Ash Regan

Akash Paun (AP): You first entered government in June 2018 when you were appointed minister for community safety. What do you remember of the conversation you had with the first minister [Nicola Sturgeon] when you were asked to take on that role? What was it like walking into government on your first day?

Ash Regan (AR): I remember the conversation very well. It was very, very short. I don't even think it was five minutes. I remember asking the first minister why she had picked that particular portfolio for me. I thought she didn’t have a very good answer for that. So, I followed that up with the chief special adviser and I felt like I got a slightly better answer. Sometimes you might think that for justice they would be better picking lawyers because there's quite a heavy legal part of that portfolio. However, I can also understand that people who come from outside the legal sphere can see it more clearly and probably see it more in the way the public would.

I thought the civil service was very good. You were introduced straight away to your private secretary. It was a bit of a whirlwind. They start telling you things and then, from that moment on, your private secretary basically followed you around the building, which was a bit of a weird adjustment. My private secretary would pop up when I was trying to have lunch and things like that, and they just followed you about. So it was a bit of an adjustment, as I'm sure it is for most people. But, they were very good. I asked for an overview of the portfolio and everything involved in it, and they were very good at giving me introductory meetings and so on.

AP: You mentioned having a conversation with the senior special adviser about the reasons for your appointment. What did that conversation convey to you? Were there specific objectives you were asked to take on? 

AR: I can't repeat what she said, but over the last few years my reflections on appointing ministers are that it's not an exact science. I think they just have roles they want to fill and probably have a pool of people they might want to put into those roles. To be quite honest with you, I don't think they think too much about it, especially for junior ministers. I think it's just “where can we put people?” and “who looks like they might work in that one?”

AP: You were first elected in 2016 and became a minister in 2018, so that’s a relatively quick ascension. You also mentioned that you didn’t have a legal background. How prepared did you feel for taking on executive responsibility?

AR: Not very prepared. I would say there's more of a gap in terms of what's expected of you between being a backbencher and a junior minister, than there is between being a junior minister and a cabinet secretary. I don't think people understand it in that way, but it was quite a significant step in terms of what you're expected to do. But you are very well supported by the civil service in order to do that. I think if you've had other professional roles, you would quickly settle into it. It's really about decision making. You're there to exercise sensible decision making on behalf of the government and hopefully in line with what you think the public would expect you to do.

AP: Is there a particular moment when you had to take a decision that stands out from your first few days or weeks as a minister? 

AR: One colleague – who had been a cabinet secretary for a while – said to me, “You must watch Yes Minister because it's a documentary.” And then I had other people saying to me The Thick of It was a documentary. I think there is some truth in that actually.
Right at the beginning I was determined that I wasn't going to let the wool be pulled over my eyes and I was going to make sure I was on top of everything. But when I first arrived there was a stack of papers – submissions we call them – that all needed to be read through and okayed and my private secretary was saying to me, “They're all fine. Just sign them off.” I was like, “No, I'm going to go through all of them and see what they are.” I think there's different ways to be a minister. You can either be on top of all the detail or you can delegate a lot of the detail and just apply yourself to the more high-profile decisions. I tried to make sure I was across everything. Over time that gets easier because you're more familiar with the topics, subject matter, stakeholders and so on.

Millie Mitchell (MM): How did you go about setting out your main priorities in that post? How much autonomy were you given over what you could prioritise? 

AR: In September of every year, the first minister sets out the programme for government which encompasses the policy themes and all the legislation the government will be looking to progress over that year. This means that, if you come in as a minister, really everything that you're going to be working on has already been decided for you by someone else. Depending on what stage the legislation is at, you might be able to influence individual parts. But if it’s already quite progressed, there won’t be a lot of additional decision making or ability to steer the legislation. The government may already have given commitments about a direction it might be taking. So it's very much mapped out in terms of what you're going to do.

A few months in, when I’d got to grips with what was in the portfolio and what I could have influence over, I brought in two policy areas that had not been on the table. One of them was changing the law around prostitution. I think Scotland is very similar to the UK at the moment in that the balance of criminality falls on the seller rather than on the buyer. I don't know how familiar you are with this, but a lot of countries (recently France and the Republic of Ireland) now follow the ‘Nordic model’, where you switch that around and put the balance of criminality onto the buyer, rather than the seller. We would now conceptualise many of the people working in prostitution as victims rather than criminals. That is in line with the way that we police in Scotland, so it seems to me that the law needs to be updated there. I began working straight away on that and I began working straight away on changing the law around fireworks. There is quite a lot of antisocial behaviour regarding fireworks in Scotland, as I'm sure there is in other parts of the UK. I wanted to do something on that.

