HENRY McLeish’s resignation from the Scottish parliament is a personal tragedy for him but, just as importantly, it is also a sad loss for our nation’s politics. A good man who has given the best years of his life to public service has been driven out because of one mistake.
Scottish public life has a capacity for being nasty, vicious and narrow-minded, but it has surely plumbed new depths in the treatment of McLeish. Vindictive bile has been briefed openly by anonymous senior sources in the Scottish Labour Party who hav
e taken no real pains to conceal their identities.
The pompous and self-aggrandising bullying of certain Scottish journalists and newspapers has been a nauseating sight. All this fury and hatred to what end - to hound a man no one has accused of dishonesty and to trash his life. Conventional media wisdom (and media wisdom rarely gets as conventional as the Daily Record does) already has it that nothing will be left of the McLeish era. Before the waters close over him it is important to make a reckoning of Henry McLeish in the round.
To start with, his end. There is no doubt that the question of his Westminster office expenses was badly handled. (I was one of his senior policy advisers at the time and I take my full share of responsibility). But that was it - badly handled. There was no personal gain, no diversion of public funds to party political purposes - just an inaccurately completed claim form. He could, indeed should, have been better able to clear the air as soon as the issue arose.
I believe that the fact that his late wife Margaret had full responsibility for his Westminster office and related costs massively complicated this issue. She had died tragically young from cancer and that painful memory was part of his difficulty in addressing the question of full disclosure. However, the cardinal rule of crisis management - get everything out as soon as possible - was ignored.
The sentence was death by 1,000 press cuts. The crime was poor handling. Whether this was fair or not is a question long beyond answering. Whether it could have been avoided is moot. We all of us have weaknesses and flaws. This is not special pleading - it should, however, offer some perspective.
Why, though, should there have been such a hunt for Henry McLeish’s blood? I can’t help thinking that he was dogged by condescension all the time that he was First Minister. People said that he was no Donald Dewar. (In fact Donald Dewar would have found it hard to live up to the legend others have constructed about him). There was snobbishness about his background. He was a football player. A football player as First Minister... what was the world coming to? His speech was mocked - yet how many of us would like to see ourselves quoted verbatim? But looked at another way, McLeish’s was a ‘log cabin to White House’ story. As a young man he was written off by his school and head-teacher and left at 15 to join the Leeds United youth team. Homesickness brought him back to Fife after six weeks and after another year at school he became a professional footballer. At the end of that career he went back into education, gained a degree and became a university lecturer.
When he told young people not to allow any barriers to hold them back he was talking about his life. When he talked about the importance of Scots having confidence and self-confidence he was reflecting on the opportunities he missed because he was unhappy in Leeds. This was the well-spring of his passionate vision as a leader.
One of the great legacies of political leaders is visionary language - that is why, for example, John and Bobby Kennedy both still live, they can still inspire. A confident, competitive, compassionate Scotland was, and is, an ambition worth working for. Although his successor, Jack McConnell, has so far eschewed setting out his vision for Scotland, there are detectable echoes of McLeish, particularly on the theme of confidence. That is as it should be - for surely the automatic, Scottish cultural cringe is the one thing we would all like to see driven from our land. In the end, though, what you have done matters as much as what you said. Most political careers end in failure, said Enoch Powell (and later illustrated his own point spectacularly).
Yet there can be successes, and these are normally either institutional or legislative. Henry McLeish succeeded in both areas. He it was who took the Devolution Bill through the Westminster legislative process, tackling hostile opposition, effectively prosecuting the case for change, negotiating increased powers for the Scottish Executive (notably in the field of rail transport). He also led the CSG in its critical work of designing a new institution and ways of working which would embody the ‘new politics’ Scotland so badly wanted. The robustness of the parliament is in no doubt today - having taken in its stride the loss of two First Ministers, and having shown, however sporadically, that it can assert its autonomy from the Executive. There is little doubt that in its next term the committee system will start to use more fully the powers and procedures designed for it.
However, McLeish’s lasting impact on Scotland will be the introduction of free personal care. This policy, more than any other, justifies devolution. A distinctively different policy solution for a crying injustice. There was no intellectually coherent, or clinical, distinction between the ‘nursing’ care needed by terminal cancer patients and the ‘personal’ care needed by failing elders. Charging the latter was unfair and socially indefensible. That distinction is no longer made in Scotland and hundreds and thousands of Scots and their families owe a debt to Henry McLeish for forcing that policy change through. There is no doubt that without him it would not have happened.
Time will balance McLeish’s large achievements against his much smaller failings. He will always know that he was one of a handful of Scottish Labour politicians who have made a tangible difference. The loss to our body politic is that an experienced parliamentarian - 10 years on the opposition front bench in Westminster, four years in ministerial positions north and south of the Border - is being lost to the Scottish parliament. We desperately need age, experience and character on the backbenches of our parliament. We seem unable to value it or to keep it. McLeish’s loss is our loss too.
The full article contains 1119 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
