Salmond’s battle cry: The harder they come, the harder they fall...
MI CHAEL Moore’s ignominious dismissal as Scottish Secretary came as a genuine shock in Scotland’s political village – and by all accounts as an even greater shock to Mr Moore.
Most felt the understated Lib Dem MP for a large chunk of the Borders had done well in a job which, in the decade since devolution, had nearly become a sinecure. That, of course, changed sharply when the SNP formed its first, minority Holyrood government, and still more dramatically in 2011 when Alex Salmond led his troops to an overall majority, under an electoral system allegedly devised to make such a feat impossible.
Now Mr Moore was not just Scotland’s man in the Cabinet but the Union’s man in Scotland, walking at tightrope between the Coalition Government in London, a faintly bemused and frightfully English prime minister and a triumphalist SNP simply spoiling for a fight.
Most agree that Mr Moore had since done a deft, shrewd job, largely low-key and involving delicate, behind-the-scenes negotiations with the First Haggis, a man of no mean ego.
His achievements were twofold. In close liaison with legal experts, the Prime Minister and Mr Salmond, Mr Moore negotiated the terms under which next year’s independence referendum will be fought. That was of extreme delicacy as he had to enshrine in law the Scottish Government’s right to hold one at all, since this was specifically precluded by the devolution legislation.
Mr Moore had, besides, to steer the new Scotland Act onto the statute book, devolving yet more powers to Holyrood – notably in criminal law, including the ability to lower the drink-driving limit or ban air guns. The Bill’s passage had a particularly torrid time in the House of Lords.
He achieved both tasks without making personal enemies, forfeiting the trust of opponents or appearing at any stage to ‘talk Scotland down’, a besetting sin of previous Secretaries of State as they attempted to neuter the Nats.
It was a harsh fate, then, not just to be removed from the Scotland Office but to be sacked from the Government altogether. At least George Robertson, who was denied the role quite unexpectedly and to his own chagrin when Labour took office in 1997, was given the Defence portfolio instead and went on to great things.
NOW Mr Moore’s replacement is Alistair Carmichael, MP for Orkney and Shetland and hitherto the Liberal Democrats’ Chief Whip. The replacement, it was briefed rapidly, was necessary because the situation had changed, the referendum campaign was looming, the dainty legalities had been sorted – and what was needed now was a Secretary of State who would be a Hammer of the Nats.
Mr Carmichael i s, we are assured, a serious bruiser, a hard man to take on the Nats. As one commentator put it, he has ‘ a secure reputation as a combative Lib Dem Chief Whip – a role where the incumbents develop a propensity for getting their own way’.
One suspects there were also two other factors underlying his appointment. He is in an extremely safe seat and could be the Lib Dems’ only surviving Scottish MP if they are smitten as ferociously at the next Westminster election as they were in the last Holyrood poll. This gives him unusual freedom and confidence to roam the land, seeking whom he may devour.
Moreover, Orkney and Shetland are the part of Scotland least enamoured of Nationalism. Many Shetlanders talk darkly of ‘ Scotland’, not ‘ the mainland’, when referring to the land with which they have no connection and are acutely conscious that the mass of Scotland’s North Sea oil and gas reserves are in what they regard as their own waters.
We can safely expect Mr Carmichael to make hay with that claim, come next year’s campaign, when the SNP’s vision for Scotland the Free will be seen to depend on oil-bought goodies. Nor would it be the first time the folk of the Northern Isles have been deployed to queer the Nationalist pitch – Jo Grimond used his same constituents, to deft effect, in the late 1970s.
Such tactics would doubtless make the SNP campaign excessively complicated but one still has reservations about the appointment of Mr Carmichael. At 48, the same age as Mr Moore, he is no spring chicken but one wonders why he was chosen in preference to fellow Lib Dems Sir Malcolm Bruce, 68, or Sir Ming Campbell, 72, who the youth-obsessed David Cameron may have regarded as too long in the tooth.
Nor was Charles Kennedy given the job. No doubt his publicised frailties – and lack of enthusiasm for the Coalition in the first place – were factors, but it is hard to think of anyone who would more enthusiastically fight for the Union, with energy and charm.
Much has been made of the suggestion that a factor in Mr Moore’s downfall was his rather limp performance in the recent knock-down-drag-out STV referendum debate with the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon. While such political-bearpit telly is of great excitement to politicians, scarcely anyone normal bothers to watch these programmes and what is regarded as a ‘win’ by your average political anorak may be pretty offputting to the general public – many viewers actually thought Miss Sturgeon was abominably rude.
AND the ‘Westminster bubble’ phenomenon may well have exaggerated Mr Carmichael’s supposed gifts and graces. That he has been an effective Chief Whip is not in doubt – the Liberal Democrats in the Commons have been far more disciplined than the Tory backbenches – but the ways of a Westminster bruiser may not beguile or impress the public.
We have seen this recently in Gordon Brown’s generally calamitous premiership. In Scotland, the indefinably unpleasant Helen Liddell’s loathing of the Nats made her a liability to Labour – the public began to feel she never seemed to open her mouth without doing her country down.
When it became known that ‘Stalin’s Granny’ had so little to occupy her as Secretary of State that she had slotted French lessons into her diary, she was removed in Tony Blair’s botched 2003 reshuffle and, after a hilarious bid to abolish the office entirely, the job of Scottish Secretary was f or many years reduced to a part-time post. Meanwhile, it is as yet far from evident that Mr Carmichael is the man to make Mr Salmond and the SNP quake in their boots. In April 2010, when the two men collided in a Sky News general election debate along with Labour’s Jim Murphy and the Tories’ David Mundell, nobody went more ferociously after Mr Salmond than Mr Carmichael... or was more effortlessly swatted away.
‘I have one wee disagreement with Alistair,’ said the First Minister witheringly, when the Lib Dem hard man unwisely sought to bait him. ‘If the rest of us had Norwegian standards of living, which are approaching 50 per cent more prosperous per head than the United Kingdom, then it wouldn’t be such a problem paying sky-high prices at the pumps…’
Whatever you think of the First Minister – a man incapable of seeing a spotlight without wanting to dance in it – Mr Salmond has a signal virtue which commentator James Naughtie once called ‘the great political gift of rarely seeming to lose his temper. He always seemed to be smiling… and he had the extra advantage of irritating opponents, who would always call him smug but found him devastating to deal with in debate.’
Now the Coalition Government seems determined to have a dog in next year’s referendum fight. That appointed pit-bull is Alistair Carmichael. But he pads over terrain littered with the whitened bones of a great many people, over not a few years, who have proved to be better at loathing Mr Salmond than actually beating him.