AWKWARD!
Spurned wife Robison and cheating husband Hosie share office in a VERY carefully timed (but toe-curling) show of ‘business as usual’
THEIR marriage breakdown has been the talk of two parliaments for days.
But Westminster and Holyrood politics collided yesterday as MP Stewart Hosie and MSP Shona Robison came face to face in the small constituency office they share.
In what could have proved to be a particularly awkward meeting, they spent more than an hour together.
Their separation was announced after it emerged that Mr Hosie was conducting an extra-marital affair with London–based political journalist Serena Cowdy.
Yesterday’s meeting, seemingly perfectly stage managed, saw Mr Hosie arrive first at the office on Old Glamis Road, Dundee, at 7.30am.
After discussion with staff, he left to meet voters at surgeries elsewhere in the city.
Before departing in his navy blue Jaguar, Mr Hosie, who is deputy leader of the SNP and MP for Dundee East, said: ‘Shona and I are both elected representatives. The office remains open. We will continue to serve our constituents.’
After he left, his wife Miss Robison – MSP for Dundee City East and Scottish Health Secretary – arrived at the office at midday for her regular Friday afternoon surgery meeting constituents.
She said: ‘We will continue to work together. Our constituents come first and they will not be affected in any way at all.’
While she was preparing for her afternoon appointments, her husband returned to the office and the pair spent more than an hour together there, before leaving separately.
Yesterday’s comments are their first in public since the scandal broke. Earlier this week, the Scottish Daily Mail revealed how Mr Hosie, 53, and his SNP Westminster colleague Angus MacNeil, 45, had both enjoyed intense relationships with Oxford-educated journalist Miss Cowdy, 36. Mr MacNeil announced his separation from his long-suffering wife Jane last year, not long after his affair with Miss Cowdy ended.
Mrs MacNeil had stayed with her husband after a previous embarrassment when he was caught with two teenage girls in a hotel room while she was pregnant.
After Mr MacNeil’s relationship with Miss Cowdy ended, she embarked on an affair with Mr Hosie, who currently bills the public purse more than £1,500 a month for renting a London home. Mr Hosie announced at the weekend that he was separating from Miss Robison, who is one of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s oldest and closest friends.
Both Mr Hosie and Mr MacNeil could now face questions from two sleaze watchdogs.
Labour MP Graham Jones has contacted the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, demanding answers about the use of public funds for London accommodation.
Tory MSP Jackson Carlaw has also sent a letter to the separate Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Kathryn Hudson.
Earlier this week, the Mail revealed how Mr MacNeil charged the taxpayer thousands of pounds for the luxury hotel where he had an affair with Miss Cowdy.
He charged taxpayers £6,250 for overnight stays at London’s Park Plaza in 2014-15, prior to the independence referendum, where Miss Cowdy told friends she repeatedly spent the night with him.
Yesterday, former independent MP and anti-sleaze campaigner Martin Bell said: ‘I have always maintained that MPs seem incapable of regulating themselves and Parliament needs a strong external regulator.
‘An MP is entitled to a degree of privacy but, of course, you must expect if you are an MP you are going to be exposed to more public scrutiny.’
Referring to Mr MacNeil, he said: ‘I have to say he has a few questions to answer here and I hope he can. If I was one of his constituents I would hope that he would answer them.’
Earlier this week, Mr MacNeil said: ‘My accommodation in London is claimed under normal expenses, as is the case for all MPs, and the cost of this is compliant with the rules of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority.’
An SNP spokesman said: ‘Angus MacNeil’s expenses were approved by the Commons authorities in line with the rules on MP’s London accommodation, and none of them involved any additional cost to the public purse beyond that.’
‘We will continue to work together’
THROUGH the decades they have stumbled, fallen, and continued almost gloriously to do so – so many gallant, well-meaning Parliamentarians, brought down by drink, graft, traffic-offences, dead women, live boys, shady associates, preposterous expenses-claims and Communist spies – a legion of men (and they have almost always been men) unable to keep their lives sober, their hands clean or their trousers up.
Rather like the traditional murder of English whodunnits – the put-upon husband, the shrewish wife, the tempting arsenic and the suspicious doctor – they even follow a broad pattern: talent, promise, frustration, hubris, and final moral lapse of the scale that wrecks marriages, ends careers and, now and then, has added to the gaiety of nations.
