LEAVING Parliament will, Philippa Whitford hopes, leave her more time to get back to the work that got her into politics in the first place – campaigning for independence.
“The reason I went to Westminster, the reason I got into party politics came from being active in 2014,” she tells me over Zoom.
“I never would have imagined being an MP.
"It took two months of people nipping my ear after the referendum for me to consider standing to go to Westminster. I had a career that I loved, that I’d had to fight for in its own right.
“It’s the Yes movement and Scotland’s right to self-determination that’s the main driver for me and actually I will have more time to be around Scotland, to be spending time on what I think we should be doing more of which is reaching out to people who’re not yet convinced about the arguments for Scotland to be independent and actually speaking to them, listening to them, taking part in that sort of campaigning because I think that’s vital.”
The 64-year-old breast surgeon became the SNP’s eighth MP to announce they would be stepping down when she announced earlier this week she would not be contesting the next election.
Whitford said she had made her mind up last year. She had just spent a gruelling stint as the party’s health spokesperson during the worst of the pandemic and the common strains of the Commons seem to have been weighing on her.
“It’s hard for anybody who is from further away than around London because you are away from home for four days a week, there’s a lot of travel, then you’re trying to make up time in your constituency, so it’s a tiring job for anybody.”
Come the next election, the Central Ayrshire representative will have spent nine years in the House of Commons, a place she paints as having been on a downward spiral since she first sat on the green benches.
Whitford divides her time there into the three parliaments of which she has been a member – the last days of the David Cameron years, the Brexit wars of Theresa May and finally, the era of a bullying, aggressive Tory party reinvigorated by Boris Johnson.
She reserves particular venom for the Covid rule-breaking former health secretary Matt Hancock, who conducted an affair while at work during lockdown and who Whitford says dismissed her at every turn – despite her medical expertise.
“I was health spokesperson through the pandemic, trying to get Matt Hancock to listen to anything, he was always consistently rude and dismissive of the points I was raising during Covid.
“And what the hell would I know, I’d only been a doctor for 39 years?”
When she and the rest of the 56 – as the 2015 contingent of SNP MPs are known – arrived in Westminster she says she was “pleasantly surprised” by the amount of cross-party working and an unexpectedly collegiate atmosphere compared with what was to come.
Between 2017 and 2019, May’s minority government fought seemingly endless battles over Brexit and much parliamentary time was taken up preparing for the very real possibility of a no-deal exit from the EU.
In 2017, the party fought an election many within the SNP will admit they were not prepared for, losing 21 seats.
By 2020, a deal had been struck, however flawed and the SNP – brought back up to 48 seats – could get back to business agitating for Scotland’s right to decide its future, says Whitford. But then the pandemic struck.
“So when people are always going, ‘Oh well, what did Nicola Sturgeon do with the last eight years?’
"Our members didn’t turn out in 2017 and we lost 40% of our MPs, you can’t then say that’s a mandate for independence when the MPs had dropped so much."
She goes on: “When people say she wasted eight years, you haven’t bothered looking at what happened in those eight years. There was never a point in those last eight years where we could have successfully held a referendum and won it. People have to be realistic.”
The Westminster party itself has changed during Whitford’s time. She has now served under two first ministers and three Westminster leaders.
Stephen Flynn she rates as an “effective communicator” but Whitford says the biggest challenge facing the SNP come the next election is that voters simply will stay at home.
Asked whether they could be blamed – whether wearied by 13 years of Tory rule, Keir Starmer offering little hope of change, or by the intangibility of achieving independence – Whitford says: “If they are pro-independence, then they need to be bothered.
“If Labour do not get a massive majority and obviously the predictions of John Curtice and so on is that actually it will be closer to a hung parliament, then actually sending a strong message from Scotland to Labour is absolutely vital.
“More than anything it’s important that they turn out and that they vote SNP, to show that it isn’t just about getting the Tories out, it’s also about having Scotland’s right to self-determination recognised. I would say that for people who support independence, it’s absolutely vital to come out.
“Even if they were former Labour supporters, as indeed many of my colleagues on the benches come from that background, many SNP supporters and indeed members come from that background, but equally, if that’s how they vote next year then that’s interpreted as a pro-Union vote and they need to understand that.
“I would say if anything, our chance is that if it’s a bit closer than maybe Labour would like and they’re going to have to work with other parties in Parliament, then you want the SNP group to be strong but also you want the message from Scotland to be strong; that Scotland has a right to self-determination.
"And we would expect the Labour Party, who always are marking and celebrating the independence days of other countries and the independence movements in other countries, to actually recognise Scotland’s right to self-determination.
“But that will only come if there’s a strong message from Scotland.”
As for her plans after parliament, Whitford suggested she hoped to return to important work she did in Palestine before becoming an MP and spending more time with her husband, Hans.
To add to Liz Truss’s list of crimes, Whitford tells me she had planned to take this up again last year, but was stopped from taking virtually any time away from Westminster because of the chaos caused by Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister.
