Kezia Alexandra Ross Dugdale is a Scottish former politician who served as Leader of the Scottish Labour Party from 2015 to 2017. A former member of the Scottish Labour Party and Co-operative Party, she was a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the Lothian region from 2011 to 2019.
Born in Aberdeen and raised in Dundee, Dugdale studied law at the University of Aberdeen and Policy Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where she was a campaigns and welfare adviser. After leaving university, she worked as an election agent, political researcher and parliamentary officer. She was elected at the 2011 Scottish Parliament election on the Lothian regional list and became Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party in 2014.
Dugdale was elected Leader of the Scottish Labour Party in the 2015 Scottish Labour leadership election. She led the party into the 2016 Scottish Parliament election; where it finished third behind the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Scottish Conservatives; Dugdale failed to be elected to the Edinburgh Eastern constituency, once again being elected on the Lothian regional list. During the 2017 general election, the party held their previously sole seat and gained a further six seats from the SNP. She resigned as leader in August 2017 to "pass on the baton" to a successor who would lead the party into the 2021 Scottish Parliament election.
After leaving frontbench politics, Dugdale worked as a columnist and appeared as a contestant on the seventeenth series of ITV reality show I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! in November 2017. She later resigned her seat and Scottish Labour membership in July 2019 and accepted the role of director of the John Smith Centre for Public Service at the University of Glasgow.
