My life as a new Scottish MP - the 30,000 steps, seeing Nigel Farage and email deluge

For long-term MPs, winning a seat in Westminster is not a seismic change to their lives.

They have been doing it for a while, and the win maintains them in their role, broadly with the staff and office they had before.

However, for new MPs, winning means needing to find an office, hire staff and, most dauntingly of all, learning how Parliament works.

Susan Murray, the new Lib Dem MP for Mid Dunbartonshire, talked The Scotsman through the processes, and on how she has adjusted to a new normality.

She said: “Your email inbox fills up at a rate you’d have never thought possible. There are just so many congratulatory emails, they are all lovely, then under all the congratulations, there is a ‘this is what we’d like you to do next’.

“In addition to that deluge, there are the constituents reaching out as they need help, and we have to prioritise them.

“At the same time, we are getting huge amounts of information thrown at us on how the Houses of Parliament works, what the offices are for, we have to arrange our travel, accommodation and work out even just walking in and out of a room for being in the chamber, that small head bow acknowledging the Speaker, and again when leaving the room.

“Them there’s the geography of the building, not just what the different offices are, but where and where you can get a decent cup of coffee.”

The Liberal Democrats enjoyed a strong general election result, having 72 members voted into the House of Commons to comprehensively leapfrog the SNP as the third-largest party in the UK.

Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey hailed the result at the time as "exceptional” as he vowed: "This will not be a one off."

"I hope that the style we've gone about it has encouraged people to join the Liberal Democrats,” he said. "It's certainly encouraged them to vote for us. This is an exceptional result, a historic result for the Liberal Democrats."

Comparatively, the SNP’s Westminster seat count shrank from 47 to nine in the July 4 vote - an election that saw turnout in Scotland slump to just 59 per cent.

Ms Murray said of the Lib Dems result: “It was really nice because obviously it was a fantastic result and 72 [MPs] in number. But the changeover, you don’t go straight to your office. We had hot desking until recess.

“Then there is the seeing people you’ve only ever seen on telly and now they’re sitting in the corner. [Former Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn, [Reform UK leader] Nigel Farage, getting use to that normality.” Ms Murray, who defeated the SNPs Amy Callaghan with a majority of 9,673 votes, also discussed the amount of walking required on the parliamentary estate, where more than 3,000 employees support and facilitate the day-to-day running of the House of Commons.

She said: “It’s a lot of walking as well. The first day we were taken around for a tour of the Houses of Parliament and I walked 30,000 steps, in the wrong shoes. My foot took a week to recover!”