Mark McDonald repeats calls for a second chance as he returns to Scottish Parliament

Mark McDonald - Mark McDonald/Facebook screengrab

Former SNP children’s minister Mark McDonald has repeated calls to be given a second chance as he returned to the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday.

McDonald had been absent for four months while the SNP was investigating complaints against him – a process he said he had understood at the beginning would only take “a matter of weeks”.

In a press conference, the MSP said he was not there to “antagonise anybody or upset anybody” and would keep his head down to represent his constituents.

Having resigned from the SNP, McDonald will now sit as an independent, where it is understood he has been assigned an office in the basement away from the rest of the MSPs’ offices and will sit in the chamber behind the Labour group, opposite his former SNP colleagues.

In the face of calls from the First Minister and others to resign, McDonald denied that standing down and triggering a by election would better serve constituents.

He said: “The point I made was I want to be able to demonstrate the reflections that I’ve undertaken and the commitment I have made to improve my conduct and behaviour going forward, and I said yesterday in the interviews I undertook that I don’t think a by-election campaign affords that opportunity to demonstrate that to people.

“The way I demonstrate that is through the way that I work, the way that I operate on behalf of those constituents and the work that I undertake going forward.

“That’s the commitment that I am making from this day forward in relation to my future conduct.

“I’m asking people to give me the opportunity to demonstrate that and give me that second chance and that’s what I’ve asked for.”

McDonald was among those who called for former MSP Bill Walker to resign as an MSP in 2013 following accusations of domestic abuse, but he denied his case was comparable.

He said: “Bill Walker was convicted of a criminal offence and that was the thing that led to him leaving parliament at the time.

“At no stage in this process has there been any indication or suggestion my conduct was criminal, and that remains the case.”

However, McDonald refused to give any further details of what he had done or the content of the text messages he had sent.

He said there was “a process I have chosen to respect” and putting further information into the public domain himself would not be appropriate because it would affect the women who had made the complaints as well as himself.