Triangle of deceit forces SNP leader to side with her best friend...or her deputy
How the tawdry affairs of two senior Nationalists will shatter the SNP’s hierarchy... while scuppering Nicola Sturgeon’s summer push for independence
THE terse announcement was made through their local possible. newspaper and designed to be as colourless as Stewart Hosie MP and Shona Robison MSP had separated, it said. Their young daughter will be their priority at this difficult time.
In June last year there was a similarly clipped announcement from Mr Hosie’ s Westminster colleague Angus MacNeil and Jane, his wife of ten years.
‘We can confirm that we have separated amicably,’ they said. ‘Our shared priority is our children.’
Politics, of course, is littered with broken marriages. If there was curtness in those nothing-to-see-here statements then it was informed, the public might imagine, by the regrettable facts of political life, the pressures, the punishing hours, the days and weeks away from home.
Who knows, perhaps all of the above played a role in both sad partings. But it seems clear there was another factor too. Her name was Serena Cowdy.
While Miss Cowdy and the deputy leader of the Scottish National Party Mr Hosie are said to be an item, the 36-year-old former struggling actress, wildlife commentator and online dating columnist was also previously involved in a liaison with his fellow Nationalist Angus MacNeil.
What it was exactly that attracted two middle-aged SNP men to a kooky young parliamentary journalist who, after studying at Oxford, flitted from career to career like an exotic butterfly can only be a matter of speculation.
A typical extract from her online resume reads: ‘After pottering about being an actress for a few years, I decided I’d like to be a journalist instead. So here I am!’
For a Dundee Institute of Technology boy like Mr Hosie, it possibly sounded deliciously glamorous.
More pressing from a political point of view is how the love triangle bombshell will affect life in the cosy upper echelons of the party. For, more than perhaps any party in Westminster or Holyrood, the network of bonds and friendships here stretch back a very long way.
Health Secretary Shona Robison, for example, Mr Hosie’s wife of almost 20 years, is one of Nicola Sturgeon’s closest friends and allies. They go all the way back to the party’s 1980s youth wing.
Her soon to be ex-husband, meanwhile, is her party deputy. He has known Miss Sturgeon for nearly 30 years. In the light of Mr Hosie’s infidelity, will the First Minister instinctively gravitate towards her Holyrood colleague – and at what cost to party harmony?
And where, her party’s supporters may wonder, does the present liaison leave the SNP’s programme of persuasion scheduled for the summer? It is, of course, Mr Hosie who is expected to be leading the big push to convert the unconvinced on the merits of independence. Can he possibly hold on to such a pivotal role?
It was back at an SNP conference in 1990 that former IT businessman Mr Hosie and Miss Robison met. The two activists married seven years later and, by 1999, Miss Robison was a list MSP for North East Scotland in the inaugural Scottish parliament.
She became the constituency MSP for Dundee City East in 2003 two years before her husband was elected to the same Westminster constituency seat. What a fine couple they made. The Holyrood and Westminster elected representatives both under the same roof in Scotland’s fourth city, dividing those devolved and reserved matters between them.
Neither was under any illusion, they said at the time, that their marriage would be tested.
Miss Robison reflected: ‘Westminster is a challenging place to work but it is difficult for any working couple and we are lucky in that we have family support, and not everybody has that, and a very good local nursery.’
It was in the same 2005 General Election that former BBC Radio Scotland reporter and Jordanhill College teacher Angus MacNeil found his way into Westminster at a comparatively youthful 34.
A Western Isles lad through and through, he was fluent in Gaelic, skilled at shinty and imbued – or so it seemed at the time – with a winning puritanical streak.
‘Sleazebuster’ MacNeil’s first big splash in the Commons was in March 2006 when he lodged a formal complaint with the Metropolitan Police on Labour’s cash for peerages scandal. For his part in instigating the inquiry into alleged abuse of the honours system he was rewarded with a Best Scot at Westminster gong that year.
HUMILIATION was only months away for the man once tipped at as a future leader of his party. Weeks after taking his seat in Westminster, it turned out the clean-cut parliamentarian had attended a sports event in Orkney before repairing to a bar where he met two teenage school-leavers.
It started innocently enough. Judie Morrison, then 17, and Catriona Watt, 18, had a few drinks with the MP and played darts. Then he invited them to his room where they stayed until the early hours.
