Edinburgh West: A pretty setting for Scotland’s most bitter election battle
PRETTY Edinburgh West, which includes picture-postcard South Queensferry and the suburb of Cramond, is hosting one of the country’s ugliest election battles.
The Westminster seat used to be held by the Liberal Democrats but Michelle Thomson won it for the SNP in 2015 with a 3,210 majority.
Thomson has since been reported to the procurator fiscal after a police probe into alleged mortgage fraud and the LibDems won the equivalent Holyrood seat from the SNP at last year’s election.
That contest, in which LibDem Alex Cole-Hamilton – ACH – triumphed over the SNP’s Toni Giugliano, was marked by bitterness.
Giugliano, who works for a mental health charity, is the SNP candidate again and one of his election leaflets indicates the current battle will also be rancorous.
According to his communication to voters, there are “three facts” that “you should know”.
The first “fact” is that ACH is “under police investigation” over his “expenses”.
In reality, a complaint was made to police about his election spending, which the force says is still being considered.
Secondly, Giugliano claims that current LibDem hopeful Christine Jardine has stood for election “all over Scotland”.
Finally, he accuses the LibDems of being responsible for “abhorrent” policies when in coalition with the Tories. Is this campaign shaping up to be as dirty as the last one? “It’s certainly not dirty from my side,” Giugliano says.
I’m struggling not to laugh. What about that leaflet? “It is factual,” he replies. I sense he is still smarting from his Holyrood election defeat, where the LibDems were not shy in drawing attention to the Thomson controversy. Did the Thomson row hurt him last year?
“They were always going to use it. I was not Michelle Thomson in 2016 and I’m not Michelle Thomson in 2017. Funnily enough, they never mentioned me once last year.”
Is he not tainted by the defeat? He responds: “I think it shows passion for the area, for the communities.
“The alternative is that I do what Christine Jardine does and just go around the country looking for a seat.”
Jardine, a former broadcast journalist, has stood several times for the LibDems – and always lost. However, she moved to Edinburgh West over a year ago and is not impressed by her opponent’s jibes.
“Very few people stand in one election and win,” she says. “I am not quite sure what the point is about me having stood before.
“I was moving on in my career and my daughter is in Edinburgh West. I’m not psychic – I didn’t know Theresa May was going to call a General Election. I moved here to live.”
She describes her mention in Giugliano’s leaflet as a “personal attack” and says: “This is simply gutter politics and mud-slinging.”
THE campaign last week took a vicious turn. An SNP activist, Simon Hayter, tweeted that Jardine had been campaigning on the day of a truce called to remember the victims of the Manchester bombing.
He was wrong. Jardine had been at the funeral of her husband, the respected former Herald journalist Calum Macdonald, in Clydebank.
Jardine is keen to speak about doorstep issues – “independence is coming up more than anything else” – and makes an explicit pitch to Unionist voters: “It is a two-horse race in Edinburgh West. It’s between us and the SNP.”
Giugliano sees it differently and points to a Financial Times analysis that predicted the Tories could win the constituency: “My pitch to voters – both LibDem voters and SNP voters – is let’s unite and defeat the Tories.”
The reality, according to several constituency sources, is that the Tories are on the way up, but from such a low point that victory seems improbable.
The SNP vote is concentrated in the poorer parts of the constituency like Drylaw and Muirhouse, while the LibDems have a spread of voters and do better in affluent areas such as Blackhall. Sandy Batho, a human resources specialist who is standing for the Tories, sees the contest differently and says the Tories are getting an “extremely good reception” on the doorsteps over their anti-independence stance.
He says people do not vote LibDem on principle but merely as a tactic: “Voting for the Scottish Conservatives is seen as a principled position, to stop the constitutional haggling.” He insists: “It’s a three-horse race.” Labour, meanwhile, have no chance of winning.
Given that the party fell short in Edinburgh West by nearly 12,000 votes at the 1997 election – Labour’s high water mark – no-one is expecting the constituency to go red.
Mandy Telford, a key figure in the Scottish Labour team at Holyrood who is standing for her party, says hostility to an independence referendum is a key issue, but she is not making wild claims about her chances.
Most folk believe Edinburgh West is a fight between the SNP and LibDems and that the contest will be the Toni versus Christine show. So, the hustings should be fun.