Roseanna Cunningham on her career with the SNP and Scottish independence

The Glasgow-born, Australia-raised, solicitor-to-trade was one of the first MSPs elected to the devolved Scottish Parliament and before that was the first SNP MP to hold on to a Westminster seat won in a by-election.

Nicknamed “Republican Rose”, she was a founder member of the 79 Group and has been present for every major development in Holyrood’s two decades and instrumental in the growth of the Yes movement.

Currently Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform, she has held three separate government portfolios and was deputy leader of the SNP.

Now she’s stepping down and campaigning for the man she hopes will replace her as MSP for Perthshire South and Kinross-shire, Farmers4Yes founder Jim Fairlie. “I wondered whether or not at some point something would kick in and I’d be thinking ‘oh my god, what have I done?’”, she says. “I’m still waiting for that to happen.”

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Her first election win in 1995 was one of “sheer, unalloyed joy”, she recalls. She’d been widely-tipped to win Westminster’s Perth and Kinross seat three years earlier as John Major’s Tory government floundered, but Thatcher’s successor proved naysayers wrong to hold on.

At the by-election she secured victory with a 4% swing to the SNP, leaving Labour’s Douglas Alexander in second place. The Monster Raving Looney Party’s Screaming Lord Sutch also stood, as did the Natural Law Party, which promoted transcendental meditation.

“We had a press conference every morning and every morning it was chockablock – standing room only,” Cunningham recalls. There was, of course, as much scrutiny of her appearance as of what she had to say. “As a female politician, whatever you are wearing is wrong,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s wrong.”

When the general election followed in ‘97, smart money was on Cunningham to lose because in those days SNP by-election gains never lasted more than one contest. But smart money was wrong and she became the first SNP MP to hold a by-election seat. “I wish I’d put £10 on, I’d have made a fortune,” she says.

Cunningham remembers the Houses of Parliament as akin to a gentleman’s club, and somewhere she was “never comfortable”. She didn’t like spending time in London, where other MPs would go to Ronnie Scott’s jazz club after 10pm votes, and she doesn’t miss it.

It was different with the Scottish Parliament, she says. Her mother accompanied her to the opening ceremony, which included a procession along the Royal Mile and a performance of A Man’s A Man for A’ That by Sheena Wellington. The “great and good” turned out, Cunningham remembers, and her mother was thrilled to meet Cardinal Winning but had to be taken to hospital later that afternoon after collapsing amidst the excitement and heat of the May day.

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With that very personal memory, everything else “smooshes into one”, Cunningham says, but Wellington’s singing stands out. “It was extraordinary,” she says. “She sang the first few verses and then some people started to sing along and she did that thing with her hands to say to everybody to join in.

“I thought ‘this could only happen in the Scottish Parliament, you wouldn’t get this in the House of Commons, it’s amazing’.”

Cunningham became one of 14 politicians with dual mandates, including then-first minister Donald Dewar and Jim Wallace of the LibDems. They entered a cross-party agreement to exit Westminster at the next general election and while some have repeated the practice since – Alex Salmond has held a dual mandate three times – Cunningham is against it. “I don’t think it should be happening,” she says. “None of us envisaged that there would be an attempt in future to try and twin track in any real way.

“It’s not an upright thing to do. I’m not absolutely certain that a House of Commons backbencher understands what the workload is like in the Scottish Parliament. You can’t do justice to two parliaments.”

As well as the excitement, optimism and cross-party cooperation Cunningham describes, early days of the new Scottish Parliament were marked by intense scrutiny over its operation and the creation of the purpose-built Enric Miralles complex that now houses Scotland’s seat of power.

READ MORE: Enric Miralles: The man who designed the Scottish parliament

CRITICISM of the design itself and details of construction overruns and cost increases were headline news across all sections of the media. Responsibility for these issues was often attributed to the new MSPs themselves, though the decisions had been taken before their election. “I remember how utterly depressed and dispirited a lot of us were at what happened,” says Cunningham, who preferred another of the final six shortlisted designs. “Some of the criticism was grossly unfair. It was criticism about decisions made before the parliament even came into being, before any of us had had a chance to express an opinion.

“There was an early attempt to undermine any authority the Scottish Parliament had. You run the risk of sounding conspiracist but it just looked too concerted and widespread to be anything else.”

Cunningham says the row of the £56-per-head medals awarded to the first MSPs stands out. “It’s not an unusual thing to do in inaugural events,” she says. “None of us had been asked about this and I’m sure the decision was made in good faith but it blew up into this massive attack. Most people were pretty bewildered.”

Over the last two decades the country’s relationship with Holyrood has changed. An entire generation has reached adulthood knowing nothing but devolution and recognising Edinburgh as a key centre for national governance. “We’re now part of the landscape,” says Cunningham. “It’s a very open place. The vast numbers of people who began to pour in started to change the way people saw it, the parliament itself has become linked into the public consciousness. It’s still quite new, really. We are still in the process of its development.”

THE next phase of Holyrood’s development will begin after the polls close on May 6. The constitutional issue has dominated campaigning, with much debate also around how the Alba Party will fare. Cunningham says “any growth in support for independence is welcome”, but questions whether those ex-SNP members who have joined Alba, including her former cabinet colleague Kenny MacAskill, will “find what they want” in the new operation.

Cunningham, who helped found the left-wing 79 Group SNP faction with brother Chris Cunningham, says “I was openly in dissent with the party, but never for a second thought about leaving. That was never in our thinking. Things got changed because of us. There’s dissent, and there’s dissent. The 79 Group was a kind of internal political mission, it wasn’t built on attacks on personalities.

“When you look back on your career it all looks like it was a seamless progression to where you got to, but at the start of it all you have absolutely no idea where it’s going to end up,” she goes on.

“I was a research assistant at headquarters, all I wanted was to work for the party and for independence. I could never have envisaged what would happen. I just took a deep breath and did these things.”