Meet Labour’s elite Scottish MPs

Scottish Labour has won 37 of the 57 seats north of the border, an increase of 36 on the 2019 result. This is the party’s best showing in Scotland since 2010 and comes nine years after losing all but one of their seats to the SNP. Labour will be sending its most impressive crop of Scottish MPs to Westminster in a generation. Leading the pack is Douglas Alexander, the new MP for Lothian East. A protege of Gordon Brown, he was MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South from 1997 to 2015, serving as transport and later Scottish secretary under Tony Blair and international development secretary under Brown. After 14 years in opposition, the pool of Labour MPs with senior ministerial experience is small, so it’s unlikely that someone of Alexander’s talents will stay on the backbenches for long.

Shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray, the only Labour MP to survive in Scotland in 2015, returns to Westminster, accompanied by Michael Shanks, a teacher who won the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election last October.