85 Facts About Ruth Davidson

Ruth Davidson served as a Member of the Scottish Parliament for Glasgow from 2011 to 2016 and for Edinburgh Central from 2016 to 2021.

Ruth Davidson has been a member of the House of Lords since 2021.

At the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, Ruth Davidson was elected on the Glasgow regional list.

Ruth Davidson won the contest and was declared party leader on 4 November 2011.

Ruth Davidson resigned the leadership in August 2019, shortly after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Ruth Davidson was succeeded by Jackson Carlaw who was replaced by Douglas Ross.

Ruth Davidson was generally considered a fairly successful leader, especially in 2016 and 2017.

Ruth Davidson supported Scotland remaining part of the United Kingdom in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

Ruth Davidson supported the UK remaining in the European Union in the 2016 EU membership referendum.

Ruth Davidson was born at the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital and Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion.

Ruth Davidson was raised in Selkirk and later in Fife.

Ruth Davidson's family lived in Raeburn Place and then Bridgelands Road, Selkirk, and Davidson attended Knowepark Primary School until Primary 3.

Ruth Davidson's parents voted Conservative but were not especially involved in politics.

Ruth Davidson studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh, gaining an undergraduate Master of Arts degree.

Ruth Davidson later moved to Kingdom FM, followed by Real Radio, and finally joined BBC Scotland in late 2002 where she worked as a radio journalist, producer, presenter and reporter.

Ruth Davidson left the BBC in 2009 to study International Development at the University of Glasgow.

Ruth Davidson served as a signaller in the 32 Signal Regiment of the Territorial Army for three years before suffering a back injury in a training exercise at Sandhurst.

In 2009, after having left the BBC to study at the University of Glasgow, Ruth Davidson joined the Conservative Party.

Ruth Davidson said she was inspired by a call by David Cameron, the then Leader of the Opposition, in the wake of the United Kingdom parliamentary expenses scandal, for people who had never previously been political to get involved in politics.

Ruth Davidson was encouraged by the Scottish Conservative Party's Director of Media, Ramsay Jones, to join the party and stand for the House of Commons seat of Glasgow North East at the 2009 by-election, which was triggered by the resignation of Labour MP and Speaker of the House, Michael Martin.

Ruth Davidson finished in third place, with 1,075 votes.

Ruth Davidson played a large part in the organisation of campaign media events in the run-up to the 2010 general election, at which she ran again in Glasgow North East, finishing in fourth place with 1,569 votes.

Ruth Davidson's campaign was endorsed by two MSPs and a former Secretary of State for Scotland, Lord Forsyth.

Ruth Davidson was supported by the conservatives sole MP in Scotland David Mundell.

On 11 September 2011, Ruth Davidson sacked her election agent and parliamentary assistant Ross McFarlane.

Ruth Davidson had been filmed trying to burn a European Union flag in a Glasgow street following a University Conservative Association St Andrew's Day dinner in November 2010.

Ruth Davidson subsequently won the leadership election and was made the leader of the Scottish Conservatives on 4 November 2011.

Ruth Davidson gained 2,278 first preference votes out of the 5,676 votes cast, after second preference votes were counted, she won by 2,983 votes to runner up Murdo Fraser's 2,417.

Ruth Davidson made what he called a "prolonged and embarrassing climb-down" from a pledge to oppose any further devolution of powers to the Scottish parliament and struggled in parliamentary debates with Alex Salmond.

David Torrance wrote that after a year in office Ruth Davidson "had little to show in terms of policy development, strategic direction or opinion polls".

Ruth Davidson [Davidson] is totally and utterly useless and so are her team.

Ruth Davidson began to "modernise" the party's stance in the mold of changes Cameron was making at the time.

Ruth Davidson campaigned for a 'No' vote in 2014, expressing the view that Scottish independence would endanger the "wonderful messiness of these islands".

Ruth Davidson wrote that she was an effective campaigner able to make a compelling case even for aspects of UK policy which were not popular in Scotland, such as Trident.

Ruth Davidson knew that the SNP's majority virtually assured that Salmond's successor as SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, would become First Minister.

Ruth Davidson called Sturgeon a referendum "denier" and implied that she wanted another vote in the near future.

Ian Leslie argues that "Ruth Davidson achieved something that nobody else did: she made the case for Remain sound thrillingly righteous" and that her performance led to observers outside of Scotland seeing her as a major figure in British politics.

Ruth Davidson called on the UK and Scottish Governments to work together and put "stability" first.

Ruth Davidson was appointed to the Privy Council on 13 July 2016.

At the 2016 Conservative Party Conference, Ruth Davidson warned her party that "immigrants should be made to feel welcome in the UK" and the "party should not lurch to the right in the wake of Labour's implosion".

Ruth Davidson argued that Britain should seek access to the European Single Market even if that meant accepting reciprocal freedom of movement.

In 2016 and 2017, Ruth Davidson had high approval ratings in Scotland with many voters seeing her as an unusual kind of Conservative.

Ruth Davidson led the Scottish Conservatives into the 2016 Scottish Parliament election, where the party doubled its number of Scottish Parliament seats to 31, replacing Labour as the second largest party at Holyrood behind the Scottish National Party.

