Frankly, page 17
By the time I left Dundee, I had decided to throw myself at the mercy of Parliament, admit what I’d got wrong, apologize and resolve to learn lessons. I wasn’t sure it would be enough to save my skin, but I knew that I would feel better for having done what I felt to be the right thing. I felt calmer, more at peace in my own mind.
Alex, though, was less than happy. In his alpha-male world view, admitting mistakes was a sign of weakness and saying sorry even more so. ‘Never explain, never apologize’ was his mantra. He told me in no uncertain terms that he thought my approach was misguided and that it would damage my standing. He urged me to think again. Normally his disapproval would have shaken my resolve, but not this time. I felt in my bones not only that my way was right in principle but that it was the only possible chance I had of saving my career.
On 24 February, I made a statement to Parliament, every word of which I had written myself. I set out what I believed I had got wrong, but also what I considered I hadn’t. It was important to me that the apology I offered was genuine, not just a convenient device. That meant being clear about what I was, and was not, apologizing for.
As I sat down at the end of the statement, I could feel the change in atmosphere. The Chamber at the outset of the session had felt like a bear pit, the opposition baying for my blood. At the end, they were much more subdued and there even seemed to be some grudging respect. I saw David McLetchie, the former, now late, Tory leader, actually applauding. In that moment, I knew I had weathered the storm. The debate quickly became about whether politics would be better if politicians had more space to admit mistakes, as I had done.
I lived to fight another day, but I had learned some hard lessons, most importantly about the value of listening to my own conscience and trusting my own instincts. Had I followed Alex’s advice, no matter how well intentioned, I would have been finished. He continued to assert that I’d been wrong to apologize. This moment changed our relationship, albeit subtly and imperceptibly at the time. Although I had been developing as a politician in my own right and out of his shadow, it was now that we shifted quite firmly from being mentor and mentee to something closer to equals. With that shift came a hint of tension that had not been there before.
On the same day that I made my apology, the Standards Commissioner ruled that Alex and I had not breached the code of conduct over ‘auction-gate’. We were in the clear. Two controversies – entirely of our own making – which could have brought one or both of us down and caused deep damage to party and government, had not in fact done so. Our integrity had been called into question and our judgement shown to be fallible, but we were able to breathe a huge sigh of relief.
It is easy to forget now, given our landslides in more recent times, that back in 2010 the SNP had not even come close to winning a UK General Election in Scotland. Our high point had been winning eleven seats in 1974. Going into the 2010 contest, we held seven seats. One of these had been the result of a spectacular win in the Glasgow East by-election in 2008, which came at a time of momentum for us and deep unpopularity for UK Labour and Gordon Brown in particular.
David Cameron’s Tories were widely expected to win the UK election. The situation in Scotland was different. Still scarred by the Thatcher years, the priority of the majority north of the border was to vote to defeat the Tories. Traditionally that had meant voting Labour, a tendency we had always struggled to overcome. It would be no easier this time round, but now expectations around us were much higher. We were on the up and Scottish Labour was very much in decline.
Our campaign centred on the notion that voting SNP was the best way to shield Scotland from the austerity cuts that everyone knew were coming. Alex came up with the strapline, which he thought very clever, of ‘More Nats, Less Cuts’. I hated it. Not only was it grammatically offensive, but to my mind it was also weak. Good slogans should be truisms, statements that leave voters nodding their heads. Those that have them scratching their heads and asking, ‘But how?’ rarely work. However, I didn’t have a better idea, so I went along with it. We also decided to set a public target of winning twenty seats. The balance in politics between motivating your supporters with a stretch target and setting yourself up to fail, between ambition and realism, is always a tricky one to strike.
The context of the election, about who would enter 10 Downing Street, was not easy for us to navigate. We struggled just to be heard. Our demand for Alex to be included in the leaders’ debates due to take place between David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg was rebuffed by the broadcasters. So, we decided to go to court. We didn’t think that the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, was likely to find in our favour (it didn’t), but the publicity we got for trying was, to some extent, the objective of the exercise. It got us airtime that we would not otherwise have had.
It made little difference, though. We won the same six seats as in 2005, but lost our Glasgow East by-election gain. The perception was that we had gone backwards. Our vote share rose by 2.2 percentage points, but we fell just short of 20%. Labour’s share went up by 2.5 percentage points, slightly more than ours. They polled 45% of the vote overall and won 41 seats. Given our recent ascendancy and the needlessly bold twenty-seat target, it was a massive setback. It gave the impression that our post-2007 momentum had halted, that Labour was on the up again and that we were heading for defeat the following year. We got on with governing, but the sense of invincibility had gone. Our unity also started to crack around the edges too.
