Ruth Davidson’s decision was personal, but her departure is a loss for all of us | Libby Brooks

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As the Scottish Tory leader’s resignation shows, balancing work and family is still a problem for women in public life

I’m racing across the central belt to cover Ruth Davidson’s resignation, a row for missing an important email from my son’s nursery ringing in my ears, when I realise I’ve been reporting on women’s difficulty balancing work and family for what feels like two centuries. No wonder I’m feeling so ruddy tired. It’s the sheer unwieldy intractability of the dilemmas posed. It’s like getting stuck behind a motorhome on a Highland road: the progress is teeth-grindingly slow, you get tired of hearing yourself complain, then suddenly you’re forced to reverse into a ditch.

At a press conference in Edinburgh on Thursday, the now former Scottish Conservative leader, who is widely admired for transforming her party’s fortunes north of the border, explained that she was leaving frontline politics because she had been “a poor daughter, sister, partner and friend”, and that the birth of her son last October had caused her to “make a different choice”.

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