For some MPs, the general election announcement came as a shock; for others, a starting pistol. But for Mhairi Black it was the end of “a sort of purgatory”, as she prepared to step down as MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, a position she has held for almost a decade. She will turn 30 in September. “I’m about to be exactly where I was 10 years ago, asking: ‘What am I going to do with my life?’”
The Scottish National party’s deputy leader at Westminster announced last summer that she intended to leave the Commons, a place she has variously described as “defunct”, “depressing”, “sexist”, “poisonous” and “one of the most unhealthy workplaces that you could ever be in”.
But as the finish line approaches, she adds an essential clarification: “I genuinely don’t regret any of it. That’s not to say I’ve enjoyed every single second, but I would still rather have done it than not.”
When she was sworn in, aged 20, she was the youngest MP to be appointed since the Reform Act of 1832. In many ways, Black was the distillation of all that the Westminster establishment feared most about the SNP’s landslide in the 2015 general election, when it won all but three of Scotland’s 59 constituencies: she was young, fierce and a lesbian with an unmodulated accent who had unseated a Labour veteran – the former secretary of state for Scotland, Douglas Alexander. The photograph of their awkward election night handshake became a visual shorthand for Labour’s bloody demise north of the border.
Her extraordinary maiden speech was a withering attack on then chancellor George Osborne, in which she declared herself to be the only 20-year-old in the country whose housing bills he was prepared to help with, just after he’d abolished housing benefit for the under 21s. It got 10m views online in its first week. She was being talked about as a future leader of her party. She still gets effusive emails from people who have just discovered the speech today, a contrast to the torrent of online abuse she receives on a regular basis. Black took the dubious honour of first member to use the C-word in the Commons when she read out excerpts – “dyke, rug muncher, dirty bitch, ugly cunt” – in a 2018 debate on hate crime.
She says she is not standing again in part for personal reasons: “I want to have more calmness and also more structure to my life, rather than having it dictated by Westminster.” But cynics suggest she is leaving before she is pushed by the electorate, with the SNP predicted to lose a swathe of seats to a resurgent Scottish Labour. There is also the fact, which may come as something of a surprise, that she doesn’t consider being a politician to be a job for life: “I’ve genuinely never worried about a career,” she says. “I can see how politicians game play – it’s a long game of chess for many of them. For me, it’s either right or wrong, sensible or stupid.” Black insists that she doesn’t see party politics “in my immediate future” but, she caveats: “Politics is everywhere – even the Barbie movie was political – so whatever I end up doing, I don’t think I can ever be free of politics or would want to be.”
The weekly travel back and forth to London, last-minute schedule changes and constant uncertainties of timing are “hellish”, affecting not only her constituency work but also her home life. Her partner, who she married in 2022, “the rampant feminist that she is, cannot wait to have a housewife”, she jokes. “I’m aware of how depressing and how critical I sound, but I do think it’s important for people to know the reality of what day-to-day politics is like.”
What would she change? “Practical stuff like the voting system, how we conduct the timings of business” – by which she means not only late-night votes but archaic rules about amendments and who will be called to speak in a debate. “So much time is wasted and it serves nobody other than the folk who view parliament as a private club.”
I meet Black today in her constituency office, which sits between a dog grooming parlour and a branch of Subway, in the centre of Paisley. A former textile town, Paisley has seen millions of pounds of cultural investment in recent years, but is too often still defined by industrial decline. Ferguslie Park, a housing estate that was once the site of thriving mills, is now the most deprived area in Scotland.
She says she is most proud of the successes with individual constituency cases during her time as an MP. “It might seem like a small win but for the person involved it was massive,” she says. It was at one of her first surgeries as a new MP that she was alerted to the Waspi campaign – the scandal affecting women born in the 1950s, who lost out after changes to the state pension age. She has campaigned on the issue since, and later sat on the work and pensions select committee.
In person, Black is funny and unfussy, open enough for someone who plainly does not like talking about herself to a relative stranger. She’s also sharply intelligent, as you would expect from someone who started university at 16 and secured a first-class degree while still out on the campaign trail. She took her final exam after she was elected.
While Black has always insisted that her age is the least interesting thing about her, it is hard to forget that she has spent most of her adult life as a member of parliament. Nor the impact this must have had on her.
She recalls one night out in Glasgow to celebrate a friend’s 21st birthday, not long after her maiden speech. The group ended up at the Garage nightclub, a sticky-floored student hangout in Glasgow city centre, when suddenly a message came up on the projector: “Anybody who gets a photo with Mhairi gets a free drink.”
I remember her telling me about this incident soon after it happened – how her close-knit group of friends made a ring around her to stop people taking pictures of her, and later turned down other lucrative offers from newspapers to tell tales of her bad behaviour.
“Because I was so protected by the folk around me, I don’t feel I missed out on that much,” she says now. “I still had the social life. I just had to be a bit more careful about who I celebrated with”.
* * *
Black grew up in a suburb of Paisley with her older brother and their parents, who were teachers. She remembers hearing them talking at school or political campaign meetings – both were involved in protests against the Iraq war. “They weren’t public speakers, but if we were at a meeting and my dad made a point it was always very eloquent and thought through,” she says.
