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Typical of a politician who wears their heart on their sleeve, few contributions to debate in the Scottish Parliament have been more moving than that given by Margo MacDonald yesterday when she spoke about her battle with degenerative illness and her openness to the idea of assisted suicide.

With a lifetime of achievement behind her and Parkinson's disease to contend with, she has peered into the abyss and doesn't like what she sees.

Her fellow parliamentarians and other friends will be reassured by her declaration in November that she had no intention of departing the political scene any time soon.

But they will be saddened that illness has cast such gloom over one of the liveliest and most controversial figures on the political scene over the past 30 years and more.

She burst on to the national scene in 1973 by snatching Govan for the SNP from Labour in a Westminster by-election. The blonde bombshell's career as an MP was short-lived - Labour won the seat back four months later in the General Election - but the SNP has bounced back from worse setbacks and so did MacDonald, who became SNP deputy leader in 1979. Within three years she was enhancing the CV which would later win her the Maverick of the Year award, leaving the party in 1982 over the decision to suspend seven members of its left-wing '79 group faction. She returned to the fold in the early 1990s and was elected to the first Scottish Parliament in 1999.

But disharmony was restored in the run-up to the 2003 election when she was placed fifth on the party's Lothians list, which she regarded as unwinnable. Her new label - Independent - was an apt description.