Gray announced his resignation the day after the result, but remained in post as leader until his successor, Johann Lamont, took over on 17 December 2011.

Gray was educated at the state comprehensive Inverness Royal Academy and briefly privately at George Watson's College, Edinburgh.

After the sudden resignation of Wendy Alexander (following disagreements with McConnell) in 2002,[6] Gray took over her role as Minister for Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning, where he was responsible for overseeing changes to Scottish higher education.

Leaving Holyrood, he went to work in London as a special adviser to Alistair Darling, who was Secretary of State for Scotland, and initially announced that he would not be seeking re-election.

Following the resignation of Wendy Alexander over a foreign donation scandal,[8] Gray announced in July 2008 that he would stand in the contest to find the next Leader of the Labour group in the Scottish Parliament, and was elected to this post in September 2008.

[9] In December 2010, Iain Gray sparked a diplomatic row when he appeared to claim in parliament that Montenegro had been involved in ethnic cleansing and war crimes during the 1990s Balkans Conflict.

[10] On 7 April 2011, whilst campaigning at Glasgow Central station for the Scottish Parliament election, Gray was forced to cancel an event due to disruption by a group protesting against public spending cuts.

[11] Gray later stated that he had not been unsettled by the incident as "I spent two years working in the civil war in Mozambique, I've been to Rwanda two months after the genocide, I walked the killing fields in Cambodia and I was in Chile three days after Pinochet was demitted from office".