Frankly, page 11
I thought it was just part and parcel of politics, something I had to endure. It wasn’t until 2017, when I was filling out a survey conducted by the Scottish Parliament authorities in the wake of the #MeToo revelations, that I realized it had been bullying. It was bullying of an overtly sexual nature, designed to humiliate and intimidate, to cut a young woman down to size and put her in her place.
While I’d like to say that things are better now, I’m not sure it is true. Today, a story of this type would stalk a woman round social media, day and night. We have such a long way still to go to make the public sphere safe for women and girls. I just worry that by the time we get there, there will be too few women left in public life for it to matter.
Perhaps the fact that I have not named this man is another sign that things have not changed as much as I might have hoped. I have thought long and hard about whether I should reveal his identity. I worry that in deciding not to, I am being less brave than I should be. But the thought of his face all over the media, and of the backlash he might try to whip up against me, makes me feel sick. Even just thinking about it transports me back to the day I cried in the toilet all those years ago. It is for my own sake that I am letting him off the hook. But he knows who he is. I can only hope that he has the decency to reflect on how his behaviour made me feel.
As this first session of the new Scottish Parliament drew to a close, I was miserable. Partly, it was personal. My relationship with Stuart was dead, though not yet buried. I was living a nomadic existence, staying as much as I could at a friend’s place in Edinburgh to avoid going home. But it wasn’t just that.
I had fallen out of love with politics. My expectations of the Parliament, like those of the country as a whole, had been high, probably unrealistically so – and the experience had fallen short. Tragically, towards the end of 2000, the First Minister, Donald Dewar, who had become a ‘father of the nation’ figure, died suddenly. It shocked the body politic, and the country, to the core. A year later, his successor Henry McLeish was forced to resign over an expenses ‘scandal’. By today’s standards, what he was accused of seems insignificant, but it all added to a sense that MSPs were not up to the task. I was starting to think it about myself too: was I good enough to make the difference that I wanted?
By the time of the 2003 election, I was going through the motions, with no real passion or enthusiasm. I was the candidate in Govan again, but this time I didn’t I believe I had any chance of winning. At John’s appointment, I was also the national campaign manager. We tried hard to apply the lessons of 1999 and, superficially at least, our campaign was more professional than four years previously. We had an advertising agency and PR professionals helping guide our message. But while our presentation may have been slicker, the politics were wrong. Our pitch was too negative. Our strapline was ‘Time’s Up’ and most of our material focused on the failings of Labour in general and Jack McConnell, First Minister since late 2001, in particular. We still weren’t giving people a clear reason to vote for us. Negative campaigns rarely win elections.
The public mood was difficult for us to navigate too. In 1999, many people were unwilling to vote for an independence-supporting party without first getting to experience devolution in action. In 2003, they were unwilling to do so because the devolved Parliament had been a disappointment and confidence in self-government had been undermined. Tony Blair was becoming ever more divisive, but although public opinion about the Iraq war was sceptical at that point, it hadn’t yet turned as sour as it later became. Whatever doubts people had about Labour, they had deeper ones about us. The divisions and dysfunction that had bedevilled us over the past four years had made us look even less like a government in waiting than we had been in 1999.
The outcome was a disaster. We went backwards, losing seven of our thirty-five seats, with big names like Mike Russell amongst them. Our vote share dropped by five percentage points. For a third time running, I had failed to make the breakthrough in Govan. We entered the second session of the Scottish Parliament in a state of crisis, with John’s leadership on shaky ground.
For me, it felt like the end of the road, the point at which my political story would be over. The only question was whether I would serve the term or stand down sooner. Either way, the girl who had lived and breathed politics for as long as she could remember was on the verge of quitting. She was done. Or so she thought.
CHAPTER SIX
Climbing the Mountain
A week after polling day, I moved out of the flat I had shared with Stuart for the previous few years. Our relationship had limped on for much longer than was good for either of us. In the end, he forced the pace, but it was me who moved out. Within forty-eight hours of biting the bullet, I had viewed, leased and moved into a swanky modern flat in Glasgow city centre. I have seen Stuart less than a handful of times since. Notwithstanding the upset of the break-up, the move proved to be really good for me. I went out more, saw friends I hadn’t kept closely enough in touch with, and generally learnt to relax a bit more.
It was soon after that my relationship with Peter Murrell started. I had known Peter since I was a teenager. He had been recruited in 1987 to run Alex’s constituency office in Peterhead and my activities with the Young Scottish Nationalists back then brought me into contact with him on a few occasions. However, it wasn’t until he became the party’s Chief Executive that I got to know him properly. During the 2003 campaign we worked together closely, seeing each other almost every day. It was when that was over and we no longer had to spend so much time together that I realized I still wanted to. And so did he. We tentatively started seeing each other outside of work as he, like me, was emerging from a long-term relationship. But as the year progressed, despite our intentions to take things slowly, we became a couple. I was happy.
