According to her boss, Lorna Slater is “an incredibly hard worker”. Let’s just pause a moment to consider this endorsement.

Slater is one of two Scottish ministers drawn from the ranks of the Green Party. Her boss is the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who appointed her in the first place and therefore has a vested interest in Slater’s success in the role.

But the minister has been criticised for supposedly telling her civil servants that even during the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow, she wanted no more than two ministerial appointments a day in her diary, that she didn’t want to start work too early, had plenty of time to eat and an adequate number of days off.

This is, to say the least, would be a list of unusual demands, particularly since COP26 represented everything that brought every Green Party member into politics in the first place. If a Green minister prioritises her down time even as world leaders meet to negotiate an end to climate change, you have to wonder what circumstances might persuade her to forgo a long lie. After preferred gender pronouns, the environment is the Greens’ top priority, but what kind of priority allows a Green minister to get to the pub on the first night of the summit by 17:30?

All of Slater’s alleged demands seem perfectly sensible for your average worker on average wages — a description which does not, unfortunately, include Slater or any of her ministerial colleagues.

I never worked harder than I did during my relatively short ministerial career: early mornings, back-to-back meetings and speeches, briefing sessions — all day, every day. And it was wonderful. It was a privilege. It was the best job I ever had and I was incredibly lucky to have it.

Perhaps, even as co-leader of her party, Slater was unaware of the pressures of a life in politics, particularly the unusual and extraordinary pressures that being a minister entails. She was a Green, after all — what reason had she to speculate about the workload of a minister?

Let’s return to the first minister’s inevitable defence of Slater’s performance. Just to be mischievous, let us take her at her word and assume that Slater is, as Sturgeon said, “an incredibly hard worker”. 

incredible: adjective

1. impossible to believe. “an almost incredible tale of triumph and tragedy”

2. difficult to believe; extraordinary. “the noise from the crowd was incredible”

So, that’s a useful context, and accurate if “impossible or difficult to believe” is what the first minister intended. Perhaps she meant that compared with other colleagues and their workloads, Slater’s own ministerial tartan box is heavier and more substantial, taking up even more time than anyone else’s.

This also has the ring of truth to it. After all, the civil service can only generate so much work for 27 ministers. In pre-devolution days, the old Scottish Office managed to get by with one Secretary of State and four ministers under him, dealing with health, education, transport, the economy and justice, plus anything else that came their way. An increase was obviously necessary after devolution. But 27? Really?

Of course, Slater’s supporters — which includes a smattering of Scottish Labour MSPs from the Corbynite wing of the party — will cite the need for ministers’ roles to be modernised, for their leisure time to be respected, for their family life and mental health not to be compromised by the demands of helping to run a government department.

In fact the Scottish Parliament itself was set up specifically to reform and reject anything that smacked of the “old politics”— i.e. anything that Westminster did.

So no more late night votes, no more early starts, no more working in parliament on Mondays or Fridays (these would be designated “constituency days”). Procedures too were changed, not necessarily for the better, but to make them different from Westminster, which at Holyrood amounted to the same thing. So MSPs could refer to each other by name instead of constituency, the Speaker was referred to as “presiding officer” and instead of having a confrontational “us and them” style chamber separated by two sword lengths, the parliament was made semi-circular in shape, all the easier for its denizens, when the mood took them, to clasp hands and hum Kumbaya my Lord together.

Slater and her new job are part of that 21st century makeover. Working all the hours that God sends for the good of your country is just so…well, Westminster. Ministerial work now must fit into a minister’s social life. 

Now that really is incredible.