Margaret Ferrier: Who is the MP who broke Covid rules?
- Published
Margaret Ferrier campaigns with the then-SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon ahead of the 2019 General Election
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
She had travelled to London while feeling ill in 2020 then got a train home after a positive Covid test.
Ferrier was elected as an SNP member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West in 2015 but was suspended from the party after the lockdown breach in 2020 and has since sat as an independent.
She had taken a Covid test on Saturday 26 September 2020 after noticing what she described as a "tickly throat".
While awaiting her results, she went to church, gave a reading to the congregation and spent more than two hours in a bar in Prestwick, South Ayrshire.
The next day she travelled to London by train and spoke in the Commons before finding out a short time later that she had tested positive for the virus.
Ferrier decided to get a train back to Glasgow the following day, fearing she would have to self-isolate in a London hotel room for two weeks.
She was arrested and charged with culpable and reckless conduct in January 2021 and pleaded guilty last August. A month later she was ordered to carry out 270 hours of community service.
The 62-year-old first became an MP in 2015 in the SNP landslide that saw the party take 56 of the 59 seats in Scotland.
'Scottish identity'
Ferrier, who won Rutherglen and Hamilton West, pulled off one of the biggest shocks on a night full of surprises.
Her victory overturned a Labour majority of 21,002 - one of the largest in the UK - and she ended up the winner by 9,975 votes.
She was 54 when she was chosen to be the SNP candidate and had only joined the party four years earlier.
Soon after becoming an MP, she told the Rutherglen Reformer, external she could not remember a time when she did not support an independent Scotland.
Even as a member of the Labour Party in her youth, she felt the country should go it alone, she said.
Born in the south of Glasgow, she lived for almost two years of her childhood in Spain.
She told the Reformer she had early memories of correcting people in Spain when they called her English.
"I wasn't English, I was Scottish, so I always had that Scottish identity, even from the age of 12," she said.
Ferrier returned to Scotland in 1972 and settled with her family in Rutherglen.
Margaret Ferrier in the House of Commons during a debate on the coronavirus response
She is said to have had a keen interest in politics since her early-20s and was a member of Amnesty International.
Before becoming an MP, she had worked as a commercial sales manager for a manufacturing construction company in Motherwell.
Although she said she voted for the SNP on a number of occasions, she did not join the Rutherglen branch of the party until 2011.
She quickly established herself in the local party and was a candidate for the council elections in 2013.
She said she was initially reluctant to contest the Westminster seat in 2015 and admitted at the time that some potential candidates may have been put off by the prospect of taking on a huge Labour majority.
Her surprise win was followed by defeat in the snap election of 2017 when Ged Killen regained the seat for Labour with a slender majority of 265.
'Dangerous and indefensible'
The then-First Minister Nicola Sturgeon visited Rutherglen to offer her support for Margaret Ferrier as she campaigned successfully to win back the seat in the 2019 election.
Ferrier was one of the MPs who called on the prime minister's adviser Dominic Cummings to resign in the wake of the controversy over his visit to the North East of England during lockdown.
At the time, she said his actions had "undermined the sacrifices that we have all been making in lockdown to protect each other from coronavirus" and described his position as "untenable".
It subsequently emerged that Ferrier had travelled from Glasgow to London with Covid symptoms, and then returned home by train after testing positive.
Nicola Sturgeon was quick to condemn her actions as "dangerous and indefensible".
The former SNP leader later called "with a heavy heart" for Ferrier to resign as an MP.