View from the Street: I don’t share all of Kate’s politics. I’m writing this anyway.
Published
Rebecca Mason
Three weeks ago, I found myself on the edge of a media huddle – one of those tight clusters of journalists, microphones, and hushed intensity that forms whenever a senior political figure has something supposedly important to say. At its centre: the deputy first minister.
I work in communications. I understand what good looks like. And what I witnessed that afternoon was something rare.
I should say from the outset that I don’t share all of Kate Forbes’ politics. That matters. Because the reflection that follows isn’t born of ideological allegiance. It’s of professional respect, and something close to regret at what Scottish public life will lose once her political curtain falls.
There has long been a broad critique of Holyrood that too many MSPs have arrived via the party structures rather than through careers built on lived experience.
Forbes herself has spent most of her professional life in politics. And yet she has done something few of her colleagues have managed – she has undeniably won the respect of many in Scotland’s business community, at times when her own party has struggled to do so.
She has demonstrated that you don’t need to have run a company to understand the pressures facing one. What matters is whether you can hear your audience, take their concerns seriously, and make them feel understood. Forbes can. Empathy is not a given, and it’s not a skill that can be faked in a room full of people who have spent their careers spotting exactly that kind of pretence.
But what struck me most that afternoon was something harder to quantify.
At five foot two, standing among a predominantly male pack of journalists, she commanded the space effortlessly. Not through volume or assertion, but through presence. Through what I can only describe as complete control of the moment. Fluent between policy and personality. Quick enough to land a joke off-mic – scotching one hack’s suggestion that she might add Charlotte Street Partners to her CV – without losing any of the seriousness that had preceded it.
She never lost the room because she never stops reading it.
You can watch hours of tutorials on effective communication. You can study the theory, analyse the techniques, deconstruct the rhetoric. But there is something that only happens when you see a truly gifted communicator working live, under pressure, at the top of their game. It lands differently. It teaches you differently.
What made it harder to watch, in retrospect, was knowing it was possibly my last opportunity to see the deputy first minister operating up close at the centre of government.
Come May, when at least a third of MSPs stand down and the Scottish Parliament enters a new era, we will lose a decade of Forbes’ institutional experience alongside a quality of communication that Holyrood rarely produces and finds even harder to replace.
The SNP will grieve her absence. But her loss will be felt further than one party.
Scotland is navigating a moment that demands leaders in our parliament who can speak to multiple rooms at once – to the business community and the classroom, to the sceptic and the supporter, to the journalist and the constituent. Leaders who lead not just with conviction but with empathy. Who have the drive to push through resistance and the intelligence to bring people with them rather than despite them.
As a young woman working in communications, watching her operate that afternoon, I took note not just of what she said, but how she captivated the attention of every person in that room.
That’s the hallmark of genuinely exceptional communicators. They make the craft look effortless. And only when they leave do you understand for the first time exactly how much work it was and why it matters.