The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Hard work on fast track
In the second of our special interviews with the new MPs of Courier Country, Michael Alexander speaks to Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath Labour MP Lesley Laird, who has been appointed Shadow Scottish Secretary
Fife councillor and Labour candidate for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath Lesley Laird was driving with a friend on the A92 at the Redhouse Roundabout near Kirkcaldy on the night of June 8 2017 when Fife Council Labour leader David Ross phoned her to ask where she was.
He had been texting her at home all evening to give updates on the general election count taking place in Glenrothes. Then he told her: “Get here quick because you’ve won!”
Lesley – who had been in the midst of the Fife Council elections when the snap election was called six weeks earlier – arrived at the Michael Woods Sports and Leisure Centre just in time for the returning officer’s announcement that she had overturned SNP MP Roger Mullin’s majority of 9,974 and won back Gordon Brown’s old seat for Labour with a majority of 259.
Lesley – one of seven Scottish Labour MPs elected – puts her narrow victory down to the hopeful Labour manifesto, which aimed to tackle issues such as low pay and zero-hours contracts, while she also detected a “mood change” on the doorsteps whereby many folk, she says, were “scunnered” at the prospect of a second Scottish independence referendum.
The 58-year-old – who only entered politics as a Fife councillor for Inverkeithing, Aberdour and Dalgety Bay in 2012 – admits the campaign was all a bit of a “whirlwind”. But nothing could prepare her for the “complete shock” that arrived just six days later, when she would find herself in Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Scottish Secretary.
“At about 9.45pm at the end of day one in parliament, I got a call from Jeremy’s office, saying that Jeremy wanted me and how did I feel about that – basically they were sounding me out,” explains Lesley in an interview at her constituency office in Kirkcaldy.
“I was exhausted, it was right in the middle of a heatwave, so I’d literally got back to the hotel and flopped on the bed, when the phone went and I was like: ‘oh my God, what am I going to do with this?’. I needed to make a decision fairly quickly. I needed to take some soundings. I hadn’t really got my head round being an MP, let alone suddenly finding I’m going to be in the Shadow Cabinet.
“On balance, people said to me that these opportunities don’t come along very often, that I should take it and give it my best shot! That was the tipping point for me in saying yes!”
Lesley admits that in her first few weeks as an MP she “didn’t sleep much” Like all new MPs, in the beginning she had no office, no staff – just an email account, which quickly filled up with case work.
Since then, and with her staff now in place, it’s been a steep learning curve. But, fundamentally, she aims to build on her reputation as a campaigning councillor who “gets things done” – and for the time being, at least, she plans to stay on as a councillor while helping Scottish Labour’s seven MPs bring a “different Scottish perspective” to the Brexit debate.
Born and brought up in Greenock in a “traditional Labour trade union house”, her father was a trade union official who became chairman of the STUC in 1984, coinciding with the miners’ strike.
“Our tea time chats were always interesting – it was an exciting political period for the trade union movement,” she recalls, drawing parallels between the decline of the shipbuilding community in Greenock and the decline of heavy industries in Fife, and the legacies that remain.
Offered a job with the Clydesdale Bank and describing the two years she spent as a sponsored secretarial student with IBM as the “best grounds for training you could ask for”, she got married, moved to Livingston and started working for various start-up companies in “Silicon Glen”.
Both she and her husband experienced various redundancies and, after having a son, she eventually became senior talent manager for RBS.
It was in 2011, however, that she decided to become more actively involved in politics. She was one of only three Scots to be selected for UK Labour’s national talent programme and stood for the Fife Council elections in 2012. She took over the administration’s business portfolio in 2013 and became deputy leader of Fife Council in 2014. She was an unsuccessful Labour list candidate for the Holyrood elections in 2016.
When it came to the 2017 general election campaign, she valued the support of former MP and Prime Minister Gordon Brown. However, she has mixed emotions about becoming an MP now as her father, who influenced her so much during her younger years, died just before Christmas last year, aged 91.
“We actually buried him on his 92nd birthday,” she smiles. “My dad was such a pragmatic man. He loved the cricket and when we knew what was what, he said: ‘I’ve had a good innings!’
It’s a sporting analogy that Lesley will be hoping she can use when she looks back on her own political career in years to come.
I got a call from Jeremy’s office, saying Jeremy wanted me