Is being tough as teak what it takes to rescue Labour?
Jim Murphy revelled in the referendum fray but his next challenge needs more than fighting spirit
WHAT’S it like being Jim Murphy these days? Consider this. A couple of weeks ago, the Scottish Labour leader candidate was out doing his shopping when a woman approached him, took out her phone and started filming.
‘She’s got a Yes sticker on her phone and she starts videoing me and I think “well, that’s probably a bit too far” but all I can do is say “good afternoon, how are you?”’
He sighs a little. ‘They want me to respond or react and I’m pretty patient…’ He stops.
‘Well, one of my weaknesses is that I’m impatient, but I’m tolerant of these sorts of things. I’m not into playing the victim – woe betide me, isn’t it a shame that people shout at me.’
He makes a dismissive ‘pfft’ noise. ‘ Just live with it. If you don’t like it, move on to something else.’
It’s a neat metaphor. Apparently, Mr Murphy didn’t much like being demoted from the defence brief to international development in Ed Miliband’s shadow Cabinet. So now, following the referendum and that infamous egg-throwing incident, the 47-yearold has indeed moved on to something else: the Scottish Labour leadership.
His declaration raised a few eyebrows. Why not a home-grown MSP? After all, Mr Murphy is a Scottish Labour politician who has spent the last 17 years at Westminster. A man who, the story goes, greeted the offer from Tony Blair to become Europe minister with the response ‘at least it’s not Scotland’.
He says that even Mr Miliband, with whom it is rumoured there is little love lost and whose coat currently occupies the same shoogly peg Johann Lamont’s once swung from, was surprised.
‘When I told him I was doing it he said, “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” And I said yes, it is. He understood my decision, but I don’t think he was expecting it. We’d spoken before about the UK general election and me being part of the Cabinet if we were fortunate e nough to have a Labour government.
‘But, yes, we talked about it, and I’ve talked to him about it since, because I want to make changes, have a more autonomous Scottish Labour party which makes more of its own decisions, raises more money and introduces its own policies, so that we’re not run from another part of the UK.’
He’s a curious mix, Mr Murphy. The working-class lad from Glasgow who ended up at a whites-only school in South Africa. The shadow Cabinet minister who plunged into a disaster zone to bring survivors out of the Clutha pub in Glasgow that awful night last November. The softly spoken Catholic who, upon having an egg thrown at him during his 100 days t our of Scotland, rounded on his attacker and bellowed: ‘Is that the best you’ve got?’
He was arguably the ‘break-out’ star of the referendum. His tour, in which he pitched up in towns and cities across the country and spoke to crowds on street corners, took on a gladiatorial quality, his daily roustabouts with Yes voters making him a fixture on front pages and the nightly news. The man some vaguely knew as Gordon Brown’s Scottish Secretary had suddenly become a household name. Did he enjoy the rough and tumble of it all?
‘I just wanted authentic politics that was unspun,’ he says. ‘There was no control over it. It became this combination of politics and street theatre, that “I’ll go and join in” thing.
‘So that’s how it started, but then it took off and gathered an energy and the other side tried to drown it with aggression. Did I enjoy it? I did. I’m not scared of people. I’m not a coward. I’ve got a thick skin.
‘I’m not scared of people... I’ve got a thick skin’
They can shout what they want. It won’t put me off.’
He relates the story of one meeting in Hamilton where a man repeatedly shouted ‘paedophile’ at him. ‘I said to him “look, there are children in the audience, cut it out”. And the response to that wasn’t “I’m very sorry, I don’t agree with you because of this”, it was “well prove you’re not a paedophile”. I mean…’
He shakes his head. All this is related in a voice barely above a whisper. Teetotal, vegetarian and with a weakness for chocolate, Mr Murphy is not, in everyday conversation, a shouter. He is sharp, though, and prone to bone-dry humour.
At one point he delivers a sermon about the low levels of life expectancy in certain impoverished areas of Glasgow, suddenly adding: ‘Now the answer to that isn’t to get middle- class people to live shorter lives.’ He flashes a toothy smile. ‘Just for the avoidance of doubt.’
But it was the experience of traipsing round the country during that long, hot summer which made him think ‘hang on a minute, the Scottish Labour leadership might be quite a good gig’.
‘It changed me, actually,’ he says. ‘Hopefully for the better. I saw parts of Scotland I haven’t been to and met people from different parts of Scotland I hadn’t listened to before. It made me realise people want change.’
He admits the Scottish Labour party is in a doleful state and warbles at some length about how it needs to appeal to the ‘non-tribal’ voters.
‘The party’s not good enough. It’s not strong enough. The Labour party hasn’t been the party that our voters want. It has to have a different tone and a different approach. It has to be optimistic, it has to be open, it has to admit its mistakes.
‘It’s not just about a new leader. We have to change the way we do our politics. We can’t just shout at the SNP all the time.’
Mr Murphy grew up in a housing scheme in Arden, a tough, workingclass area of Glasgow. There were four generations of the family in two bedrooms and his first bed was the bottom drawer of his uncle’s dresser. It has undeniably shaped his world view.
‘It was a very proud, workingclass Catholic family,’ he says. ‘I’m not embarrassed by it, I’m not ashamed of it. My parents worked hard every moment of every day to
Only member of his family not to meet Mandela
make life better for themselves.’ When he was 12, that meant upping sticks and leaving Glasgow altogether when his father was made redundant from Grangemouth oil refinery. The family wound up in South Africa, where young Jim attended a segregated school (his entire secondary education was in Afrikaans) and developed an interest in politics.
