KEZIA Dugdale has spoken of the “personal sacrifice” she has made to carry on as Scottish Labour leader after the recent break-up of her relationship and the death of her best friend.
She said she had just been "putting one foot in front of the other” after splitting from fiancée Louise Riddell and saying goodbye to MND campaigner Gordon Aikman this year.
Appearing at a fringe event at the Scottish Labour conference in Perth, Ms Dugdale was asked about the personal cost of being in the public eye when her party is in a slump.
She said: “My attitude certainly in recent weeks is just to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I broke up with my partner who’d I’d been together with for nine years and that was undoubtedly very difficult, very challenging, especially to do it in the public eye.
“It’s a bad thing thing to face at any point in your life, let alone to do it on the front or indeed the middle pages of newspapers. And then I lost my best friend to a disease that I knew was killing him - I just didn’t expect it to take him quite so soon.
“So to say that 2017 hasn’t been the greatest year so far would be of an understatement. I thought 2016 was bad. I’m almost tempted to revisit it.
“But l’ve got a very strong sense of who I am, what my strengths are, what I can contribute, and what I want to do with this job. You do make a personal sacrifice - it is public service.
“But I do it for a reason. I love this party, I love its potential, I love what it’s achieved in the past, and I believe it can achieve great things again.”
She said party workers who went out at night to knock doors made personal sacrifices too.
Ms Dugdale, 35, separated from Ms Riddell, a college lecturer, over Christmas.
When the couple got engaged in Mallorca last August, Ms Dugdale issued a picture of them wearing diamond rings and said she was “utterly thrilled to be marrying the love of my life”.
A former Labour party researcher, Mr Aikman died earlier this month aged 31.
Diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2014, he switched from politics to campaigning for his fellow sufferers and raised £500,000 for research into the incurable disease.
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