I think I read somewhere that UK government ministers are in post for an average of 11 months. I always scoffed at that and thought it was ridiculous, because it usually takes you at least six months to get to grips with the portfolio. Even at six months you won't really have had any influence on anything or been able to set much of a direction. Even though there was an election in between, I was in the same post for four and a half years, so that's fairly unusual. I think there were only two of us in the junior ministerial team who didn't get moved to a different portfolio. It gave me quite a long time to set a direction and – in some ways – to achieve things. So my work on fireworks became law [Fireworks and Pyrotechnic Articles (Scotland) Act 2022]. Parts of which are law now and other parts of it are just about to be implemented. 

However, despite putting as much, if not more, effort into pushing the prostitution legislation – I did not get any closer to that becoming law. In fact, I’m doing it as a members’ bill [Proposed Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill] and it is at the consultation stage at the moment.

MM: Could you tell us more about your experience of taking the Fireworks and Pyrotechnic Articles (Scotland) Act through parliament? 

AR: My special adviser and I decided that we would do a consultation on fireworks. At the time, it was something like the second or third most responded to Scottish parliament consultation. It got something like 16,000 responses from the public, so it was clearly a very live issue. The Scottish public really wanted to see something done about it.

It was actually very tricky. The UK Internal Market Act [2020] had a detrimental effect on putting that piece of legislation through. At one point my schedule completely dropped away because the Lord Advocate had to take quite a long time to look at the fireworks legislation and make sure it wasn't going to become unstuck by the new situation with the internal market. In Scotland, sometimes we say we’ll do what we call an “effective” ban, though we aren’t actually legally able to ban things. We can find other routes, but the laws around it are quite complicated. 

In the end, I got it through quite quickly. I actually had to do it as an expedited bill because the parliament had made it really clear to me that they wanted action. Then when I tried to do it as an expedited bill, parliament went, “Oh, this is terrible! You're putting legislation through two weeks quicker than normal.” But it did go through. I don't think it will solve all the problems around antisocial behaviour with fireworks, but I tightened the law up as much as I had the powers to do. It did things like reduce the amount of time that vendors could sell fireworks and the times that they could be used. I felt like I did as much as I could with the powers that were available to me.

AP: Interesting you mention that, as we were wondering about whether the UK Internal Market Act had affected your work on fireworks. Was there much engagement with the UK government to ensure you could get the legislation through in some form?

AR: No. We tried ourselves to understand what effects it would have and what it meant that we additionally could and couldn't do. It’s a few years ago now, so I’m struggling to remember exactly what it was, but I think the act meant were not able to compel vendors… 

We were trying to introduce a licencing scheme. When this comes into force, you will not be able to just go and buy fireworks from a supermarket in Scotland. You will need to have completed an online course and have got a licence. The idea is that this shuts down spontaneous purchasing, at least through legal routes. If people are buying fireworks illegally, then that’s a different story! There are ways of doing a licencing scheme where you ask vendors to hold information about who is purchasing the fireworks – but we couldn’t do that because of the Internal Market Act, so we had to find a workaround and that did take us extra time.

AP: You’ve said publicly that you faced resistance within government when you attempted to change the policy on prostitution. Can you tell us more about that? What did you do to try to build support within government and Holyrood for your proposals?

AR: I’ve now defected to another party as a result of other things, but when I was in the SNP, I went to the party conference and I actually changed the party’s policy on prostitution to be in line with what I think. It went to a vote and passed. Now, that doesn't really have any bearing on what the government will do, but it certainly helps, because you can say “this is in line with party policy”. I know that the civil service do look at party policies as well. It was also very much in line with other government policy – the government had a long-standing conceptualisation of prostitution as violence against women. We have something in Scotland called ‘Equally Safe’, which is a strategy document around violence against women. At first glance, I felt my proposal was very much aligned with what the government was saying and doing, and that it was really just a realignment of the legislation with the policy objectives.

However, that is not how it turned out. I would have meetings with civil servants where I thought I was being very clear about what I wanted to do and when I wanted to achieve it. Then, I would have a follow up meeting three months later, nothing would have been done and it would be like, “oh, but minister, I don't think that's what you said,” and “oh, minister, I didn't realise you wanted it done.” It just felt like pushing treacle uphill. The reason I mentioned the fireworks legislation is because I started them at the same time. I worked on them in exactly the same way to steer and drive the legislation forward, manage the team, set objectives, and so on. Yet, one is law now and one is not. 

