IN 2010 Dr Eilidh Whiteford was the newbie of the SNP parliamentary group. Then she had the other five slightly longer-in-the-tooth SNP MPs to help her out. Now, there are 50 new MPs in the SNP group.

“I’ve gone from being the newbie to the elder statesman,” she tells The National.

Growing up in Macduff in the north east of Scotland, Whiteford joined the SNP in 1986 when she interviewed young candidate Alex Salmond for her school magazine. Then Salmond was standing for his first election and needed all the help he could get.

“By the end of the interview I decided ‘Aye, he’s no bad’, and agreed to give him a hand with his campaign”.

Some 24 years later Whiteford replaced him as the MP for Banff & Buchan.

From the 1986 election on Whiteford was an active SNP member. During her time at university she played an active role in the Federation of Student Nationalists, including a term as president.

Her studies took her to Scotland and Canada before she came back and taught briefly at Glasgow University.

After university she spent time in the third sector, including a stint at the Scottish Carers Alliance and six years with Oxfam. This campaign work was important to her – it was in 1999 that Whiteford felt that there was a real chance for the voluntary sector to make a difference in Scotland.

“Something I felt very strongly at the time when the Scottish Parliament was established was that there were other ways of influencing the political process than just being an elected politician. Democracy’s not just something you do every five years. Actually in Scotland we’ve got such a rich civil society, and that’s an enormous bit of our democracy.”

In the SNP Westminster group’s recent round of spokesperson appointments, Whiteford was named as the party’s person for social justice and work and pensions.

She is passionate about politics connecting to the people.

The first piece of advice she would give to her new colleagues is to sort out constituency offices and make sure it’s easy for constituents to get in touch.

“Politics isn’t something we do to people” she says. “There’s a huge tendency for politics to get very detached from people’s lives, and you see the symptoms of that in the alienation in voter turnouts where they’ve really fallen in the last 40 years.

“In Scotland we’ve really bucked that trend. The referendum’s been a great galvaniser in terms of making people realise how transformative politics potentially can be”

Whiteford’s excited about the next term. The new MPs in her group she believes will be transformational.

“We’ve [the SNP] got everything from trade union officials to QCs, teachers, charity workers and people who have have worked in a wide range of different industries.

“There’s such a range of different life experiences and that’s a real strength”.