We have seen it at Westminster this week, where louche Nationalist MPs Angus MacNeil and Stewart Hosie both embarked on relationships with the same blonde siren. Mr MacNeil maintains his marriage ended for different reasons, but Mr Hosie – deputy leader of the party, no less – has seen his implode this last few days. And to add to the misery, his estranged wife is Shona Robison, just returned to her post as health minister in Nicola Sturgeon’s Holyrood Cabinet.
This type of fat scandal – sordid, shameless – is apt to characterise the tail-end of a party in power too long or which has enjoyed protracted electoral success to the point where its professionals believe themselves invincible.
After the 1992 general election, the Tories for a fateful period believed Labour could never again credibly challenge for power. Labour, after Tony Blair, plunged into a sea of vicious, unedifying troubles and the SNP (and one should be less troubled by the turpitude of Hosie and MacNeil than the cocky, ribald response of their Commons colleagues; Hosie was re-elected Westminster deputy leader the very day it emerged he had dumped his wife in the cruellest fashion) may likewise have lost all moral perspective.
This is how it begins – long political prosperity, begetting hubris, feeding a sense of invincibility and entitlement; and, if not nipped in the bud, concluding in humiliation and rout.
SOME, arguably, were victims of their times. You have probably never heard of Maureen Colquhoun, but – in 1974 – she was elected Labour MP for Northampton North, shortly afterwards came out as a lesbian, and was duly deselected by her horrified local party, who bewailed her ‘obsession with such trivialities as women’s rights’. Local Labour chairman Norman Ashby said sternly: ‘She was elected as a working wife and mother... this business has blackened her image irredeemably.’
Other scandals are, in hindsight, eyebrow-raising – notably that peripherally involving, as over-eager Government cop, W F Deedes. The sometime editor of the Daily Telegraph was once a minister in the Macmillan government, and proof definitive that journalists usually make terrible politicians.
It was Deedes’s calamitous decision to arouse John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, at oh-gosh o’clock one morning to force him to sign a declaration that he had never had carnal knowledge of one Christine Keeler, a woman of easy virtue besides linked to Yevgeny Ivanov, a ‘naval attaché’ at the Soviet Embassy in London and who was, of course, a Soviet spy.
Groggy with sleeping-pills, the fuddled Profumo agreed. Unfortunately, he had indeed slept with Keeler and, when finally cornered, had no choice but to resign and in such ignominy he was not even allowed personally to return his seals of office to the Queen (a messenger collected them instead).
The Profumo scandal did not, contrary to myth, bring down the Macmillan government – Macmillan’s resignation four months later was, in fact, down to a prostate cancer scare and his genuine belief he was about to die; instead, he survived till December 1986.
But it brought in curious new rules: in October 1983, for instance, Cecil Parkinson was forced to resign from Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet because he had not left his wife for his mistress, while Nigel Lawson continued to prosper therein because he had.
Some political careers have been ended by sheer greed. The 2009 expenses scandal still looms large in collective memory. What was striking, even at the time, was how many MPs survived really rather gross offence: Alistair Darling, for instance, lived down repeatedly ‘flipping’ his main home to qualify for especially generous perks. By contrast, those who had dared bill the long-suffering taxpayer for (for instance) bath plugs, scatter cushions, home cinema equipment, hanging baskets and pot-plants – to say nothing of that duckhouse – were decried by an enraged public.
Rather affectingly, Sir Peter Viggers (Con, Gosport) let it be known that his ducks had not even liked their £1,645 new gaff (it was later sold at auction for charity, even as Sir Peter obediently stood down at the next election on David Cameron’s orders).
Far more serious were the cases of those MPs who grew too close to big business by half. In the early 1960s, Reginald Maudling, an able if jowly young Tory star, was widely tipped as future Conservative leader (and did, in fact, push Edward Heath hard for the job in 1965).
But Maudling was unhealthily anxious for ‘just a little pot of money for my old age’.
It drew him into the dangerous orbit of John Poulson, whose bankruptcy and subsequent prosecution in 1972 forced Maudling (sometime director of a Poulson company) to resign as Home Secretary.
The broader tragedy was far greater, for – distracted by avarice and increasingly careless with drink – Maudling had been Home Secretary at a critical time in the building madhouse of Northern Ireland, once collapsing into his plane at the end of a blundersome day in Belfast with the mumbled moan: ‘What a f ****** awful country.’
Liquor simpliciter has destroyed many careers. It reduced George Brown – one of Labour’s most interesting and thoughtful politicians – to, by 1970, a national joke and, by his death from cirrhosis of the liver, Sir Nicholas Fairbairn to a foul-mouthed buffoon.
