SNP leadership contest: Who is Ash Regan?

Despite having been a government minister for four years, Ash Regan was little known outside of the Holyrood bubble until she quit as community safety minister over plans to allow people to self-identify their gender.

Ms Regan had been a longstanding critic of the proposals and was one of the senior SNP politicians - including her leadership rival Kate Forbes - who signed an open letter to the first minister raising their concerns.

She was also one of the nine SNP MSPs who rebelled against the party whip in the final vote last December.

She is seen as being the outsider in the leadership contest, trailing behind Ms Forbes and Humza Yousaf in the few polls that have been done since Nicola Sturgeon announced she was standing down.

But she has insisted she is "in it to win it" - pointing to the large number of apparently undecided SNP members who will choose the next leader.

Ms Regan, who is the oldest of the three candidates at 49 and has twin sons, is pitching herself as the best person to reinvigorate the independence movement.

She has accused her opponents of being "wishy washy" on independence, and has pledged to unite the various Yes groups and political parties through an Independence Convention if she does manage to upset the odds and win the SNP leadership.

This would appear to include Alex Salmond and his Alba Party, with Ms Regan saying she would be open to readmitting the former SNP leader and first minister to the party if he wanted to do so.

Ms Regan has dismissed claims that she is effectively Mr Salmond's candidate in the leadership contest, despite many of her policies being very similar to his.

She has been critical of the current SNP leadership, most notably the party's chief executive Peter Murrell - Ms Sturgeon's husband - who she has accused of having a "clear conflict of interest" during the contest to succeed his wife.

The Edinburgh Eastern MSP has said Mr Murrell's role would be like having Carrie Johnson counting the votes in an election to decide her husband Boris's successor as prime minister.

Mr Murrell was subsequently forced to quit after admitting that he had been responsible for misleading information about the party's membership numbers being given to the media.

Ms Regan has accused SNP HQ of "bussing" supporters of Mr Yousaf to party hustings events because they are scared he might lose, and called for people who had cast their ballot before Mr Murrell's resignation to be able to edit their ballot.

She has also attacked some of Ms Sturgeon's key policies, including the deposit return scheme which she has said she would scrap in its current form.

And she has said she would not fight the UK government's block on the gender reform legislation in the courts on the basis that "I don't think we would win".

It seems unlikely that the SNP's power sharing agreement with the Scottish Greens would survive under Ms Regan.

Her opposition to the return scheme and gender reform, and support for the North Sea oil and gas industry - where she believes the focus should be on protecting jobs - clearly clash with the views of Green ministers Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater.

During the televised STV leaders debate, Ms Regan claimed to have spoken to all of the pro-independence parties, who she said were excited about her plans.

This was immediately dismissed as "plainly false" by Mr Harvie. Ms Regan subsequently clarified that she had "left a message" for the Greens but had not yet heard back.

Those plans include treating every election as a vote on independence, with the pro-independence parties winning more than 50% of the votes being a clear indication that Scotland wants to leave the UK - although she says this is not the same as Ms Sturgeon's plan for a de facto referendum.

She has argued that there is "no possibility" of the UK refusing to open negotiations on independence if this happens "as demonstrated in the 65 examples of countries that have left the UK or British Empire".

Mr Regan said: "There is a 100% success rate in those countries getting the UK government to the negotiating table after an initial refusal. It is not credible to suggest anything else, the UK government will even concede this fact."

Ms Regan has raised eyebrows during the campaign with proposals for an "independence thermometer" that would be erected in a public place so people could see how close Scotland was to independence.

She has claimed it would be possible to create a separate Scottish currency in just a few months, and has already reportedly produced mock-ups of what they might look like, complete with a picture of a unicorn and a signature by Ewan MacDonald - the fictional governor of her "Scottish Reserve Bank".

And she has suggested that a reason for fewer people voting for the SNP in the south of Scotland than in many other parts of the country could be because they get ITV Borders rather than STV - and therefore watch "some English programmes".

Ms Regan also issued an apology "on behalf of the SNP" to people in the Highlands affected by the Scottish government's failure to deliver on a promise to dual the A9 by 2025.

She wrote on her campaign website: "This is a total drop of the ball. We debated at conference, we made a manifesto promise, we approved the work in Parliament, and then we failed to deliver.

"Trust is everything in politics and this is not acceptable. On behalf of the SNP I sincerely apologise."

Ms Regan was born in Biggar - her parents owned a kilt shop in Glasgow - and attended primary school in Scotland before moving to England.

She received a BA in international relations at Keele University and a diploma at the London School of Public Relations.

She worked in PR, marketing and event management before returning to Scotland in 2012, when she became active in the Women for Independence organisation and the Common Weal thinktank.

She joined the SNP after the 2014 referendum, then replaced Kenny MacAskill as the MSP for Edinburgh Eastern by defeating Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale in the 2016 Holyrood election.

She was appointed as the community safety minister by Ms Sturgeon two years later and held the role until her unprecedented resignation over the gender reform bill, which she said her conscience would not let her support.

While serving in government, she proposed legislation to restrict the sale of fireworks and set up a panel aimed at improving outcomes for women involved in the criminal justice system.

Speaking as she formally launched her leadership bid, Ms Regan said the gender self-identification legislation was "flawed and does not command public support".

She also said the SNP had "lost our way" in recent years. She said she would be able to "heal the divisions that have emerged in the past few years" and that "everyone is going to make up and move on" after the contest is over.