When I got re-elected in 2021 and reappointed, we went into a very different situation as we had the Bute House Agreement with the Green Party. It was designed so that there were policy areas inside the agreement where the two parties were aligned and policy areas outside the agreement where they were not. Prostitution was outside the agreement. While the negotiations were going on, we were party to the document that was being used between the two sides. I saw that prostitution was outside the agreement and my heart sank. I thought, “I’m not going to get this through because they’re going to object to this.” In wanting to keep the Green partners on side, the SNP government was looking to stick to the areas where there was agreement and minimise the friction between the two parties. I would say that the Greens in Scotland are very ideologically aligned against women’s rights, so I knew that was going to be a problem. Now, no one ever fed this back to me. No official ever said anything to me. No senior government minister ever said anything to me about any of this. But that was the impression I got and I can't think of any other reason as to why my legislation didn't progress. 

We have a thing called ‘Forward Look’, which is a legislative programme that you'll do every so often. Certainly at the beginning of a session, the civil service will present you with five years of potential legislation. Everything is mapped out with what year it'll be introduced. Now, that is subject to change if the first minister decides that they really want to do another piece of legislation and it is squeezed in. And sometimes things drop off, maybe if the parliament didn't agree. In 2021, I was fully expecting the legislation on prostitution to appear in year one or two of the Forward Look. To my surprise, it was appearing in year four or five. I said to my officials, “Well, surely we can get our ducks in a row before then and progress this”, and they went, “Oh…well…”. I then made quite a song-and-dance about it. The next time I looked it appeared in year three and I thought, great! But then, I looked another time and it had slipped back to year four again. I just started to get the feeling that this it was never going to happen. 

So when the Gender Recognition Reform Bill came up… I suppose some ministers can think, “Oh well, I'm doing really good things on this other policy area, so maybe I can swallow the fact that I've got to vote for something I don't agree with, because I'm going to get something else.” But I began to think that I was not going to make progress on the prostitution legislation, which is something that I've wanted to work on for ten years now. So that probably made it easier to think, “if I resign, what am I losing in terms of progressing policy?”

MM: When you were first appointed, you were working with Humza Yousaf who was the cabinet secretary for justice at the time. What was your relationship like at that point? Was there a clear demarcation of your respective responsibilities?

AR: No. Because I was in the same portfolio for four and a half years, I didn't have as many different relationships and didn’t work with as many different people as other ministers might have had an opportunity to do. I only worked with Humza and then with Keith Brown [cabinet secretary for justice and veterans from 2021–23]. I observed that cabinet secretaries really can decide what they work on and what they don't work on. Certainly with Humza, if he didn't want to do something – either because he didn't want to do it or because of time pressures or whatever – it just got delegated to the junior minister. But if it was something that he thought he could get positive media out of, or something that he thought would get him positive attention from the first minister, then he would immediately pounce on it – even if it should have been in the junior minister’s area.

It's very flexible. You can negotiate at the beginning as to what's in whose portfolio. Things do move around. To use an example from community safety: human trafficking might be in the junior minister’s portfolio, but then in another session with a different cabinet secretary it might move into the cabinet secretary's portfolio. There is supposed to be a demarcation, but I felt that really the cabinet secretary ultimately made the decision about what was included.

Then, above that is the first minister. Certainly after 2021, there were a couple of instances where I went to the first minister and said, “I want X, Y and Z,” and I was given them. I said at the time, “What if Keith doesn't like it?”, but the response was “Oh well, Keith will just be told that that's what is happening.” So I think it depends on your relationship with the first minister, how much leverage you've got, what you want to achieve and whether the first minister agrees with you. It’s all about the hierarchy, isn't it? They outrank the cabinet secretary.

MM: Can you talk us through your experience of being a minister during the pandemic and the impact it had on your day-to-day role?

AR: We just carried on as we had before. We were obviously mostly mainly working from home, although I did regularly come into parliament throughout that period. A certain number of people were allowed in the chamber, so that we could socially distance. Whilst a lot of my colleagues live very far away, I only live about an hour’s drive from parliament, so I made it clear to the minister for parliamentary business that I was happy to come in.

At one point, they asked if ministers would volunteer to help with health and I did that. I was happy to take on additional responsibilities outside of my portfolio to be helpful, but we never heard back. I don’t know if anyone heard back, but I certainly didn’t. I just carried on in justice. 

