Ruth Davidson has signalled she could quit frontline politics if her bid to become First Minister fails at the next Holyrood election.
The Scottish Conservative leader told a St Andrews audience she knows what she wants to do “up until 2021”, but will see what happens after that.
Her comments come less than a week after she ruled out vying for Number 10 for the sake of her mental health and relationships.
Speaking at a launch event of her new book on Friday, the mum-to-be said a lot of politicians get “seduced by the bubble” and know they are going to be “carried out in a box” from parliament.
The former Fife schoolgirl there will come a day when she will walk away from politics because it “takes so much from your family life and what you’re able to give to friends and others”.
Asked about her next career, she said: “I literally have no idea what comes next for me.
“I know what I want to be doing up until 2021, about the first Thursday in May,” she said referring to the date of the next Scottish Parliament election.
“I will let everything else take care of itself after that.”
She said her ambition is to replace Nicola Sturgeon in Bute House, saying: “I want to be able to take Scotland to that next level and to get us past constitutional politics and invest all of our time, of government and civil servants, into bringing the country together to focus on our future.”
Ms Davidson, who is going on maternity leave next month, was speaking at an event hosted by Topping and Company Booksellers as part of the launch of Yes She Can, which was published this week.
At the start of the question and answer session at Hope Park and Martyrs Church, organiser Robert Topping said they had run similar events with the likes of Alex Salmond and Gordon Brown, but this was the first time the bookshop had received abuse from “nasty creatures on Twitter”.
