Mandy Rhodes

Edinburgh

Managing Director and Editor at Holyrood

MD & Editor of @holyrooddaily "the kind of magazine the Italian Camorra might subsidise...a glossy, vapid pile of nothingness" PPA UK columnist of year & @EHRC

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Articles

Maggie Chapman is an activist not a parliamentarian

2 weeks ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

Maggie Chapman, like other dogmatists, lacks self-awareness when it comes to how she hurts others while berating everyone else for not being kind. And my conclusion is that she just doesn’t care. Her imperious demands for her way or the highway, her assumptions about the motivations and prejudice of others, and her lack of any contrition about the damage she has inflicted on the reputation of the body politic by refusing to back down on her Trumpian attack on the Supreme Court is telling.
I am woman, hear me roar

1 month ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

It was the lesbians wot won it. Having always been the more ignored sexual minority, it was a defining moment in the For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers’ case at the Supreme Court when the great legal minds wrestling with the apparently vexed question of ‘what is a woman’ had to then grapple with the idea that lesbians were not sexually attracted to a certificate. It was a comedic moment in what had already felt like a surreal case. It seemed like the right time to stop for lunch.
Children in poverty don’t have time to wait for whatever 'change' actually means to Keir Starmer

1 month ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

The SNP will eradicate child poverty by 2030. It’s a bold claim. But that is the target, the legal obligation, and John Swinney’s guiding moral mission. But today, less than five years and one election to go to that deadline and with 18 years of governing Scotland already on the clock – most of that with the now first minister in charge of the public coffers – there are more than 10,000 children being housed (not homed) in temporary accommodation.
When Nicola Sturgeon looks back on her career, it is she who should feel shame

1 month ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

I literally bumped into Nicola Sturgeon a couple of months ago when I crossed the street and almost tripped over her as she wheeled her suitcase down the Royal Mile for one of her rare appearances at Holyrood. The meeting surprised us both – we haven’t spoken in years – and the greeting, while reasonably polite as the conventions of etiquette leap-frogged the creeping realisation of all that has passed between us, was cold – a muffled salutation that gave no hint to the warmth we once shared.
Sitting on the precipice of World War Three, the SNP response gave me the cringe

2 months ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

Trumpian politics might well turn our sensitive stomachs. I suspect our prime minister finds them as abhorrent as most. Afterall, slugging it out in public is hardly the ‘British way’.
Naomi Cunningham: I’m fuelled by rage, and I’ve been lucky

2 months ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

Employment tribunals don’t usually hit international headlines. But Sandie Peggie vs Fife Health Board isn’t just dominating the news, it is also consuming politics at Holyrood and Westminster.
Anas Sarwar: Labour will 'earn the right to form a government' in 2026

2 months ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

This time last year Anas Sarwar bounced onto the stage at party conference in Glasgow to the backing track of Sia’s Unstoppable. The pop pick reflected the high-energy mood in the room.
Sandie Peggie case has helped Anas Sarwar grow a pair when it comes to gender self-ID

2 months ago | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

I am no psychologist, but I understand the concept of ex post facto rationalisation whereby people try and give logic to their past choices, even when it was obvious that they were mistakes at the time. Some might just call it a chancer’s charter. And that’s exactly how I would describe Scottish Labour’s cynical attempt to absolve itself of the damaging psychodrama that has engulfed Scotland with the dogged pursuit of gender self-identification.
Another broken promise: Scotland's children are being failed badly

Feb 7, 2025 | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

Former first minister Humza Yousaf’s currency of late rests on him seeing almost everything through a particular lens, understandably perhaps, a very personal lens, and while I appreciate his pain over the atrocities committed in the Middle East and his stomach-punch response to wherever he perceives racism, it doesn’t make all his deliberations right or give him a monopoly on calling out injustice.
Trading Places: Back in government, Douglas Alexander is a new man

Jan 24, 2025 | holyrood.com | Mandy Rhodes

Nothing spoke more to the seismic shifting of the tectonic political plates in Scotland than when Douglas Alexander, a Labour MP for 18 years, a veteran of the Tony Blair years, a former government minister, and with a majority of 16,000, lost his seat in 2015 to the 20-year-old politics student Mhairi Black. Like Black, Alexander was still a student, albeit a returning one, when he was first selected to stand for Westminster in 1995.