The main issue we were having in justice was the court system, because they had reduced capacity. That had a huge knock-on effect on the rest of the system. We were working quite hard to try to keep the lines of communication open with stakeholders. I had a lot more meetings with the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service, the Faculty of Advocates, the Law Society and others, in order to make sure that we could see problems coming and try to find solutions to those problems. We knew if we created a huge court backlog, this would have a really detrimental effect to the whole system for years after the pandemic. We did create some court backlog, but I think it could have been worse than it was. So we were working quite hard on that.

Other than that, we were just doing normal work. Everything was carrying on. If anything, there were more meetings in certain areas than there would have been in normal times. I also attended a few intergovernmental relations meetings. I can't remember the title of them now, but they would be ministerial forums around certain things. I remember I had to go and represent Scotland on something like whether we would close the border to Luxembourg. I'd been sent in to talk to whichever UK minister and say that Scotland didn't agree with this and we should be doing something else, and we did. I can't remember exactly what that was, but something along those lines. I was involved in some of those type of things, but not that many.

MM: What was your experience of those meetings themselves? Did you feel they were productive forums? 

AR: In fact, I remember it was Grant Shapps [then secretary of state for transport in the UK government]. It was in that brief period in the summer of 2020 when you could go on holiday before they stopped it again, and Grant Shapps had got himself in a bit of bother where he had to come back from his holiday. So I went on and straight away I said, “how was your holiday?” and to his credit he laughed.

I felt it was good. Even though these meetings sometimes had 40 or 50 participants – I assume a lot of them were civil servants – they always made a point to ask the devolved governments for their input. You didn’t even have to raise your hand. You were always asked to contribute and to check that you either understood or were in agreement with what was being decided. So, I thought it was fine. 

MM: The Gender Recognition Reform Bill eventually led to your decision to resign from your ministerial post in 2022. Before that point, what discussions were you involved with in government about this policy? 

AR: You'll know that that one had been bubbling along for quite a while. In about 2018 or 2019, a non-ministerial colleague and I had a meeting with the minister in charge of the bill. I think it was Shirley-Anne Somerville [then cabinet secretary for social security and older people] who was in charge of it at that point. We had a one hour meeting where we set out that we were very concerned about what was happening, that it wasn't a very good idea, and that the government really shouldn't be doing it. We were just basically told, “Well, the first minister wants it and so we're going to do it.” I had also spoken to the minister for parliamentary business and I'd spoken to the whips. I felt like I'd spoken to quite a lot of people informally – as well as having this formal meeting with the cabinet secretary – and really explained why it wasn't very good idea. Nobody was listening. 

I took the fairly unusual decision to put my name to an open letter which appeared on the front page of The Scotsman. Kate Forbes, Ivan McKee and I signed this letter, along with lots of other SNP colleagues like Joanna Cherry, Joan McAlpine, MPs, MSPs, councillors, etc. I think there were about 20 of us. We urged caution on the government and explained that there were a number of areas where this would have unintended consequences if it wasn't very carefully thought through. I obviously got into quite a lot of trouble for that. I think I had three bollockings: one from Humza [Yousaf, then cabinet secretary for justice], one from Mike Russell [then cabinet secretary for parliamentary business and constitutional relations] and one from the first minister [Nicola Sturgeon]. I think Kate [Forbes] told me she that she had an extra one because they didn’t think she was repentant enough. I always thought it was quite funny that she got an extra one. 

It got to the point where you felt the government just weren't listening. So we thought one thing they do listen to is front pages. We thought this would get their attention, which it did. At that point, the bill was kicked into the long grass and we breathed a sigh of relief. We thought that if they’re sensible and they’ve got any idea about how politically toxic this is, they will keep it in the long grass and never mention it again. 

And then of course they reinstated it in the 2021 programme for government. Possibly it was also because the Greens were asking for it. The Scottish Greens and the UK Greens actually split over this situation, because the UK Greens aren’t as interested in this and didn't think it was very sensible but the Scottish Greens are absolutely rabid on gender identity, seemingly almost to the exclusion of their environmental side – which is odd when you think about it for Greens. So it popped up again and I thought, “Oh no, here we go.”

I was getting prepped to go on a TV debate by four special advisers. I said, “Because the media know that I probably have a different view from the government on this topic, should we prepare what I say if I get asked about gender recognition?” and the special adviser was like, “Oh, yeah, here's the government lines,” and I was like, “I won’t be using the government lines.” So we workshopped what I would say that wouldn't get the government in trouble but I was also comfortable with. In the end, I didn't get asked about that. 

