Tony Blair: My part in his Ascent
by Paul Connell
Monday 25th May 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the Perth and Kinross By-election, a minor event in political history but one in which I had a bit part that permitted me a vantage point on the rise of what we now call New Labour. As a small contribution to the history of that time, this is my attempt to remember some episodes.
Sir Nicholas Fairbairn was elected MP for Perth and Kinross at the ’92 election, defeating Roseanne Cunningham of the SNP by 2000 votes. Way back in 3rd place was the Labour candidate, Merv Rolfe, later Provost of Dundee. I was Merv’s election agent, an office I had not sought but took on because nobody else in P&K Labour would. Getting a poor third spot was held locally as a pretty decent achievement at the time. We weren’t awfy ambitious.
Nicky Fairbairn is now largely forgotten and is best described as ‘colourful’. He had been a relatively liberal young Edinburgh lawyer who, by the 90s was a foaming right winger of the sort who castigated Jim Kerr and Annie Lennox as ‘scum’ for organising the Mandela tribute concert. He was probably a sex-offender, and certainly hopelessly alcoholic, only campaigning in the mornings in ’92 as he’d be incapable later. In February 1995 he had his last drink at his castle near Inverkeithing and the by-election was on.
Meanwhile John Smith’s death in May 94 had led to a Labour leadership campaign won, of course, by Tony Blair over Margaret Beckett. I’d voted for Beckett. Smith’s Monkland seat had been quickly filled and there had also been by-elections in Wales (Kinnock’s old seat) and Dudley in the Midlands, two holds and a gain for Labour. P&K was to be Blair’s first real test in Scotland and the party machinery was wheeled out. P&K Labour officers, such as myself, were politely consulted and listened to but it was clear who was in charge. I had no objection to that.
The first indication of this was in the candidate selection, all run from Labour HQ with only the final choice from 2 candidates left to a local vote. The final two were Susan Deacon (later an MSP and more recently chief of the Scottish Police Authority) and Douglas Alexander, a young lawyer touted as a protegee of Gordon Brown. Establishing a pattern, I voted for Susan Deacon, who lost. An experienced election agent was brought in and a base set up in an old Rolls Royce showroom near Perth station. One of my few souvenirs was a leather folder for a Roller’s handbook.
The techniques that would deliver the ’97 election win were road tested. A campaign script was drawn up, focussing on a short set of points and nary a word would be said to press, opponents or the public that varied from that. Every evening, a meeting of the core campaign team was held upstairs amidst the Rolls Royce debris to review that day’s events and allocate tasks for the next. Publicity and campaign material was churned out: if there was a spending limit it was being treated as purely notional. A poster squad, fresh from the English local elections, arrived to plaster any available surface and put up boards in gardens, even where not actually requested.
We had a series of flying visits from the big guns: Blair twice, Brown several times, Dewar, Robertson and all the Scots who would later be in the first Blair cabinet. I was working full time so missed many of these but I did see Blair in action twice: once in Auchterarder in a very controlled and corralled walkabout and then at the Station Hotel for a stump speech. I even managed to insert a joke into his speech that night. We’d been discussing the Tory’s hapless campaign and the evident decay of their election machinery and I’d remarked that Tories were now rarer than Ospreys in Scotland — good line, said Douglas. It got used repeatedly, including by Blair.
Douglas was a nice guy; I liked him a lot. He would contest P&K again in ’97 when he could have easily found a safe Labour seat. He went on to win another by-election in Paisley, become a cabinet minister and then, famously, lose to Mhairi Black in 2015. He did have a personality, something that the party machine seemed determined to eliminate or at least soften. There had to be nothing to be objected to. An example was football; he was a Rangers supporter. This was deemed not a good thing and a back story as a St Mirren fan concocted since he was a Renfrewshire boy. Attendance at McDiarmid Park was ordered and the ‘Saints’ connection sold as the alternative to any divisive Old Firm link.
P&K was a weird constituency, demographically. It centred, of course, on Perth which had a substantial vote for all four main parties at that time. It also took in the Dundee suburb of Invergowrie, sizable towns like Crieff, Kinross and Auchterarder and dozens of villages and farming communities. One of the few areas where the party machine deferred to locals was in the campaign outwith Perth. Labour had no vote out in the sticks and we needed to make a splash there. Blair’s visits to Crieff and Auchterarder were, at least partly, due to my persuasion, though it fitted the Blair rhetoric of no ‘no-go areas’ for Labour. I actually wanted him to stop somewhere really small, like Muthill or Braco, anticipating the impact that might have but that wasn’t taken on.
The SNP ran a good campaign. Their blood up was up and the seat was theirs to lose. I was friendly enough with some local activists to gauge that they were fairly confident but they’d been that way in ’92 and I detected real nerves in the last stretch. They also brought in their big guns; Alex Salmond was hardly away from the place. I particularly recall two attractive young female Nat supporters who paraded around the High Street in mini-kilts on the weekends before polling. We called them ‘Fran and Anna’ (sorry) but they were, in fact, ‘Nicky’ and her pal. Nicky was a small dark-haired Ayrshire lassie with a boyish face and haircut; I wonder what became of her.
The Tories smelt of death from day one. I have virtually no recall of their candidate, John Godfrey. Local activists I knew didn’t even pretend to think they’d win. The only big guns they mustered were Michael Forsyth and Bill Walker from neighbouring constituencies. There were others; the Lib Dems put up Veronica Linklater, wife of Scotsman editor Magnus, the Greens had an enthusiastic guy called Robin Harper who deservedly went on to greater things. By-election perennial Lord Sutch turned up, sponsored by Monster Munch.
Come Election day, I had a very pleasant task, touring the polling stations in the rural airts of P&K where there were few Labour members, to put up placards and show a presence. I got to spend a lovely spring day visiting places like Glenfarg, Abernethy and Cleish. The count was in Perth city hall and the result was plain from the off. Roseanna Cunningham of the SNP had a 7000 majority, Labour in 2nd place, Tories a humiliating 3rd. A huge crowd of SNP supporters had gathered in front of the hall and the police advised us to leave by the side doors. I was in the company of the ‘portly’ Mike O’Malley, later first Labour Provost of Perth, who wouldn’t entertain the idea of a skulking retreat. We left by the front to a hearty chorus of ‘you fat bastard, who ate all the pies?’ We then repaired to the now defunct Grampian Hotel and all got very, very drunk; for P&K Labour it was a result worth celebrating.
Two years later the same machine delivered 54 of Scotland’s 71 seats. Places like Dumfries, Ayr and Stirling, with comparable demographics to P&K, fell to the campaign tools sharpened from the Rolls Royce showroom. Tony Blair had his landslide.
You already know what happened next