I was still determined to get out of politics. I hadn’t decided whether to do so quickly or wait until the end of the term, four years hence. As a regional MSP, I could have stood down with no by-election; the person behind me on the party list would simply have taken my place. My indecision on timing was perhaps a sign that deep down I wasn’t as sure as I thought. But I felt certain at the time, and liberated. I started to think seriously about the different path I wanted to take. I knew going back to being a solicitor wasn’t it, but something around human rights or international law appealed. I was also keen on seeing more of the world, maybe working overseas for a while.
I found that when I stopped obsessing about rungs on the political career ladder, I could think more deeply about the substance of politics. Suddenly I wasn’t just swallowing the party line but was working out my own opinion. I was reading a lot of non-fiction about US politics, the Middle East, Ireland. I read a pile of books on the New Labour project – volumes by people like Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. I tried to work out what the SNP should and should not learn from that example. I began to form strong views about what we had to do differently as a party. I told myself it was academic, that I was unlikely to fight another election, but, of course, it became highly relevant as we approached the 2007 contest.
It seemed suddenly obvious to me that any advance in the independence cause depended on the Scottish Parliament being a success. If confidence in it was destroyed, people’s response wouldn’t be to support independence; they would simply lose faith in Scotland’s ability to govern itself. So, instead of opportunistically exploiting the growing pains of devolution, we had to become its champion and persuade people that we were the party to fulfil its potential. Only when the Scottish people could see and feel the benefits of self-government would they demand more.
Tied to that was the need to tell people what an SNP government would mean for their own lives. It’s not that people don’t care about the higher principles of politics. But, not unreasonably, they also want to understand how it translates to their day-to-day realities: their jobs and incomes, their children’s education, the availability of healthcare when their family needs it. We hadn’t yet given people confidence that we could make their lives better either in the clarity of our message or the credibility of our messengers. That needed to change.
The liberation was personal as well as political. I was also taking the time to indulge my passion for fiction in a way I hadn’t for a while. I had loved reading novels as a child, but it was in this period that I realized just how important they were to me. Over the years, I have learned more from literature about people, places and periods in history than I have from the various non-fiction tomes I have ploughed through. Reading fiction is essential to my equilibrium, and during this period it helped me centre myself.
Over the summer of 2003, I went on a Margaret Atwood binge. Oryx and Crake had just been published and I went on to voraciously consume her back catalogue. It was over this summer that I also started reading the Scottish crime novelist Val McDermid. The Distant Echo – the first in what became her Karen Pirie series – was just out. Reading that then led me to everything else she had written. What I didn’t know then – and couldn’t have predicted – was that Val and her partner, Jo, would later become my best friends.
I was also having fun. I was a woman, in my early thirties, living alone in the centre of our biggest city. I was making the most of it, seeing Peter regularly, but also going out with pals – especially my longstanding friend, who would later become an MP, Anne McLaughlin. I even went on a health kick, becoming a committed disciple of the Carol Vorderman detox diet. Whatever people say about fad diets, it worked and I lost a lot of weight.
I was realizing more generally just how limited my thinking and experiences had been. It was no wonder that despite the raw talent I had for politics, I had wilted in the white light of scrutiny. While I had been focusing so exclusively on climbing the greasy political pole, even parliamentary trips overseas had seemed like an indulgence, as I was always worried about the intrigue and opportunities I might miss at home. It was incredibly short-sighted of me. In the year after the 2003 election, I went on cross-party trips to Croatia and Canada. I also spent a week on my own in Paris, at the invitation of the French government, meeting politicians and officials to learn more about governance and democracy.
I was, step by step, broadening my mind and my horizons. I wasn’t doing it with an eye to my political advancement, quite the opposite in fact. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that when the moment came to recommit myself to politics, I was much better equipped for what lay ahead.
My own adventures took my mind off the ongoing – and deepening – troubles of the SNP. Far from being a wake-up call, the election setback turbocharged the internal bloodletting. The divisions were ostensibly about strategy and, unbelievably, we were still arguing about whether we were pro or anti the devolved Scottish Parliament. We were also split on whether the route to independence should be via a referendum or just a majority of seats in an election (at that point a laughably forlorn hope), and on how left wing or centre ground we should be.
Personality clashes and oversized egos also played a part. It always seemed to me that people like Alex Neil and Jim Sillars were serial malcontents who wanted to be in charge and couldn’t reconcile themselves to the fact they weren’t. In the autumn of 2003, a little-known MSP called Bill Wilson decided to challenge John for the leadership. Although they denied it, there is no doubt in my mind that Jim Sillars and Alex Neil were behind it. It spoke volumes that neither of them had the guts to stand themselves. I was strongly in support of John, but, as I considered myself to be in the exit lane from frontline politics, I didn’t want to be as closely involved in the contest as I had been in 2000.