‘I really should have known very much better,’ said Mr MacNeil when the story got out. His wife Jane surely agreed. Two weeks after her husband’s tryst with the two teenagers, she gave birth to Annie, the youngest of their three daughters.
‘Some foolishness took place at a party, which was wrong and stupid,’ explained Mr MacNeil, who owns a sheep farm on Barra. ‘There is no allegation that anything further happened and I wish to make that absolutely clear.’
Back in Holyrood, Miss Robison would be reassured, no doubt, not a whiff of scandal surrounded her husband. Solid, dependable and afflicted by a distinct paucity of charm, this SNP journeyman was just not the type.
Indeed, not until the aftermath of the independence referendum and the resignation of SNP leader Alex Salmond did Mr Hosie truly register in the public consciousness. That was because, ahead of many better known party names, he found himself in the role of Miss Sturgeon’s deputy. It was his plodding steadfastness, many supposed, which won the day.
It took a bruising TV encounter with journalist Andrew Neil on the oil price crash last autumn to fully expose the wells of passion deep within. The deputy leader came across as an angry man.
Back at Westminster, it soon turned out Mr MacNeil’s expenses bill was among the highest in
Westminster – understandable, perhaps, for his constituency is among the most remote.
Closer inspection left many wondering how the politician could ever have been mistaken for a sleazebuster. In August 2007, he submitted a claim to recoup £500 petty cash, with half that sum allocated to that month and the other half for July 2007.
By dividing the sum in two, he ensured it did not breach the £250 limit, above which MPs had to provide receipts. On the same £750 claim, he tried to recoup £152.58 of mobile phone costs and £42.50 for books.
IN late 2005 he bought a flat in London for £220,000, charging the taxpayer nearly £3,500 in solicitors’ fees and stamp duty and £834.26 per month in mortgage interest. Yet, in 2006 he tried to claim for a two-night stay at The Union Jack Club, which is about a mile from Westminster.
In February this year it became clear little had changed. The MP was claiming more than £250 a night for hotel rooms despite a maximum cost stipulated in parliamentary standards rules of £150 per night in London and £120 for elsewhere in the UK. He was ordered to repay nearly £900.
Somewhere in this decadent whirl of plush hotel rooms and drinks charged to the taxpayer, Mr MacNeil and Miss Cowdy drifted into each other’s orbit as, back home on Barra, his wife Jane carried out her parliamentary assistant duties.
The two were seeing each other during the Scottish independence campaign. While Miss Cowdy’s views on independence are not clear it was, by all accounts, ‘the Mujahadeen’ in Mr MacNeil which lent him a certain allure to a sassy urbanite soaking up the power and vanity of parliament..
It was, then, a six-strong parliamentary group with secrets that 50 more SNP MPs joined last May. Mr MacNeil’s relationship with the blonde parliamentary journalist, it seemed, had ended.
But did his colleague Stewart Hosie now have designs on her? It is thought he has now been seeing Miss Cowdy for several months.
And how did those twin marital transgressions play out between the by now senior parliamentarians involved? Accounts differ as to the levels of tension in the men’s relationship. There are rumours of a bust-up in a Commons bar – claims denied by their party.
It was perhaps a blessed relief that the incoming Nationalists were soon stealing the headlines.
There was Edinburgh West MP Michelle Thomson who found her way past the selection panels despite owning a £1.7million property empire which she built up with the help of solicitor Christopher Hales who has since been struck off for professional misconduct. By month five of her parliamentary career she had resigned the party whip. She remains an SNP outcast pending a police investigation.
Before long her former colleague Natalie McGarry joined her as an independent MP. She had to resign the whip when it emerged police were looking into missing funds from the Women For Independence campaign group.
She denies any wrongdoing but, in the meantime, had to hold her hands up to a series of Twitter spats. They include accusing JK Rowling of supporting misogyny and calling a prominent Unionist a holocaust denier. It turned out she had meant someone else. After initially refusing to offer a full apology for her error, she had to pay a £10,000 legal settlement.
Weeks ago it was Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill MP Phil Boswell’s turn to feel the heat.
He was found guilty of breaching Parliamentary rules by failing to record his directorship of the firm Boswell & Johnston Ltd. He was also ordered to repay £555 after charging taxpayers for a series of videos promoting the SNP and Scottish Government.
Quite a first year in Westminster, then, for the all-conquering SNP. And into the heady mix strides a blonde siren with a penchant for self-promotion. Is there any scenario in which this ends well?