His school jotters from that time show his three main interests were how his football team was faring, what the priest said at mass and what was happening politically in the country. Outside of his family, they remain the three things that interest him most today.
‘It’s what you make of your life that’s important. That’s the lesson that I take from it,’ he says now. ‘And everyone should have a chance to get on in life. People shouldn’t have to rely too much on luck. We’re all genetically the same. That’s what I take from my own experience.’
He left South Africa to avoid conscription and to study law and politics at Strathclyde University, bringing his then girlfriend, now his wife Claire, whom he’d met when he was 14, with him.
He never lived in South Africa again. But when the end of apartheid came, his parents, Anne and Jim, went out campaigning for the ANC. He is the only member of his family who never met Nelson Mandela.
He got involved in student politics and became president of the National Union of Students. But the lure of the real thing proved too much. He was elected MP in the traditionally safe Tory seat of Eastwood during the 1997 Labour landslide at the age of 29.
During his early days at Westminster, one diarist wrote that he was ‘so on-message that the message occasionally has to be surgically removed from his backside’.
Today, he admits he felt intimidated among the big boys in the early years as Scotland’s youngest MP.
‘The House of Commons is a very deferential place. I’ve rarely felt at home there. Being around Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, these “celebrity politicians”, it took me about three years before I had the confidence to actually say “well, what I think about the world is this…”
‘It took me a while to adjust. I’ve never felt part of the establishment. I’ve enjoyed it, but I’ve never felt part of it. I won’t miss it.’ The comment about the
Politics is all about ideas, big arguments’
European job was made, perhaps, by a younger and more naive man. Certainly, he actively lobbied for the Scottish Secretary post – ‘I thought about what job in Cabinet I wanted and it was the Scottish job’ – he says, and held it from 2008 until the 2010 general election.
He and Claire, a primary school teacher, have three children, Cara, 16, Matthew, 14, and ten-year- old Daniel. Claire has stayed resolutely in the background, holding things together at their home in Clarkston, in the heart of his East Renfrewshire constituency, while he trotted up and down from London.
When he was elected back in 1997, a year before they were married, she had tears in her eyes. It wasn’t, she told her fiancé, what she’d signed up for. Nevertheless, she married him a year later and she is the one who keeps his feet on the ground, gets him doing the normal, everyday things.
He asks that we meet in a local café so that he can go and pick the kids up from school afterwards, something he hasn’t always been able to do. I wonder if this personal element to running for the Scottish leadership – the idea of finally being able to live at home full time after 17 years of a 500-mile commute, holds some appeal.
‘It’ll be absolutely great,’ he says. ‘I’ve always found it a bit weird to live in one country and work in another. It’s not a normal way to live your life. Though some people might say living in Glasgow and working in Edinburgh is even weirder.’
Well, Nicola Sturgeon’s recent pronouncement about keeping her Glasgow home instead of moving into Bute House means the next First Minister will be doing it, too.
‘Bah,’ he says. ‘The next two First Ministers will be doing it.’ His confidence may be misplaced. The leadership is far from in the bag.
He has formidable opposition from Sarah Boyack and Neil Findlay in particular, who has the backing of unions such as the CWU and Unite, whose general secretary Len McCluskey this week labelled Mr Murphy ‘a candidate of the past’. Has he thought about what he’ll do if he doesn’t win?
‘I don’t enter any contest to lose,’ he says carefully. ‘But if unsuccessful I’ll get behind whoever the new leader is. That’s what being part of a team is about.’
Then there’s the incoming First Minister. Does he have much of a relationship with Miss Sturgeon?
‘Not really, no. But we don’t know each other. She’s clearly passionate, she cares about Scotland as much as I do. I don’t in any way question her patriotism, I question her nationalism.
‘I’m sure the SNP attack machine will be unloaded on me again if I win but so what? Genuinely, so what?’ He looks, frankly, elated at the prospect.
I suggest there is a part of him that relishes this sort of knockabout, the same part that enjoyed roaring ‘I will not be silenced’ at Nationalist rabbles during the referendum. He raises an eyebrow. ‘You think so?’ Yes. ‘I do at football,’ he concedes. ‘ But my approach at football is, I try to play the ball rather than the man. I don’t always succeed because I’m slowing down at 47 but I’ll try to take the same approach to my politics. I enjoy the passion of politics. It’s a great thing. It’ s about ideas, it’s not just about conversations, it’s about big arguments. I enjoy that.’
Football aside (his team is Celtic, and he captains the Parliamentary football team), he is also a keen marathon runner, another pursuit that is rarely for the faint-hearted. He’s done three in the last year, London, Dublin and Edinburgh, and during the referendum kept himself fit doing long runs wherever he was – Barra, Stornoway, Dundee – covering 15 to 20 miles at a time.
‘I had planned to run the Sahara marathon next year, but I’m not doing that now. I thought I’d do something harder.’ He laughs at his own joke. ‘There’s a line – “Run for the Scottish Labour party leadership. It’s tougher than running through the Sahara”.’
The conversation drifts back to talk of cybernats and he turns suddenly serious.
‘People like me either stand up to them or give in to them,’ he says. ‘And I wasn’t brought up to give in to people. Which is why, when I’m running a marathon, I don’t give in, either. Even when it hurts like hell.’
Back in the café, a self-proclaimed Yes voter spots him and shouts over jovially.
‘All right Jim,’ he says. ‘We’ll get you next time!’
‘Ach, I don’t think so,’ the would-be Labour leader shouts back with a smile. ‘I can run faster than you.’