But within a week or so, a more senior special adviser appeared in my office – I assume because they'd heard I was not in alignment with the government on this policy. I was already prepared, so I had a 40-minute meeting with the head special adviser where I laid out in detail where the government was likely to have problems on this and that they needed to be able to answer these questions and/or resolve these issues before the legislation progressed. I think this was March 2022 and at that point the legislation had been introduced, but I don’t think I’d seen it.

In Scotland, there was a lot of civil society activity on this, such as by J.K. Rowling and campaign groups like For Women Scotland who were formed specifically to fight this. Because of that, I think there was a lot more public awareness in Scotland than possibly there was in other parts of the UK. Having long-grassed it in 2019, I thought that by the time they bought back and amended the bill in 2022, it would have looked quite different and would have reflected the debate. But no – it was the same bill. I was quite dismayed when I finally saw it and I thought “Have they learnt nothing? Are they really going to do this?” Anyway, I didn't hear anything else. 

Two days before the vote for stage one, I went to group meeting and a few colleagues were saying “Look, this bill’s not good. I can’t vote for this.” As a minister, I never spoke at group meetings, because they are really for backbenchers. Ministers can respond to things for backbenchers, but you wouldn't usually pile onto whoever's running the meeting on the SNP’s behalf. But on this occasion, I did. I said it should be a free vote.

The same day, that senior special adviser appeared again and said, “What’s happening? The first minister wants to know what you’re going to do?” And I said, “Well, I'm not going to vote for it.” And I said there were different options like not turning up, or voting against it and resigning. He was like, “Oh my God, you’re going to resign!” and I said, “Well, it certainly is one of the options.” He then backed out of my room and was like, “Don’t do anything. I’ll speak to the first minister.” I heard nothing for two days.

It was fireworks season by this point so I was at a visit at a school. We had a fire engine in the driveway, all these school kids, STV cameras and everything. The media were all saying to me, “How are you going to vote later?” I got back to the car and looked at my phone and it just said, “Turn up and vote with the government.” I knew I wasn't going to do that. I was in my ministerial car and I said to the driver, “I'm not going into the parliament because the media will be there.” So I said, “Can you just take me home?” and he was like, “fine.” I went home and over the next few hours I sent in my resignation letter, which the government then immediately gave to the media. I shouldn’t have been surprised that they did that, but I was. I voted against the bill and I gave a statement to the press a few days later.

I think it is quite unusual to resign over a policy. I think I am the only person to do it in Scotland since 2007.

AP: Ultimately that legislation was prevented from implementation by the UK government. As a supporter of independence, but also as someone who opposed the policy, what was your view of that decision?

AR: I was very angry with the Scottish government for putting me in the position where I was pleased that the Tories had to intervene to stop Scottish legislation. First of all, if the government had listened to people like me and loads of others, like Joanna Cherry [then the SNP’s shadow secretary of state for justice in the UK parliament] and women campaigners, they wouldn’t have done the bill in the way that they did. We all said – probably years in advance – that this would interfere with the effectiveness of the UK Equality Act and therefore they shouldn’t be doing it in the way that they were, and they were like “no, no, no.” If you watch any of the passage of the bill, Shona Robison [then cabinet secretary for social justice, housing and local government] kept repeatedly – in my opinion – misleading parliament and saying that it didn’t have anything to do with the Equality Act, when we knew that it did. I thought they brought the parliament into disrepute by doing that, lost the trust of the public, had this embarrassing showdown with the UK government, and spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money defending this ludicrous position in the courts. So, let’s just say I wasn’t very happy about it.

AP: As a minister, did you have much involvement in thinking within government about the path to Scottish independence?

AR: No, but I think people would be surprised by that. I think that the people who put the SNP into government again and again would think that the government was constantly planning to get independence. From what I could see, that was not the case. I went to cabinet quite a lot as a junior minister substitute, because the justice committee also sat on a Tuesday morning. If the cabinet secretary was called to give evidence in front of the committee, I’d be sent to cabinet as a substitute. I think at one point I was going to cabinet almost as much as the cabinet secretary. To my knowledge, we never discussed independence at cabinet. 
It really just became something we thought the first minister (so that would have been Nicola Sturgeon at that time), John Swinney as the deputy and probably some of the most senior special advisers were working on. I think Liz Lloyd, who was the senior special adviser in that phase, has said recently in the media that people would be surprised about how little time they spent on independence – that’s certainly what I observed. You just assume that other people are handling it.