That position didn’t hold for very long. A lengthy article that I wrote for a Sunday newspaper setting out what I thought the party had to do to get itself on track was interpreted as a thinly veiled pitch for a leadership bid of my own. Maybe I had been naive in not foreseeing that, but the upshot was that I threw myself into John’s campaign. I wanted there to be no doubt that he had my full support. He won, but the contest was deeply unpleasant. It did nothing to broaden our appeal to the electorate; probably the opposite. At the time, SNP leaders were elected by just a few hundred delegates from branches across the country. These were the most active activists in our ranks, fantastic people, but not necessarily representative of the wider public. It was to John’s credit that he set about trying to fix this.
In spring 2004, he drove through far-reaching reforms to our internal processes. The most important of these was the adoption of a ‘one member, one vote’ system for the election of the leader and deputy leader. This was more than just a technocratic change. It was instrumental in our journey to government in 2007. The wider membership of a party is still not perfectly representative of a country, but it is much more so than a narrow activist base and it forced us to look outwards.
Another of the proposed reforms was the adoption of positive action to boost the number of women elected to Parliament. It was a move I had long advocated, but the party had repeatedly rejected it. We had always had able, high-profile women in our ranks, including Winnie Ewing, Maggie Ewing and Roseanna. But quality was masking the lack of quantity, so I spoke out in favour of reform. ‘Women are not a minority,’ I argued, ‘we form the majority of the Scottish population. If we can’t get it right for the majority, what chance do we have of getting it right for the minorities we want to see represented in our parliament?’
For the first time, the SNP backed positive action. These reforms were vital, but they were not enough to save John’s leadership. In the European election in June 2004, we polled less than 20% of the vote, going backwards, not forwards. Gil Paterson, an MSP who had lost his seat in 2003, was the first to call for John’s resignation. That wasn’t surprising. Much less expected was Mike Russell’s public comment that it was time for the ‘men in grey kilts’ to step in. It was a move that hurt John deeply. Mike had been a long-time friend, and an MSP until 2003, when he lost his seat.
It was a horrible time. The party’s difficulties were not solely John’s fault, they were our collective responsibility. He did everything he could to turn things around, but on 22 June he announced that he was stepping down as leader.
John Swinney’s leadership ended on a sour note between the two of us. Given how close we had been, this made an already distressing situation even worse. My own naivety was partly to blame, but so too was a bit of foul play by Roseanna. In the days leading up to John’s resignation, I had decided to reach out to her. I was upset by the continued deterioration in our relationship. My move was well intentioned but, in the circumstances, ill judged. We arranged to meet for lunch in a restaurant in Stirling. Referring to the possibility of a leadership election, I told her that I was worried about the potential in the weeks ahead of us being pitted against each other. I expressed the hope that we could avoid this.
Later that evening, I learned that the Daily Record was about to run a story to the effect that I had tried to persuade Roseanna to form a ‘joint ticket’ leadership bid with me, in what was essentially a plot to oust John. I was stunned and devastated. I felt stupid and more fearful than ever that there was no way back for our friendship. Worst of all, it quickly became clear that, though the story wasn’t true, John believed it.
It seemed to me that the story could only have come from Roseanna or someone she had confided in. The motive? Perhaps it was revenge for the shoddy way she felt I had treated her, but it also gave her an advantage in the leadership election that was surely coming. It is a truism in politics that he, or she, who wields the knife rarely wears the crown. If she could make members believe that I had stabbed John in the back, any bid of mine to succeed him would be undermined from the outset.
Roseanna threw her hat in the ring almost immediately after John announced his resignation. She showed a lot of energy, guile and ruthlessness in those few days. Mike Russell would also soon declare, though his candidacy was never a serious proposition. Suddenly I had a big decision to make too. I made the wrong call. Standing to be leader of the party, at that moment, was a stupid thing to do and, if I am being honest, I knew it. Although the debates around internal reforms had sucked me back in, I had only recently been contemplating giving up politics.
More to the point, I wasn’t yet up to being leader. I was starting to mature in my thinking and approach to politics and I certainly wasn’t lacking in ability or, relative to many others, political experience. However, my first difficult few years as an MSP should have told me that I needed to become a more rounded person, to build the experience and hone the skills I would require. I should have had the courage to recognize and acknowledge this. Instead, I succumbed to a dangerous duo of factors.
The first was the flattery of those encouraging me to stand. The second was my ambition. What if this moment never came around again? On 24 June, I announced my candidacy. I then formed a joint ticket with Kenny MacAskill as candidate for deputy leader. My long-time friend, Shona Robison, was my campaign manager, and on board my team were individuals with whom I would serve in government years later, such as Richard Lochhead, Angus Robertson and Kevin Stewart. Allison Hunter, the former full-time party organizer and latterly my election agent, played a key role too.
Shortly after, I flew to London to see Alex Salmond. He had encouraged me to stand and promised to endorse me at an appropriate moment in the campaign. However, I knew I had to strike a careful balance between the positive impact his support would have and being seen as his puppet. We spent a couple of hours chatting through pitfalls and possible tactics. Later that evening, just as I was going to bed, Alex called to tell me that Sean Connery was in Edinburgh and would like to meet me. Could I get myself there the next morning? It wasn’t an invitation to be turned down, so I hastily rescheduled my flight home.
