Pain, loss and the miserably high price of seizing Scottish Labour’s poison chalice
NOT many party leaders launch their political career on a sofa in front of daytime TV, but that is where it all began for Kezia Dugdale. The Aberdeen University graduate was 23, unemployed and bingeing on trashy talk shows in her Edinburgh flat when her roommate came out with a curious suggestion – Miss Dugdale should go into politics.
As the Lothian MSP once recalled: ‘We couldn’t get jobs. We spent most of the day in our pyjamas, talking about the world, watching Trisha, and applying for jobs. Living the dream. Michelle was a member of the Labour Party and she told me: “The things you like, the things that make you angry, are the things the Labour Party is all about. You should join”.’
And so she joined and rose quickly through the ranks, taking on the leadership in 2015 in the wake of the General Election wipeout. It was the job no one else wanted. The prospects looked bleak, the chances of power scarcely above nil. Scottish Labour was a plummeting anvil and Miss Dugdale grabbed it with both hands.
Now, after two years, her leadership has come to an abrupt end. Yet despite her opposition to Jeremy Corbyn, she has not been deposed in a dramatic coup. It’s true that low-level but persistent sniping from internal party critics did not make her life easy, but personal factors loomed large in her decision.
The past year has been one of pain and loss for Miss Dugdale. Her nine-year relationship with fiancée Louise Riddell broke down last Christmas. Two months later, her friend Gordon Aikman lost his battle against motor neurone disease. The death hit her hard. Watching someone close to her slowly tormented by a cruel condition was sobering.
It is to Mr Aikman that she refers in her resignation letter, writing: ‘Earlier this year I lost a dear friend who taught me a lot about how to live. His terminal illness forced him to identify what he really wanted from life, how to make the most of it and how to make a difference. He taught me how precious and short life was and never to waste a moment.’
Personal trials, the capture of her beloved Labour Party by the extreme Left, the daily venom to which the SNP’s online activists subjected her, all eventually took their toll on this young idealist. Cynics will say that anyone who pursues a political career needs a thicker hide, that parliament is no place for those who can’t set their emotions aside.
But that is exactly the kind of politics Miss Dugdale rejected as outdated and a hindrance to repairing the public’s faith in their leaders. She understood most people are not political animals and the goings-on at Holyrood and Westminster rarely intrude on their everyday lives.
TO Miss Dugdale, politics is about feelings and how these emotions could be put to good use improving people’s lives. As she once put it to me: ‘It sounds weak to talk about emotion, as if to argue with emotion is weaker than arguing with rationality. It’s not. It’s more powerful and more politicians should do it.’
That principle guided Miss Dugdale through her time as aide to political veteran Lord Foulkes and, after her surprise election in 2011, as an MSP. It was this emotional outlook on politics that allowed her to connect with audiences during one of the final TV debates before the independence referendum, credited by observers with establishing her as a potential leader. When Jim Murphy lost the 2015 election, she took on what was the most daunting challenge in British politics.
Miss Dugdale has conducted herself with calm and dignity amid the petty humiliations of Scottish politics. Under her tenure, Labour was squeezed into third place at Holyrood by the polarisa-
tion of Nationalism and Unionism. She did all she could to prevent it but, once it had happened, she refused to let it define her, ramping up her weekly broadsides against Nicola Sturgeon at First Minister’s Questions.
The SNP sought to embarrass her by leaking a youthful application to work for one of its MSPs. Miss Sturgeon, in a measure of the woman, even revealed the damaging contents of a private conversation in a live TV election debate. She claimed the Scottish Labour leader had confided the morning after the EU referendum that her party was now less hostile to a second independence referendum. This pre-election revelation took Miss Dugdale’s legs out from under her and shifted yet more pro-Union Labour voters into the arms of Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives.
That was especially unjust because Kezia Dugdale did more than anyone else to affirm Labour’s commitment to the Union.
No, she wasn’t a Unionist in the same way Tories were – to her the United Kingdom wasn’t about history but solidarity, a country where the strength and prosperity that comes from London could be used to make life better for people across the nation. Perhaps she was too idealistic and tried to pass off naiveté as idealism. Sometimes she gave off an air of Nicola Murray, the hapless Labour leader in The Thick of It: mousy, well-meaning but a bit lost. She was friendly and some mistook this for weakness. She was open to internal dissent and this really was weakness.
Her personal tribulations might have been more manageable had she stamped her authority on the party early on. As it is she leaves a legacy of internal reform but little of note in policy terms. Many see her departure as unnecessary or at least precipitous.
In her personal life, though, things are starting to look up. Last month, she revealed her relationship with Jenny Gilruth, a Nationalist MSP. Anticipating questions about a romance across political dividing lines, the couple said: ‘While we are both politicians, we are also human beings – in a new relationship, which we cherish.’
It was further confirmation that Miss Dugdale viewed politics as her job, not her life. But those within the Holyrood bubble view this as a sort of treason. While wishing her all the best in public, some politicians are privately bewildered, even scornful, of her decision. Those who live and breathe politics might move on when the time is right but they couldn’t imagine walking away so soon, and with their party experi- encing a unforeseen fillip in its fortunes. For most outwith the Scottish parliament, there will probably be more sympathy for the Labour leader’s choice. ‘It’s just politics’ may offend insiders but it is a sensible creed that allows the rest of us to live fulfilled lives. That is the lesson of Kezia Dugdale – that normal people are complex and, unless we accept this, normal people won’t go into politics.
Of course it’s a tough business. As Miss Dugdale once told the BBC: ‘It should be tough. It is important decisions you are taking all of the time.’ But should it be so harsh, so nasty, so brutalising of all who try to take part?
IT is notable that her fellow Lothian MSP Neil Findlay has ruled himself out of the leadership contest. He is Jeremy Corbyn’s man in Scotland and would probably win, but after standing in a previous leadership poll he is thought not to have enjoyed the experience.
When a party leader stands down as Miss Dugdale has, we might chalk it up purely to personal circumstances or shrug that she was simply not tough enough. But when her obvious successor doesn’t want the job, it’s clear something is wrong, either with the job or with the way we do politics today.
As Scottish Labour searches for its seventh leader in ten years, there will be plenty of debates about the direction of the party. There should also be one about the direction of Scottish politics. Do we really want young, bright, passionate women like Kezia Dugdale to be bowing out from leadership at 36? Do we want no one in politics who isn’t willing to sacrifice relationships and personal happiness for a political party?
As the late makar Edwin Morgan observed of the pell-mell cluster of buildings sitting at the foot of the Royal Mile: ‘What do the people want of the place? They want it to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.’ Instead we have an assemblage of the bland and the fanatic, the absurdly self-righteous and the creepily ambitious.
Kezia Dugdale now returns to the backbenches, there to regain a normal life. Who among us could blame her? The fact that so many politicians would do so confirms that those who represent us are nothing like us.