This was the genesis, she believes, of her talent for oratory. In 2014, she got involved in the independence campaign and ended up debating alongside former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars. He recognised her raw talent and asked her to join him touring the “Margo mobile” – a converted van named in honour of his late wife and nationalist heroine Margo MacDonald – around housing estates and working-class communities in the final weeks before the vote.
“One time he had me on the back of the van where the PA system was,” she says. “He just handed the mic to me in the middle of this [housing] scheme. I was awful, but it was a real learning curve.”
While her uncompromising speaking ability continues to draw praise – in 2022 she declared that the UK was “sleepwalking towards fascism” during the Queen’s speech debate and she has recently made powerful demands for a ceasefire in Gaza – she has also faced criticism and ridicule.
One parliamentary sketch writer complained he couldn’t understand her accent. She is variously described as “thuggish” or a “ned” (Scottish slang for a hooligan), or else is castigated for overplaying her accent to appear more working class. “It always makes me laugh when people say I talk like a ned,” says Black. “This is me really trying!.”
Former SNP MP Eilidh Whiteford – who was an unofficial mentor to Black, occupying the office near hers when she first arrived in parliament – says: “I was appalled by the grief she got for her accent, but she refused to moderate it. There was an anger that she wouldn’t go back in her box.”
Another focus of criticism has been Black’s attendance at parliament. After the 2017 general election, Black was signed off work for several months, initially for a physical complaint but “then my mental health started to deteriorate as well. It was a domino effect.”
She is circumspect about the support she received from her own party. Individual colleagues were helpful, she says, but on a formal basis “there could have been more support … I do feel lessons could be learned.”
The response from her political opponents were even worse. She describes some Labour MPs “going to town on it, saying that I just deliberately wasn’t turning up … It was right dirty politics.” She shakes her head. “Any perceived weakness is weaponised immediately.
“I spoke to the Labour whips about it, I spoke to the Labour MPs. I said: ‘You know what the script is here, you’re supposed to be the party of looking after workers’ health and you’re having a pop at me.’”
It is extraordinary, I say, that in the midst of a period of significant mental ill-health, she was fronting up to her critics in the lobbies. What does that say about her, I ask? “Scrappy-Doo,” she snaps back, and laughs. “Even when I first went in the door, I thought, everybody in here’s equal because you all got elected the same way I got elected.”
Since then, have there been other moments when her mental health has suffered? “Definitely. There can be lots of different factors. When your body’s telling you ‘I need a holiday’, but you’ve got another two months. Folk manipulating you being ill or briefing against you.”
Family and friends have helped her maintain her mental equilibrium. “I’ve always been one foot out of Westminster, and I’ve never allowed it to become my life. I rely so heavily on my support network and my loved ones that once I come out of that place, I’m able to switch off and come back down to earth.”
She first came out to her family when she was about 15. “But my family knew, and I never felt the need to pretend. Again, it speaks to the love and nurture I always had around me that I find it really hard to not be myself.”
In the Commons, this has translated into how she presents herself. In the early days, her mum took her shopping for smart suits from Primark and Next. “But I didn’t feel comfortable, so I switched back to wearing my black jeans and put a suit jacket over that. And even cutting my hair. I just felt so much better.”
Her own party is still reeling from rows over gender recognition and hate crime reforms – and the axing of the governing partnership with the Scottish Greens, which led to Humza Yousaf’s dramatic resignation and the unexpected return of SNP veteran John Swinney to the leadership.
Swinney took up his position as first minister with a pledge to “govern from the mainstream” and many of Black’s colleagues have expressed concern at a growing perception among voters that the SNP is distracted and divided over gender issues at the expense of their doorstep concerns.
With a general election looming, Black is a pragmatist. “I think that progressing trans rights is absolutely the right thing to do, but during a cost of living crisis I can understand why people get frustrated with it,” she says. While she provoked anger when she dismissed gender-critical feminists as “50-year-old Karens”, she says she is proud for “sticking up for trans people. I think that I will look back on it in years to come and think: ‘Fair play to you, that wasn’t easy, it wasn’t popular, but it was the right thing.’”
While she says it is the responsibility of politicians to challenge “people whipping up hatred and spreading disinformation”, it is also “part of the genius of the culture war tactic that then it just looks like we’re talking among ourselves about nothing other than trans issues … It’s certainly not a bad thing for the Scottish government to be drawing a line in the sand and going: ‘Look, we need to talk to people where they’re at right now.’”
Swinney is “what the party needs at the moment”, Black says, because of “the wealth of experience that he brings and the authority that he can command over all different parts of the party”. She is less effusive about the appointment of Kate Forbes as his deputy first minister. Black has previously hit out at Forbes’s conservative evangelical beliefs, describing her “incredible hurt” at Forbes’s statement that she would not have supported equal marriage legislation at Holyrood when she ran for leadership of the party last year. “Had a candidate said they do not believe in racially mixed marriages we would rightly be horrified – so why is my marriage still considered fair game?” she tweeted. “Of course I still have a problem with those issues,” says Black today.
She will be knocking on doors for the SNP for the election, and after that she will let the pieces fall where they may. “Ask me again in a year when I can’t pay bills,” she laughs. “Until then I’m ready to close that chapter and look to new adventures.”
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
