I was born in Edinburgh in 1977 and was comprehensively schooled (alas, only in the political sense) at Craigentinny Primary and Leith Academy Secondary School.

I then did a Psychology degree at the University of Aberdeen for no logical reason, but got involved in student journalism and managed to secure a place at the Cardiff School of Journalism on graduating in 1999, the same year that my home town was blessed with the newly-constituted Scottish Parliament.

I worked as a rather shiftless staff reporter on the Edinburgh Evening News for a year and a half, before being lured into television to present and produce The Week In Politics for Grampian TV/Scottish TV. This was enormously good fun, and when it was scrapped at the end of 2003, I stayed on as a reporter on its successor, Politics Now.

When it became clear that commercial television was no place for a mediocre political anorak, I moved to London to work as a Parliamentary Aide to David Mundell MP, the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland. I’ve since gone horribly native, both institutionally and geographically. I finished at the House of Commons just before Christmas and am now 'between jobs'.