It was a balmy May 2011 day in Edinburgh and, down at Holyrood and after the latest Scottish parliament election – and in alphabetical order – all the MSPs, one at a time, were being sworn in.
They sashayed down alternate ramps, hoisted in turn a right paw, and obediently repeated, clause by clause, the rubric read out to them.
An alarming number merely ‘affirm’ – they don’t do God. There’s always some showboating. Folk who prate, in prefix, of their true loyalty to the ‘people of Scotland’, or who insist in repeating the whole rite in Gaelic, Catalan or Klingon.
But when a venerable Conservative MSP for the Highlands and Islands sailed down to renew his troth to Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors according to law, we leaned forward in the cheap seats, sure something was poised to go wrong.
In the event it took five stumbling attempts, each ever more desperate, before he finally managed to pronounce his own name.
And, alas, ‘I, Sir James Angus Rhoderick Neil McGrigor…’ had an awful lot of name.
When he finally crested that Everest, to the last syllable, there was whooping and thunderous applause, for he was – on all sides of the chamber – very much beloved.
Sir Jamie, who died peacefully last Sunday, was often underestimated. He was a talented guitarist, a natural comic, and the first MSP to pilot a Private Member’s Bill – in his case, establishing a national registry of tartans – onto the Holyrood statute book.
Sir James McGrigor was beloved on all sides of the chamber, writes John MacLeod
You wouldn’t get a Margo MacDonald in either parliament these days, writes John MacLeod
Few such characters make it onto Westminster or Holyrood ballots today. They are seldom allowed to.
The days when a local constituency association could simply anoint a candidate, when he is a fully paid-up party member and they like the cut of his jib, are long gone. They can only pick someone off a centrally approved list of clones, bores and lickspittles – and few of any interest, character or backbone survive the process.
That’s before you even get to women-only shortlists or other diversity tick-box tricks.
In 2021, Nicola Sturgeon got rid of Joan McAlpine – an SNP list MSP for South Scotland, not ‘one of us’ on trans issues – by the simple expedient of ruling that the top spot on the regional list (and, thus, the only Nationalist with a hope of election, given their near-sweep of physical constituencies) go to someone disabled.
In like manner, when our local Western Isles MP Angus MacNeil a couple of years ago lost the Nationalist whip, a new face had to be signed up for the looming Westminster election.
The obvious candidate was the Stornoway North councillor Gordon Murray. Smart, educated, delightful, happily married, a tireless community advocate and a Free Church adherent, big on the Lord’s Day and that.
But we never got to vote for him. Even signed-up SNP members were not allowed to vote for him, for Cllr Murray was blocked in ‘vetting’.
We ended up with a woman no one had ever heard of and Labour’s Torcuil Crichton duly buried her by a country mile.
The late Charles Kennedy was among a group of politicians ‘blessed with fresh minds’
You look back on the politics of yore and wonder how many would have made it onto the ballot paper in the modern era against the anointed ones – lanyarded aides, researchers, step-and-fetch-its and professional politicians ever since uni; those who have never actually had a real job, nor one original idea between their ears, nor psychologically ever left the student union.
Which is why, from NHS Fife to the Scottish parliament, we see numpty reaching out unto numpty, signed up to the latest woke obsessions and totally out of touch with reality.
You simply wouldn’t get a Margo MacDonald in either parliament these days.
Or a Michael Forsyth, or a Teddy Taylor – people with strong values, bold opinions and an incorruptible ethos of public service.
Margo spoke up all her days for the poor, the marginalised and the voiceless. Teddy Taylor – a superlative MP for Glasgow Cathcart – clamoured for capital punishment as if he had shares in rope.
Everyone hated Michael Forsyth – not least because, time and again, Stirling kept re-electing him – but I saw him holding the floor at an Edinburgh University ‘Pies, Pints and Politics’ town-hall in 1985, and not one trendy Leftie managed to lay a glove on him.
‘And where did you hear that?’ he inquired of one be-denimed brat.
‘I read it in The Observer…’
‘Ah,’ mugged Forsyth, in sepulchral scorn, ‘you read it in The Observer,’ and – hostile to a man as the gathering was – everyone erupted in laughter. Four decades ago a joyous triple-act regularly did the studio rounds: Sir Julian Critchley (Con, Aldershot), Austin Mitchell (Lab, Grimsby) and our own Charles Kennedy.
They were all blessed with fresh minds; distanced just a little from their respective parties. They were a hoot and, inevitably, were soon dubbed ‘Critch, Mitch and Titch’.
As the late Edna O’Brien once lamen-ted, the question these days is less, ‘Where have all the fairies gone?’ but, ‘Where are all the thinkers now?’
The hollowing-out of our political parties is one of the few debauchings in public life that cannot be blamed on Tony Blair. The likes of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell repeatedly rebelled in the voting lobby – in Corbyn’s case, hundreds of times – but they were left to frolic, in entire irrelevance, to their hearts’ content.
John Prescott, as Deputy Prime Minister, was less a colleague than a sort of pet.
The rot really began with the Tories when David Cameron – who had effectively franchised out his political brain to George Osborne – took command in 2005 and embarked on the ‘Conservative modernisation project’.
They looked not to Thatcher or Churchill, but to such improbable gods as Clinton and Blair, and did their best to reinvent one of Europe’s oldest and most ruthlessly successful political parties as blandly cuddlesome.
In the Nationalists, you might trace it back even to the late 1970s, when the SNP elite panicked after the disastrous Glasgow Garscadden by-election. (In a seat where Royal Navy shipyard orders really kind of mattered, local activists had mulishly nominated a pacifist.)
The trouble with closed party lists is not that you identify and nail down your best and brightest. You are simply setting yourself up to be lied to, and the people who best game that process tend to be generally away on the moors of moral turpitude.
As brilliant a mind as the SNP ever possessed, Stephen Maxwell stared when, amidst the 1999 selection winnowing, he was asked to assure his interlocuters he would never, ever vote against some decreed party line. He could readily imagine all sorts of situations when he might have to, he patiently explained. Maxwell did not make the list.
Latterly frail, having to tote bottled oxygen wherever he went, Sir Jamie McGrigor was in 2016 heavily ‘encouraged’ not to stand for Holyrood again.
He ended his career as only he could, as a councillor subsequently for Oban South and the Isles – and, in 2022, was expelled from the Scottish Tories. By accident.
