy first minister, stepped down from the platform after giving a talk at the Edinburgh Fringe last week, security officials closed in and hurried her to a car before whisking her away from the crowds. Protesters against her religious views — she is opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage — had demanded the event be cancelled. It carried on regardless, but police were taking no risks.
'I never like it when things like that happen,' she sighed. 'I always think it reflects badly on me, but it's not my decision.'
It is not, however, the reason Forbes has decided to quit political life at the pinnacle of her career. Last Monday, her daughter Naomi turned three, and Forbes felt she faced a choice: her duty to her family or her job. She chose family.
'I'd love some more children,' she said, 'and I haven't talked openly about that, but I decided that I couldn't have more children whilst doing this job. I would be 36 at the next election [next year]. [That parliament] runs to 41. I don't need to give you a biology lesson about what that means, and I didn't want to inflict what I inflicted on Naomi on another child.'
She believes that being a mother is every bit as important as holding political office.
'I do feel like motherhood is a great thing, and there's been a lot of emphasis on proving that women can have it all,' she said. 'But what if you actually do want to be a mum, and you want to do your best work at mothering? There's a tendency in our society nowadays to say that's a failure, that you're giving up high office to do this thing that society views as small and insignificant. And I don't feel that way. I feel like it's a great thing, and I'm not doing a terribly good job of it. So I wanted to do a better job of it.'
Representing her Highlands constituency, one of the largest in Britain, has meant travelling four hours from her home in Dingwall to Edinburgh and four hours back every week. The parliament has a crèche, but it is only available three hours a day (when Forbes had her baby it was only four hours a week — she got that changed, but not enough.) She relies on childminders and family friends, but the strain has finally told.
'I think it's always been impossible,' she said. 'I entered an extremely tough leadership contest [ losing to Humza Yousaf in March 2023]. Fresh from maternity leave, I then juggled a year on the back benches, which you may have thought was quieter, and that's true, but I didn't have any of the assistance that comes with ministerial office.
'So we drove up and down, with a baby in the back, and I had to do everything myself in that year. There were lots of situations I thought were just impossible, in terms of being on Zoom calls with a one-year-old and then going back into the deputy first minister role. Being so far from home, I could fill a library of books with the number of close calls and close shaves where I was seconds away from cancelling something.'
Her decision to quit has stunned her supporters and the country. Forbes is regarded as a star in the SNP, one of the few in the party's ranks with a business brain and a firm grasp of economic policy.
She studied history at Selwyn College, Cambridge, before going on to achieve a master's degree in diaspora and migration history from Edinburgh University. She joined the SNP in 2011, and worked as a researcher in the Scottish parliament before training to be an accountant and working for Barclays bank. Selected as a candidate for Skye, Lochaber & Badenoch, she fought the 2016 election and nearly doubled the majority of her predecessor.
Nicola Sturgeon appointed her minister for public finance and, when the finance secretary quit in a sex scandal, she delivered the budget on a few hours' notice.
At 35, she was seen by many as a future first minister, and her close working relationship with her boss, John Swinney, was regarded as critical to the party's prospects at next year's Holyrood elections.
The conflict between loyalty to her constituents and her family responsibilities is one she feels keenly. Last March she again put her name forward for selection as a candidate 'because I felt I would be letting too many people down by not standing'. Then, over the summer, the balance shifted.
'I suddenly realised I just didn't want to do another five years of bearing the weight of everybody's expectations,' she said. 'There's no joy in juggling all of that relentlessly. And I think you've got to have joy in your job to keep doing it.'
Her epiphany came in India where she and her husband, Alasdair, who has three daughters from a previous marriage, went earlier this summer.
Forbes was educated between India and Scotland, returning to Dingwall Academy when she was 15. Her parents were missionaries for the Free Church of Scotland on the subcontinent, and she feels at home there. Visiting an orphanage run by the Deep Griha Society near Pune in western India, she suddenly realised what these children lacked, and what she had to give.
'I don't care what anybody says — we do not understand about absolute poverty,' she says. 'We do not understand what it feels like to be completely left and abandoned. These were slum kids from Mumbai, five or six-year-olds with ill-fitting clothes and shoes twice the size of their feet. This charity takes them into the village and gives them an education — just one couple looking after 40 or 50 kids.
'I felt what an unfair privilege my daughter has — and yet she is not getting the benefit of it. And that was that. I just loved being with my family for a week, absolutely loved it, and I was so struck by the fact you have this great privilege and you're squandering it, if that's not too strong a word.'
EUAN CHERRY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Forbes, a member of the same church as her parents, denies that hostility to her strongly held religious views and her brand of social conservatism, which fit uneasily with the left-leaning mainstream of her party, had anything to do with her decision. At the time she stood for the leadership, supporters of Sturgeon were briefing against her, and even Swinney expressed the view that some of her convictions were incompatible with the party's policies.
The relationship with Swinney, she says, is now a strong and supportive one. As for Sturgeon, she has yet to order a copy of her memoirs.
'I did not stand down when I was in the eye of the storm, because I don't back off when things are tough, when the chips are down,' she said. 'The party is still on track to win the next election. I've not seen a single poll that suggests I was going to lose my seat. I am leaving in my own way, on my own terms, for the reasons that I have set out.'
She does, however, worry about the toxic atmosphere encountered by those who take on public office.
'Over the last ten years there have been a number of points where I have been fearful for my physical safety,' she admits. 'I don't talk about them. Sometimes they get reported, but I don't make a big deal about them for a whole host of reasons, not least, the more you talk about it, the more it draws awareness to other people. But it's the hatred that I just find exhausting.'
She added: 'I learnt very quickly at the beginning of my political career that if you put too much store on people's views, it would be a rollercoaster — one moment being loved and the next minute being hated. And if you believe their love, you have to believe their hate.'
Forbes hopes she has done enough to encourage others to come forward to take up a political life. 'I am extremely proud of the fact that I've left a legacy to support or to enable more people with my views to even think of standing — because fear characterises our politics to a great extent,' she said.
'People are fearful that if they're not on the bandwagon, they're under the wheels, and so they don't go near politics. But I get huge encouragement from people who say, 'You have given me confidence to open my mouth in a public place and express my views, my faith, my perspectives, and I would never have done that before.''