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Dewar and Black
lead the field
of greats by miles
Great Scots:
All 25 in order
Great Scots:
All 25 in order
Great Scots:
Profile of
Donald Dewar
Great Scots:
Interview by
Kenneth Roy
Great Scots:
Alec Douglas Home
Great Scots:
Twelve faces of
the last 25 years
Great Scots:
A selection of
nominations by readers
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
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
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’
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’.