Evangelical Christian and Scottish deputy first minister Kate Forbes has announced she will stand down as an MSP at the next election.
The Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch MSP, who has a three-year-old daughter, said she wants to focus on her family life.
She told BBC Scotland News, ‘Over the last few years I have balanced the role of representing a large area in the Highlands with a government job as deputy first minister and having a small family.
‘As I look ahead to the next election I have concluded that I don’t want to miss any more of these precious early years of family life.’
Forbes became Scotland’s first female finance secretary in 2020 and she was narrowly defeated in the 2023 SNP leadership contest.
During that contest she faced concerted attacks on her evangelical Christian faith, with her critics hitting out against her beliefs on sexual ethics, gender identity, marriage, and abortion.
In 2021 she gave an interview to the BBC in which she said, ‘To be straight, I believe in the person of Jesus Christ.
‘I believe that he died for me, he saved me and that my calling is to serve and to love him and to serve and love my neighbours with all my heart and soul and mind and strength.
‘So that for me is essential to my being. Politics will pass – I was a person before I was a politician and that person will continue to believe that I am made in the image of God.’
