It is just over a week since a seismic general election. 

Pundits have been queuing up to talk about politics, parties and power. But what about people?

Who exactly are our MPs - new and old? Where are they from? What have they done with their lives before being elected? Where did they go to school? Or university?

These people represent us. But do they reflect us? How typical are the men and women we elected of the Scottish population as a whole? 

Well, not very. 

The Herald on Sunday - as after previous elections - has taken a deep dive in to the backgrounds of Scottish MPs. 

Even their faces tell a story of how different they are to the population at large. Only 20 of the 57 are women, that is about 35%, in a country which is 51% female.

Just one MP is from a visible ethnic minority, that is 1.7% of the 2025 intake north of the border. But four per cent of Scots are not white.

But the biographies of MPs reveal a group of people who are - and there is no way to sugar-coat this - way, way, way more educated than average. 

They are also far more likely to have gone to private school - we saw a sharp rise in ex-pupils of fee-paying secondaries in the 2024 intake for Westminster.

And our analysis show two out of three of all MPs, news and old, were political professionals, people who had already done paid work in politics before they were elected. 

Still more had a history in relevant and related fields, like public affairs and public policy, trade unions, the civil service or the third sector. 

Very few had much experience in business. Only one MP, Glasgow North East’s Maureen Burke who used to work in a tie factory, appears to have spent a meaningful spell in a traditional working-class occupation. 

And that was more than a quarter of a century ago. The Labour stalwart and local councillor went to college at 40 and pursued a career in politics.

Paul Cairney is a professor of politics at Stirling University who has been studying the backgrounds of politicians for years.

He said: “Most of these results reinforce the new normal for elected representative background. 

“Gone are the stark historic divides between the posh Tory landowners who went to private school and Oxbridge and working-class Labour MPs from comprehensives. 

“The new normal is to expect most MPs to be well-educated middle-class people with jobs in or around politics and with good connections to party recruitment. 

“Some of those connections may be made in private school (far more MPs go there compared to the general population) or university (almost all MPs have graduated), but most seem to come from jobs that represent stepping stones into elected politics.”

School

So where did our MPs go to school? Well, mostly to comprehensives. Of the 54 MPs who have agreed to reveal their secondary education, 12 attended fee-paying institutions. 

That means at least one in five of Scotland’s representatives at Westminster are privately educated, compared with just over four per cent of children.

Hutchesons’ Grammar in Glasgow - which produced the leader of the Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar, and the former first minister Humza Yousaf - now has three former pupils at Westminster and another three at Holyrood. 

This single school, if you include institutions it has taken over, has a block of representatives at national level - six - which is nearly as big as that of the Scottish Greens, with no MPs and seven MSPs.

Gordonstoun, the school which educated King Charles, has two MPs.

Seven of the new Labour MPs in Scotland were privately educated, one Tory, three Liberal Democrats and one Scottish Nationalist. 

The politicians, of course, did not choose to go private - and they are not necessarily from “posh” backgrounds. 

The SNP’s Kirsty Blackman, for example, got a scholarship to go to Robert Gordon’s in Aberdeen, the Lib Dem Susan Murray, who went to the St Margaret Girls’ School, is from a Labour-supporting working family, and Labour’s Joani Reid, a Hutchie old girl, is the grand-daughter of firebrand trade unionist Jimmy Reid.

Read more: What does the rise of the political professional mean for Scotland?

Localness

Voters often say they value the ‘localness’ of their candidates - and there are lots of ways to measure how connecting an MP is to their community.  

One crude way is to see if a person went to a secondary school in the same council area as their seat. That was true for 20 of the 54 MPs who have revealed their schooling. 

Some new MPs have deep roots in their areas. 

Take Labour’s Chris Kane. The new member for Stirling and a proper Son of the Rock, went to school in his home town and literally wrote a column about his community in his local paper and ran his local council. 

He also went to Prof Cairney’s Stirling University, as did four other Scottish MPs.

Varsity

The new crop of Westminster politicians are certainly pretty lettered.

Some 55 of the 57 MPs have shared whether they have higher education or not. Of these, 52 or about 96% went to university. Only three did not. 

Fully 30 of the MPs - more than half the 54 who agreed to tell the Herald where they were educated - spent at least some time at an ancient Scottish university. 

Of those, 15 went to Glasgow. Some observers baulk at the comparison, but a bigger share of Scottish MPs went to this one institution that UK ones went to Oxford and Cambridge put together.

Another three went to Oxford. Only two MPs in the 2024 cohort had spent any of their time studying abroad, including the new member for Edinburgh East, Chris Murray. 

The former diplomat attended Oxford, the Sorbonne, Harvard and the London School of Economics.

We counted everybody who had any experience of university, including people who dropped out for one reason or another.  And we included people who returned to university as adults or did distance learning degrees.

There has, of course, been a big rise in the number of people going to to higher education in recent decades. 

But the  most recent figures, from the 2011 census, show 26% of adult Scots over 16 have degrees.

Jobs

The careers of MPs reflected their education. 

A few came from professions and trades. There were four with experience of journalism, five of the law, two of the military, three of engineering, one of medicine. 

MPs include two surveyors, a police officer, a musician and a professional golfer - Brian Leishman, who won Alloa and Grangemouth, local reporters enjoyed saying, with a big swing. 

There were several civil servants or local government officers or NHS administrators and a handful of new members with experience working in aid or the third sector.

And a good few MPs have experience of casual or short-term work, whether tending bars or gutting fish.

What about business? A fair number of MPs will have had some experience in the private sector, including those who work in public affairs or PR. 

At least three were identifiably entrepreneurs, including Liberal Democrat Angus MacDonald, at some point in their working lives.

But most of them had experience of politics. For some, such as journalist turned Tory Whitehall SpAD John Cooper, this was shortlived. For others, they had done little else in their lives. 

Cairney of Stirling University has tracked this change over the years. He recognises some people do not like it. But politics - in an ever more complex world - really is becoming a profession in itself.

“These figures raise the usual questions about the rise of the 'political class' and its distance from the general population,” he said. “Usually, the legitimate charge is that the political elite is distant in terms of social background and from the hard reality of Scottish daily life. That said, there are some advantages to this typical MP background: a university education boosts their skills of oral and written communication, while political connections may help them get policy done. In other words, a specialist political class may have some benefits for the specialist role of the elected politician.”