The election saw Ruth Davidson, who had previously been a list MSP, win the constituency of Edinburgh Central from the SNP with 10,399 votes.

However, Ruth Davidson dismissed the suggestion in an interview with The House magazine, describing the role of Prime Minister as "the loneliest job in the world".

Ruth Davidson made comments on the Brexit process, advocating British withdrawal from the Common Fisheries Policy and opposing a hard border in the Irish Sea.

Ruth Davidson was criticised by her opponents for opposing the introduction of Primary school testing in Scotland when it had been included in the Scottish Conservatives' 2016 manifesto.

Ruth Davidson spent much of late 2018 and early 2019 on maternity leave, during which she was largely quiet on politics.

Ruth Davidson opposed a no-deal Brexit, in opposition to Johnson's position at the time.

On 29 August 2019, Ruth Davidson stood down, citing several political and personal reasons for her decision to resign as leader.

Ruth Davidson, whose son had been born a little less than a year earlier, said that she did not want to be separated from her family by an election campaign.

Ruth Davidson said that she felt conflicted about the Brexit process.

Ruth Davidson praised Amber Rudd's decision to leave the cabinet over the "act of political vandalism".

In October 2019, Ruth Davidson accepted a public relations role for lobbying firm Tulchan Communications while retaining her job as an MSP.

Ruth Davidson implied in a December 2019 interview that she might want to become UK Conservative leader in years to come, when her son was older.

Ruth Davidson then lobbied for the leadership bid of Douglas Ross.

Ruth Davidson agreed to serve as Leader of the Conservative Party in the Scottish Parliament until the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, while Ross was yet to be elected to the Scottish Parliament.

In July 2021, Ruth Davidson entered the House of Lords as Baroness Ruth Davidson of Lundin Links, of Lundin Links in the County of Fife.

Ruth Davidson made her maiden speech on 22 October 2021 when she supported Baroness Meacher's Assisted Dying Bill.

Ruth Davidson presented Football's Gambling Addiction, a Channel 4 documentary released in June 2021 about the relationship between football and the gambling industry.

Ruth Davidson said that she was "very excited about combining my two great loves: politics and live broadcasting".

Ruth Davidson was often described in reporting as an unusual type of conservative.

Ruth Davidson had previous experience dealing with the media from her broadcasting career and various election campaigns allowed her to improve her skills.

David Patrick argued that Ruth Davidson was effective in using photo opportunities, magazine profiles and less serious sections of the news media to cultivate her image.

Ruth Davidson suggested her unionist message aligned with the views of most Scottish papers, which contributed to her receiving a positive response in the press.

Various commentators argued that Ruth Davidson's appeal had roots in the fact that she was a clearly Scottish figure arguing against Scottish independence, something a majority had voted against in the 2014 referendum.

When she became leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson was the first openly homosexual leader of a UK political party.

Ian Leslie wrote in a 2016 profile of Ruth Davidson that her ideals are "profoundly conservative" arguing that she is a "British patriot, a churchgoer, a passionate supporter of the armed forces, an advocate for marriage, a believer in self-reliance".

Ruth Davidson said that conservatives were wrong to oppose the creation of the Scottish Parliament in the past.

Ruth Davidson argued in 2017 that more devolution of powers within Scotland to local government could help promote economic growth.

In 2018, Ruth Davidson said in an interview that she would support a legal challenge in the Supreme Court on the basis of the Scottish Parliament voting to protect what it argued were its existing powers over Brexit.

Ruth Davidson asserted that the importance of legal action was to test the complex situation in the court.

Ruth Davidson praised the assistance provided by foreign aid in general citing the examples of child immunisation programmes, landmine clearance and female education.

Ruth Davidson criticised the Curriculum for Excellence arguing that it had made "a generation of teachers, parents and pupils utterly confused about what is going on".

Ruth Davidson criticised the fact that the Scottish NHS had not had its funding increased by as much as its English counterpart since 2010.

Ruth Davidson voted against legalising the practice in Scotland in 2015, a decision which she said several years later was motivated by "cowardice".

Ruth Davidson said that a change in her views had been motivated by seeing the suffering caused to relatives by dementia and by having some of her religious beliefs around the "creation of life" challenged by her use of IVF.

On 18 February 2015, Ruth Davidson appeared in a party election broadcast in which she was seen with her same-sex partner Jen Wilson, a 33-year-old Irish woman from County Wexford.

On 26 April 2018 Ruth Davidson announced that she had become pregnant after receiving IVF treatment, and that she and Wilson were "excited" to be expecting their first child.

Ruth Davidson has said that these struggles almost dissuaded her from running for leadership.

Ruth Davidson is a member of the Church of Scotland and counts dog walking, hillwalking and kickboxing as her hobbies.

On 23 October 2015, Ruth Davidson became the first female Scottish politician to appear as a panellist on the BBC One satirical news quiz Have I Got News for You.

Between 2017 and 2025, Ruth Davidson served as the Honorary Colonel of 32nd Signal Regiment.

Ruth Davidson was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018.

In January 2024, Ruth Davidson competed in a celebrity edition of Mastermind.