LORNA Slater has revealed her biggest political mistake was not preparing to become an MSP – and only found herself in Holyrood after the shock resignation of a high-profile Green politician.
The party’s co-leader said she was building turbines in Germany during the pandemic when she was placed third on the regional list and did not expect to get voted in before the 2021 election.
But when former MSP Andy Wightman (below) dramatically quit the Greens in December 2020, Slater said she received a phone call breaking the news and telling her she would likely be sitting in Holyrood the following year.
In an exclusive interview with Lesley Riddoch, Slater was asked what her biggest political mistake was.
She said: “I think not realising that I was in an electable position.
“If you’ll recall back in the dim and distant, Lesley, I was selected by my party to be third on the Lothian list so I understood that I was safely unelectable because of course at that time we had two Lothian MSPs.
“I went off during the pandemic to Germany and I was working on building turbines there. I got a call from Ross Greer on December 12, 2020 saying one of our MSPs has left, you’re in.
“I had to come back and prepare myself to be in the national debate and to be elected in a very short period of time, when if I had realised I was going to be electable I maybe would have spent more time during the pandemic preparing and getting to know how Parliament worked rather than building turbines.”
She succeeded Wightman as a Lothian MSP after he quit the party in 2020 over its stance on transgender rights and women’s rights.
Following a vote on the Forensic Medical Services Bill, which was successfully amended by Labour to allow victims of sexual assault to request an examiner of a particular sex as opposed to gender, Wightman said he had been “minded” to support the change against Green policy.
In a letter to Slater and co-leader Patrick Harvie (above), he accused the party of “intolerance” and referenced criticism he had received for attending a meeting at Edinburgh University discussing “sex and gender in the context of transgender rights and women’s rights”.
Slater was nominally co-leader of the party at the time but in practice the role was filled by MSP Alison Johnstone, now the Presiding Officer.