In the aftermath of our election in 2007, we had promised that every penny generated by UK health spending through the Barnett formula (which determines how UK Treasury funding for the Scottish government is calculated) would be passed on to health in Scotland. I had taken every opportunity I could to reiterate and underline that commitment, so that it could not be easily reneged upon. However, as our 2011 budget talks progressed, it became clear that John wanted a way out of it. He argued that the NHS could only meet its objectives if the social care system was functioning well too, and that since social care was a local government responsibility, some of the so-called ‘Barnett consequentials’ should go to councils. His argument wasn’t without merit, but the NHS needed all the money we could give it. Also, my political antennae told me that not honouring our commitment to the NHS would be deeply damaging – and, just months away from a re-election campaign that few gave us much chance of winning, that seemed to me a risk we should not take.
I also felt that my credibility as Health Secretary and my authority within the NHS would be shattered if I failed to deliver on such an important commitment. And there was probably some straightforward pique at play too. I didn’t like not getting my own way. Consequently, I dug my heels in and, for the one and only time during my years in government, I threatened to resign in anger.
John and I had been with Alex in his office in Parliament, each of us making our case. It seemed to me that Alex was siding with John, and my arguments did not appear to be holding sway.
I lingered behind as John left the office and made my move with Alex. The word ‘resign’ didn’t cross my lips but I simply looked him in the eye and told him not to underestimate how strongly I felt about this. My parting words were ‘Do not push me, Alex.’ I was confident he’d got the message, and the next twenty-four hours proved it. Suddenly, there was a shift in John’s position. He proposed that £70 million of the almost £300 million Barnett health ‘consequentials’ should be invested in a Change Fund to encourage the NHS and councils to work together to improve social care. Crucially, however, the money would stay under the control of the health portfolio. Our promise to the NHS would be kept. It was a solution I could live with.
I may have won the budget battle, but our political fortunes didn’t improve. A slow and flat-footed response to a spell of exceptionally bad weather in December made us look incompetent and led to the resignation of our Transport Minister, Stewart Stevenson. It was rough on Stewart – the weather was not his fault – but this was a scalp that even Alex couldn’t or wouldn’t save.
However bad the political climate, though, worse was to come in my personal life. For Peter and me, it was truly devastating.
Our wedding in July 2010 had been joyful. We had an intimate ceremony as planned, attended by close family only, in the gallery of Òran Mór, a small space above the main function room, with a stunning ceiling mural painted by the famous Glasgow writer and artist Alasdair Gray. In the evening, around two hundred friends and colleagues joined us for a party. Alex came late and left early – one of his aides told me later that his nose was out of joint because I hadn’t asked him to make a speech. I had asked my sister, Gillian, to say a few words at the reception, and to say she did us proud would be an understatement. Her speech made Peter and me, and our guests, howl with laughter and cry tears of joy. It was perfect.
We didn’t take much time off afterwards, with just a few days in Portugal. As always, the pressures of work, and the looming election, took priority. However, in the weeks after, we did make one very significant personal decision – to try for a baby.
Peter never put pressure on me, but I knew how much he wanted to be a dad. I was more ambivalent. I love kids. My niece and nephews are the greatest joys of my life. But I have never had a strong maternal yearning. All through my thirties, I waited for an uncontrollable biological urge to kick in, which as women we’re conditioned to believe is inevitable. But it never happened. What kicked in, instead, was an awareness that I was reaching the ‘now or never’ stage of my life; a creeping anxiety that I would wake up one morning when it was too late to do anything about it and find myself full of regret.
For me, then, it was less a decision based on certainty about what I wanted and more a sense of seeing what happened. Of wanting to be able to tell myself that we had tried, even if it turned out that it wasn’t meant to be. What happened is that I got pregnant very quickly. By mid-October, we found ourselves in an Edinburgh hotel room, looking at a positive pregnancy test. Peter was ecstatic. I wanted to be. I told him I was. But – and I still feel so guilty about this – I was deeply conflicted.
In truth, as a woman of forty, I had assumed that if I got pregnant at all, it would take much longer. In my stupid, work-obsessed mind the timing couldn’t have been worse. By the Scottish election, I would be six months pregnant. It may seem hard to believe now, but even in 2010 it wasn’t obvious how voters would react to a heavily pregnant candidate. Was I jeopardizing my personal chances of re-election? Worse, given my position as Deputy First Minister, was I risking the party’s chances? I was riven by practical worries too. How would I cope? Elections are exhausting. It would be tough even if I sailed through the pregnancy. But what if I didn’t? What if I had terrible morning sickness? Would I be able to do my job, never mind help lead an election campaign? I had become used to fielding constant questions from journalists about having children – if, when and, as I got older, why not? These are questions never asked of men, but they stalk women in politics. So I knew how much attention my pregnancy would attract.
These thoughts obliterated any sense of happiness that I might have felt. I was overwhelmed by guilt. I felt guilty about being pregnant, about not feeling happier about being pregnant, about not being as happy as Peter was, about hiding that from him. Later, what I would feel most guilty about were the days I had wished I wasn’t pregnant. There’s still a part of me that sees what happened as my punishment for that.
We decided we would tell our families on Christmas Day. It was a bit earlier than we might have done otherwise, but we felt it would be difficult to keep the news secret over the festive period, when we would be with them so much. Naturally, they were over the moon, and their excitement rubbed off on me too. I started to feel better, happier. The nausea that I had been feeling for the past few weeks also abated. I didn’t realize then, of course, that this was because the pregnancy had already ended.
On the morning of 30 December, I noticed some spots of blood. I’d probably have ignored it but for an appointment I had that day with the GP for my flu jab. Since I was there anyway, I decided to mention it to her. I was expecting her to tell me it was nothing to worry about. Instead, she made an urgent appointment at the early pregnancy clinic at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and that is where Peter and I spent the morning of Hogmanay 2010.
I think I’d known in my heart what the outcome would be, but I was still hoping for the best. It seemed that suddenly, belatedly, I wanted to be pregnant after all. The nurse who did the scan was lovely. I didn’t really know what I was looking for on the screen, but her face told me what I needed to know. The baby was gone.
The rest is a blur. We were taken into a side room and the nurse explained what we should expect. She said the pregnancy would probably pass naturally but, if not, they’d carry out a procedure after the New Year break. It was all very matter of fact. I don’t know if it’s because I wasn’t told, or just that I was in too much of a daze to take it in, but I had absolutely no idea when I left the hospital that morning what an ordeal the next few days would be.
For four days I was in constant agony, the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced. At one point, when I naively thought the worst had passed, we went to visit Peter’s sister. I ended up writhing in pain on the floor of her bathroom. Peter had to carry me to the car. And yet still, amidst it all, I went to work. On 3 January, I attended a memorial service at Rangers Football Club in my constituency, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Ibrox disaster, and went from there to visit the NHS24 call centre to thank staff for their efforts over the festive period. There is a photo of me from that day at the memorial service that I find impossible to look at, the pain and anguish etched on my face.
Eventually, after four days, during the evening of 4 January 2011, the pregnancy ‘passed’. I had the presence of mind to call Peter into the bathroom and, together, we flushed our ‘baby’ down the toilet. We later resolved to try again, but I knew then that we had lost our one chance of parenthood.
I was desolate and heartbroken for myself, but more so for Peter. I was consumed by guilt all over again, convinced that it was all my fault, that the stress of worrying about the impact on the election had caused the miscarriage; that I was being punished for not wanting the baby badly enough, for having even wished it away. These feelings have never quite left me.
I have always believed our baby would have been a girl. We would have called her Isla. Her middle name would have been Margaret, after my gran and Peter’s mum. She would have had dark hair and dark eyes. She would be in her early teens now, possibly causing us all sorts of trouble. I don’t want to give the impression that I am full of regret at not having children. I’m not. If I could turn the clock back and make it so, I would choose to have a child, but only if I could still do all the other things I’ve been able to do too. I don’t feel that my life is worth less because I am not a mum.
But I do deeply regret not getting the chance to be Isla’s mum. It might not make sense, but she feels real to me. And I know that I will mourn her for the rest of my life.
CHAPTER NINE
Majority Rules
The mood going into the 2011 Scottish election campaign was strange.
Since the spring of 2010 we had lagged behind Labour in the polls. It wasn’t just the pundits who were writing us off. As the election loomed closer, there was a distinct sense that the civil service was preparing for a change of government too. It seemed that the election was Labour’s to lose. I remember leaving my office in St Andrew’s House on the day Parliament dissolved for the campaign with a heavy heart, feeling beaten, and thinking that I wouldn’t be back.
And yet, somehow, the prospect of Labour winning the election didn’t seem credible. They had no clear or compelling policy programme. Their leader, Iain Gray, was lacklustre and uninspiring. His campaign, disastrous by any objective standard, had moments of genuine absurdity. On one occasion, he fled into a sandwich shop to escape protestors and journalists and found himself trapped with no way out.
By contrast, our campaign purred. We produced one of our best-ever party election broadcasts. It was the brainchild of Peter and our marketing team, a brilliant parody of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. To the refrain ‘What has the Scottish Government ever done for us?’ it listed all of the achievements of our first term. It caught people’s attention and captured the mood. It was also our first campaign conducted to any great extent on social media. There is no doubt that we mastered social media earlier and better than Labour. During our New Year strategy weekend in January 2011, we decided that all of our key communicators would join Twitter. It quickly became a core part of the campaign.
The sense ‘on the street’ was that people liked the breath of fresh air that an SNP government had represented. They broadly supported what we had done and there was no discernible appetite for change. As soon as the campaign got underway and people began to focus on the decision at hand, the polls narrowed and then reversed. We would go through almost the entirety of the campaign in the lead.
I quickly realized that campaigning when expecting victory is more stressful than the opposite, not least because it can breed a dangerous risk-aversion – the fear of breaking something precious. It may have been the conditioning effect of losing so often in the past, or the old self-doubt gnawing away at me, but I kept expecting the polls to turn negative again.
