Thomas Stewart

THOMAS STEWART began working at the Scottish Parliament in December 2017, midway through a Scottish History PhD at the University of Edinburgh, studying the political history of Dundee between the 1970s and the present day. He was originally hired as an intern on a programme supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities, which enables organisations to access the talent of researchers to deliver a specific piece of work or project.As an intern he had a number of responsibilities, one of which included looking into establishing an oral history project that could be included as part of the Parliament’s official archives at National Records of Scotland. Over the course of his internship, lasting between December 2017 and June 2018, he helped establish the Scottish Parliament Oral History Project and conducted 75 interviews with members of Parliament staff, MSPs and journalists, assembling a sizeable collection. Realising that much of this content was unique and interesting, Thomas put the idea of using the output of the project to create a book forward to key personnel within the Parliament. In September 2018, he was rehired to write this book as a member of Parliament staff, and was given almost complete autonomy to bring it together. This vision culminated in the present publication.