Mhairi Black: Being Me Again

When 20-year-old Mhairi Black was elected to be the member of parliament for Paisley and Renfrewshire South in 2015, she became the youngest person since the Reform Act of 1832 to take a seat in the House of Commons. As if that wasn’t enough, the man she pipped to the post was former foreign secretary Douglas Alexander. She won hands down, beating him by almost 6,000 votes, and all before she had even completed her politics degree at Glasgow University.

Mhairi’s political beginnings were modest, coming from a traditionally Labour-voting family. But in the lead-up to Scotland’s independence referendum in 2014, it became apparent that the young firebrand was a natural orator. She and her dad threw themselves into the Yes campaign, and Mhairi began making speeches at rallies. She recalls it as a magical time in Scotland and was devastated when the campaign was lost. A matter of months later, with a general election on the horizon, people began encouraging her to stand.

From the very beginning of her political career, Mhairi attracted a lot of attention. In July 2015, she gave her maiden speech. It very quickly went viral and was viewed more than ten million times in the first few days. But not all the attention she received was positive; she was trolled as soon as she was selected as a candidate and when she assumed office. On the surface, she dealt with it, but behind closed doors, it began to take its toll. In 2017/18, she was signed off work for three months, a period of time she has never talked about publicly in detail before. During this period, she was eventually diagnosed with ADHD, a diagnosis which she says changed her life.

In this highly personal film, Mhairi talks about her life in depth as never before. As well as exclusive interviews with her wife Katie and father Alan, we go behind the scenes at the House of Commons and as she steps on stage for the first night of her sell-out stand-up show, Politics Isn’t for Me, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.