Profile: Danny Alexander

Danny Alexander, the newly-appointed secretary of state for Scotland, is one of the Liberal Democrats' newest MPs but already a political veteran. A fresh-faced and congenial 37-year-old, Alexander has been immersed in Lib Dem politics since he began working for the party as a Scottish press officer in 1993, based in Edinburgh and Westminster, soon after leaving Oxford university. An MP for five years, with several frontbench roles in work and pensions and social exclusion, he sprang to real prominence as Nick Clegg's chief of staff, taking charge of the party's general election manifesto in 2007. Over the last five days, Alexander was intimately involved in Clegg's negotiations with David Cameron, helping to broker the power-sharing deal. He already has experience of cross-party working, taking up the post of media director for the European Movement and then head of the pro-euro Britain in Europe group in the late 1990s. Chiefly an alliance between Labour and Lib Dems, it also included Ken Clarke, now the justice secretary, and Michael Heseltine as one of its handful of Tory supporters. Educated in Fort William and Oxford, and married with one daughter, Alexander unseated Labour to become the MP for the freshly created Highlands constituency of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey in 2005. He lives in Aviemore, the ski and mountaineering resort south of Inverness, but with his new post, will be splitting his week between three locations: home, Edinburgh and London. Alexander's in-tray: • Enhanced tax-raising and legal powers for the Scottish parliament • Easing in deep cuts in Treasury funding for Scotland • Tackling the Scottish National party's plans for a referendum on Scottish independence