Most recently, and pitiably, it destroyed Charles Kennedy, who never beat – and, really, never admitted – the addiction that, bit by bit, cost him his credibility, his leadership of the Liberal Democrats, his marriage and, finally (after a pitiable performance on BBC Question Time in March last year) his seat in Parliament, held only in 2010 with a 13,070 majority.
He repaired to his Lochaber home, was last sighted leaving Tesco with a trolley piled with booze – and, a month after going down to a charisma-free
Scottish Nationalist, was dead, still but 55 years old.
Perhaps the gravest post-war scandal was the fall of Jeremy Thorpe, flamboyant and funny, Liberal leader from 1967 to 1976… and yet (though twicemarried) whose desperate efforts to conceal past and ineffably trivial homosexual relationships ended up with him out of Parliament and, by June 1979, in the dock charged with conspiracy to murder.
There are aspects of the tragedy readily forgotten. Thorpe was, in the end, acquitted.
HIS accuser, Norman Scott, was the most loathsome, vengeful, whingeing, blackmailing sponger imaginable. But Thorpe, fatefully, did not give evidence (his barrister was terrified what damage he might do if tempted to show off) and, as a result, though still only 50, was never again allowed back in any capacity in public life.
And now, latest in this dismal catalogue, we have two Scottish Nationalists.
It is unlikely the unfortunate private lives of Angus MacNeil and Stewart Hosie would have excited any attention but for the strong possibility that they enjoyed carnal frolic at taxpayers’ expense. It is still a little early – for all the gleeful talk of ‘peak SNP’ – to suggest their frailty is typical of the tired endgame of a political breaker on its way out by ebbing tide… as seemed of the final days of John Major’s benighted administration, whose unwise 1993 cry of ‘back to basics’ provoked an avalanche of scandal from files hitherto locked in safes.
But certain features do mark those servants of the people apt to come to very sticky public ends. Contrary to myth, it is not the cool kids – the prefects, the teachers’ pets, the popular hunks of the 1st XV – who tend to go into politics. Most choose easy, conventional courses and try to become rich.
It’s the geeks, the weirdos, the nerds, the sort who get a briefcase for their fourteenth birthday – and love it. It takes a special sort of all-consuming ambition to pound the weary pavements of a political apprenticeship and a high proportion of those who finally make the green benches are profoundly damaged men.
Add in the human reality of being far away from hearth, home and missus, the intoxicating hubris stoked daily by the Gothic glories of the Palace of Westminster, and all the people with agendas of their own just desperate to caress the cufflinks of power and influence… with endless late nights and the generous lubrication of drink, and it is a powderkeg waiting to happen.
Most dangerous of all – especially for very able men who, in most instances, could make far bigger money elsewhere – is an infectious sense of entitlement.
‘ “I take more grief, therefore I should treat myself to a little bit more of the good life than others,” the argument might go,’ observes theologian and moral observer Carl Trueman.
‘And one could certainly cast such an argument in terms of self-love and see in it the proverbial slippery slope which might, if left unchecked, lead to personal moral chaos. Today, I treat myself to the extra glass of wine at lunch; tomorrow I help myself to an underling’s spouse…’
Something else still graver marks such episodes – vituperative abuse of those who have dared alert the public to the self-indulgent or immoral antics of their paid representatives, on their time and at their expense.
Massed Nats, for instance, have not this week lined up to side with Shona Robison, hurt and humiliated in the worst way by her rat of a husband. They have instead bewailed the scrutiny of politicians’ private lives.
Even sainted Nicola Sturgeon has shied away from tackling arguably the sternest test of her leadership thus far to talk of privacy.
Yet virtually nothing in the lamentable catalogue above would have become public without the stern raking of newspapers. Several scandals genuinely compromised national security.
MANY more told – and tell – us much about the true character of too many in pursuit of power over all our lives; revelations, only this spring, of their casual attitude to taxation, or unduly cosy links with less than benevolent multi-national companies.
Yet there has never been such sustained assault on the freedom of the press, nor such desperation in our political class to win gratifying charge of what papers can and cannot report.
There is still time for Miss Sturgeon to take a grip of her party, end the arrogant course of Mr Hosie and stamp hard on guffawing colleagues who deem the deceit of a wife and the desertion of a child all really rather a romp.
Or she and her cause can become the darkness reaching out for the darkness – pressing the more for a new, illiberal age, one of statutory press-control, prior restraint and super-injunctions, where no one can unmask the venality of the mighty, hold power to account, or tell the public the truth about those who solicit their votes.