That was another reason why I felt that I could resign because I knew there was no action being taken on independence. I knew that I wasn't potentially scuppering any chance of Scotland becoming independent by my actions. Obviously it was a big story in Scotland when I resigned. We know that the public generally doesn't like parties that are divided and it looked like we are a very divided party on some of these issues. But I knew that it wasn't going to do anything detrimental to independence because we weren’t doing anything on independence. I don't know whether Nicola Sturgeon ever had a plan or if it was just a really bad plan, but there's been – to my mind – no progress on independence. I think her one big move of referring the draft bill to the Supreme Court was a terrible idea.

AP: For what reason was it a terrible idea?

AR: Politically, I think it wasn't a very smart move. I think it has given more ammunition to the view that constitutionally you can't do it. I think there were other ways you could have done that. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading the McCorquodale legal opinion (which ALBA commissioned on the ruling of the Supreme Court), what evidence they looked at, etc. I suppose that if you were looking at it from an international law or international relations perspective, when you are talking about internal and external self-determination, you would not expect to get a positive ruling from a domestic court. I think everyone can see that that's probably going to be the case. I think politically and strategically that was a huge error on Nicola Sturgeon's part.

AP: In March 2023, you were one of three candidates in the SNP leadership contest. Had you become first minister, what would you have done differently to Humza Yourself on independence or otherwise?

AR: I would've done everything differently. I would have sacked all the special advisers and started off with a new team. I was saying at the time – and it's been borne out by recent electoral events – that the trajectory the SNP was on was going to lead to electoral disaster and that I wasn't sure if it could have been saved. Aside from whether I could have done it personally, I wasn't sure if anyone could have saved the SNP, even by changing course in March last year. The polls have started to match what I and others were saying – that the SNP needed to change course. Humza was very much the continuity candidate. He was just going to continue to do things exactly as Nicola had set out. 

I would have scrapped the entire legislative programme and realigned it with the priorities of the Scottish people. I think there's quite a lot of money being spent by the Scottish government that is being wasted and much of it is well documented. You’ll know that there were extreme problems at SNP HQ in terms of missing money, [Peter Murrell] the former chief executive and husband of Nicola Sturgeon having been charged by the police for embezzlement, etc. I knew of this beforehand, so obviously I would have got to the bottom of that. I would have done the probably the complete opposite of what Humza did. 

Now, looking back on it, because I didn't have the support of my colleagues, I probably wouldn't have been able to implement a lot of that, even if I had won the competition. So it probably would have been an impossible task. But I certainly think for the SNP to have had any chance of retaining more than nine MPs – and going into the Scottish elections, which are not that long away – they really needed to start to change the way they were doing things. They haven’t done that, so I think they’re… [makes a downward sloping gesture].

AP: In October 2023, you left the SNP to join ALBA. What was the tipping point that led you ultimately to that decision?

AR: I suppose politicians usually have a couple of things that motivate them. In my case, it is Scottish independence and women's rights. Those are the things that I'm most interested in. I felt that I was kind of muzzled in the SNP. I couldn't really talk about women’s rights and I couldn't really talk about Scottish independence because there was no action on that. Also, internally the SNP were making it very difficult for me. I haven't made a big thing out of it publicly because I just don't like it when people whine on about things, but basically I was very much on the outside of the group. I wanted to be more productive as a politician and achieve more, and I didn't feel that I was going to be able to do that on the things that I cared about if I'd stayed in the SNP, so that's why I made the decision to move.

MM: Is there a specific achievement that you're most proud of from your time in office?

AR: I passed a lot of legislation. I'm not sure what the records are, but I think at one point I was the record holder for the minister who had passed the most pieces of legislation in the shortest period of time. I'm proud of all the legislation I did, particularly the Children (Scotland) Act [2020]. That was about the family courts system and I hope that the work that I did there has improved things for children. I thought that was a really important piece of work, and also the fireworks legislation. But also hopefully the lasting impact that I've had in the area of women and justice particularly.

MM: Finally, is there any advice that you’d give to ministers coming into office for the first time about how they could be effective in their role?

AR: Somebody gave me this piece of advice. A lot like I was saying at the beginning, they said that you need to find a couple of things that you're really motivated about and that you want to achieve, because so much of being a minister is just other people's priorities. Sometimes you're in alignment with them and sometimes you're not. If you can find one or two areas where you are really interested in making a difference and pursue them, I think that is a good way to make it feel as meaningful as possible.