Dorothy Byrne: When you’ve coxed your crew onto the rocks, First Minister, it’s okay to say sorry

I have been completely wrong in my attitude towards a matter of great importance and, as a result, I made a major policy error.

Yes, Nicola Sturgeon, I am admitting that a woman in a key leadership position can come clean when she has messed up. Why would anyone trust her otherwise?

As with the first minister, my error at first appeared peripheral to the key issues facing me but that was my big mistake. If I had listened to my critics, I would have realised. But I was on a mission to succeed and complaints from a group of women seemed marginal. I know better now and have apologised unreservedly to those women. As a result, we are now united in doing something utterly brilliant.

I blame my error on the fact I come from Paisley, which is splendid but tends to make you prejudiced against people you think are posh. Friends had convinced me that if I became the head of a Cambridge College, I could help make Cambridge University a truly inclusive educational establishment. So I applied to be the President of Murray Edwards College. I am also a feminist, Murray Edwards is a women’s college, and I believe we still need women’s institutions to stand up for our rights. To my astonishment, I got the job.

I made my big blunder almost as soon as I arrived. The government, newspapers, Auntie Thomasina Cobley and all were rightly pressurising universities and colleges to improve their support for young people with mental health problems. The issues were particularly stark for young women. The Office for National Statistics revealed in 2020 that nearly a third of girls and young women aged 16 to 24 reported depression and anxiety.

Then I got a letter from students asking the college to buy a boat. I was in the midst of creating a wellbeing programme to combat depression and anxiety and some students wanted me to buy a boat! I told them I had more important financial priorities.

After that knock-back from a new President (imagine what it must have been like making a good point under Donald Trump’s new administration), I didn’t hear anything for another year. In the meantime, I realised that a good wellbeing service is about keeping women well, not just helping them once they are sick. I started to think in a whole new way about why young women feel so awful now compared with how students felt 50 years ago when I was at university.

At this point, those boat women came back and hit me for six, to mix my sporting metaphors. They brought me extraordinary testimony from our students about how rowing had helped their health and wellbeing. And I realised that wellbeing and boats are not two different things. They are the same. In the same boat, you might say. I was wrong and prejudiced.

So I bought a boat. Or, to be accurate, persuaded the college to buy two thirds of a boat and appealed to kind donors to chip in the rest. If I had listened properly in the first place, this is what I would have discovered: the Murray Edwards Boat Club has more members than any other sports society and had to turn away 60 applicants because it didn’t have enough boats. Rowers have an extraordinary sense of belonging, proved to enhance wellbeing. Students who row have to eat a balanced diet and get up early in the morning, transforming their wellbeing. Women who engage in university sports activities also do better in their exams. I’m campaigning for more and better sport in our schools, colleges and universities to help combat depression and anxiety.

First minister, it’s not only possible but liberating to admit you are wrong.

Dorothy Byrne, former head of news at Channel 4, is president of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge