Great Scots:
A selection of
nominations by readers
Great Scots:
Winnie Ewing
Rear Window
John Smith
with Kenneth Roy
‘Do you want to be prime minister one day?’
‘I’m not bothered about it,’ he said. ‘I would very much like to be chancellor of the exchequer and hold a senior position in the government. But I don’t have this driving power
urge that politicians seem to have. I’m very careful about not making all of my life political. I think you’ve got to have other interests.’
This seemed a suitable moment to return briefly to the subject of his heart attack.
‘Even if you were phllosophical about the possibility of losing your political career – didn’t you have any dark nights of the soul?’
‘It was a bit of a crisis, there’s no doubt about that. But I knew I was going to survive…well, I sort of believed I would survive. I was really just thankful that I was there at all…grateful for small mercies, you know?’
‘Did you think about death?’
‘Well, I’m a Christian. If anything, what happened confirmed my faith. But not in any dramatic way.’
‘Do you consciously interpret politics in a Christian way?’
‘I’m not arrogant or foolish enough to argue that you can’t be a Conservative and a good Christian. Whether you have a mixed economy or a state economy…this is to some extent a matter of judgement. But people who argue that poverty should be tolerated or even encouraged – as some American right-wingers do – are stepping over the line. So I divide political issues into those that are sharply moral
and those that are more matters of judgement and tactics. In that sense, I suppose I have inherited my father’s Christian socialism.’
From Conversations in a Small Country, 1989. John Smith died five years later of another heart attack
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The Holiday Banner
Vatersay, Western Isles, on a summer evening two years ago. Islay McLeod took the photograph on her way back from
a ceilidh
‘There shall be a Scottish
Parliament’. He paused
and said, ‘I like that’
Alan Alexander on Donald Dewar
In 1987, I came back to Scotland after over 20 years away. I’ve been here ever since, a period that coincides, almost, with the ’25 years’ over which ‘Who’s Who in Scotland’ readers have chosen their greatest Scot. It comes as no surprise that Donald Dewar, whom I knew as a student at Glasgow University in the 60s and with whom I was in touch, one way and another, until he died, should take the top spot. When I came back I was struck by the extent of his domination of the Scottish political landscape and by the genuine affection in which he was held by people of all parties and of none.
Margaret Thatcher had just won her third general election; anyone who was even vaguely left of centre was in a state of deep gloom; but in Scotland there was evidence of a political discourse quite different from the free market dogma of Westminster. It was an odd mixture: a feeling that the Thatcher government was somehow illegitimate in Scotland and an optimism that, eventually, and sooner rather than later, a better way could be devised of governing Scotland within the United Kingdom. That Scotland had its parliament only 12 years later owes more to Donald than to anyone else.
He told me in the early 70s, after he had lost his first Commons seat in Aberdeen in 1970, and had failed to return in 1974, that he thought he might never get back to parliament and front-line politics. He was wrong, and his victory in the Glasgow Garscadden by-election of 1978, in which he strongly argued the case for devolution and against separatist nationalism, was the first credible response to the so-called SNP tide that had given the SNP 11 seats in parliament. It had also given them a salience in Scottish politics that was far from the fringe, ‘tartan Tory’ status that they had dismissively been given by the strongly unionist (and trade unionist) Scottish Labour Party.
Donald knew that they were, electorally, more dangerous than that and that Labour’s position in Scotland could be defended only by presenting the people with a clearly Scottish agenda. Perhaps because of his own experience, he took nothing for granted, had enormous respect for the voters and believed that Labour had to deserve to win: all lessons apparently lost on his successors.
Through the 1980s and into the 1990s Donald was the most instantly recognisable figure in Scottish Labour and in Scottish politics more generally. These were not easy years: he had to see off a militant challenge in his Garscadden seat and he had to reconcile various warring factions into which, in the wilderness of opposition, Scottish Labour fragmented.
By the 1990s, devolution had become, in the words of Donald’s friend and contemporary John Smith, ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’ but it still had to be delivered. Both Smith and Tony Blair, well aware of Donald’s ability as a politician and power as an intellectual, moved to broaden his experience and he became first shadow social security secretary and then opposition chief whip. Neither job seemed natural to him. But the speed with which he mastered the notoriously complex and politically dangerous welfare brief, and the skill with which he managed that most difficult club, the parliamentary Labour Party, showed that if he was essentially a Scottish politician, that was by choice rather than because of any failure to perform at UK level.
Smith loved to tell a story from the 1992 general election of when he and Donald were working the crowd at The Barras in Glasgow. He heard ‘a wee Glasgow wifie’ say to her pal, ‘Aw look! Therr’s wee John and Big Thingmy’.
However, his UK responsibilities meant that the heavy lifting on the road to devolution – Labour’s participation in the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, negotiations with other parties, and keeping on board a party that was not uniformly enthusiastic about devolution – was taken on by George Robertson as shadow Scottish secretary rather than by Donald. No-one was in any doubt, however, that Donald’s commitment to and drive towards the creation of the first Scottish parliament in 300 years informed, influenced and underpinned the process.
When someone decided to bestow the title of ‘Father of the Nation’ it went not to Robertson but to Donald Dewar. He hated it, people knew he hated it, but the fact that it stuck was further evidence of the affection for him. On the day of the opening of the parliament in 1999, people on the Royal Mile, as he passed by, broke into song: to the tune of the Cuban anthem Guantanamera, they sang, ‘There’s only one Donald Dewar, there’s only one Donald Dewar’. It was true, and for me it vies with Sheena Wellington’s unaccompanied rendition of ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ as the enduring memory of the day. (If Donald recognised the tune, he wouldn’t have been able to spell it. As a student he wrote an essay about the Risorgimento in which he spelled ‘Garibaldi’ five different ways, none correct!).
When Donald introduced his Scotland Bill in 1998, he read the first clause, ‘There shall be a Scottish Parliament’, paused, looked at his audience and beyond to the people of Scotland and said, ‘I like that’. It was powerful because it was so uncharacteristic of a man for whom the personalisation of politics was a matter of regret. But it was evidence of a longer, deeper and more nuanced commitment to devolution than one hears in John Smith’s more statesmanlike comment quoted above. But Smith had to convince the UK party that devolution was a good idea: Donald had to make it work.
Smith and Dewar had been friends since they met at Glasgow University in the late 50s and they worked very closely in the decades that followed. Smith loved to tell a story from the 1992 general election of when he and Donald were working the crowd at The Barras in Glasgow. He heard ‘a wee Glasgow wifie’ say to her pal, ‘Aw look! Therr’s wee John and Big Thingmy’. Am I wrong to see affection in both descriptions, but rather more in the latter than the former?
Donald was the only Westminster figure of real stature who opted for Holyrood rather than Westminster. His mastery of the new system and its parliament has been rivalled by no other politician, with the possible exception of the now majoritarian Alex Salmond. But his firm, intelligent and committed guiding hand was available for little more than a year. His death underlined his uniqueness and none of his Labour successors has come anywhere close to following his hard act. Arguably, these successors held firm to his approach until 2007 when they lost office by one seat to a minority SNP. That they were not worthy of his legacy is nowhere clearer than in Scottish Labour’s sense of entitlement and their conviction that 2007 was an aberration that would be put right next time. Donald would never have been so complacent nor so cavalier.
In 1997, not long after Donald became secretary of state for Scotland, I went to Glasgow Airport to meet my wife (then Scottish director of a major UK public body with a clear interest in the nature of the devolution settlement). She greeted me briefly but she had seen Donald on the plane and went off to lobby him. I waited half an hour. She emerged with Donald at her side. He was carrying two enormous briefcases, each brimming over with papers and both obviously quite heavy. He handed one to me and said, ‘Good to see you, Alan. Carry that. Think of it as a service to your country!’.
Typical of the man: friendly, open, self-deprecating and witty, but with a clear undercurrent of serious purpose. I’ve tried to think of anyone who could come close as the greatest Scot of the last 25 years, but I can’t. And that is amazing, and a little depressing, because he was alive for only 15 of them.
Alan Alexander is emeritus professor of public sector management at Strathclyde Business School and a former chair of Scottish Water
