Conservatives sprinkle the Goldie dust on Argyll – but are they a team?

Currently sweeping through Argyll is Annabel Goldie, Leader of the Scottish Conservatives at Holyrood and with a seat in the Cabinet, should the Conservatives win the forthcoming General Election.

Alongside her are Jamie McGrigor, Highlands and Islands MSP, a resident Argyll farmer; and Councillor Gary Mulvaney from Helensburgh, the party’s candidate in the election, now all but certain to be on 6th May.

On Islay today (2oth March),  the party yesterday came south from Oban and Lorn to Mid Argyll. We caught up with them in their visit to the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool in Lochgilphead, with its energetic new Board, led by the Mid Argyll Cycle and Triathlon Club – battling to save the pool for the resource-starved community.

We then stayed with the politicians as they visited the factory of Argyll’s major private sector employer, MacLeod Construction at Kilmory, talking to some of the twenty apprentices who work there and having discussions with the twin MacLeod brothers, Murdo and Kenny, who established, grew and own the business.

Watching politicians on the stump is fascinating. They are hurtled from one meet-and-greet session to the next, in short order, grasping at a welter of faces, proferred hands, clicking cameras (sorry), reporters and issues changing as fast as the people in front of them.

Oban was the hospitality industry with seafood restaurant, Eeusk; and activity tourism with the ambitious new marina project from Oban Bay Marine. Rhudle was farmers and agribusiness.  Lochgilphead was community amenities and the construction industry, as linked above. And Islay – who’d not bet on a distillery? The question is, will they patronise industry bad boys, Diageo, the sackers of Kilmarnock, or will they maintain a cordon sanitaire? All will be revealed in time.

Goldie – the party leader

So, how did we rate Annabel Goldie, close up and working hard as a human spinning top? The damage of Margaret Thatcher and the hated poll tax, forced first upon Scotland, still hurts. Public confidence in politics and politicians has – for good reason, never been lower.  The Conservatives are not going to come near to taking Scotland. The issue is can they improve on their current position of a single Westminster seat. The party has targeted 11 seats which it feels are winnable. One of these is Argyll and Bute.

There are persistent rumours that David Cameron and the metrocentric London Tory insiders don’t rate Goldie. Of course they don’t. She’s a very different type of politicians from Ashcroft non-doms and the slick young content-free, theory-heavy, policy-light teenagers that ‘advise’ and run the country these days.

What sane, rooted human being would vote for a Miliband (take your pick), or a Balls or the sternly vacuous Yvette Cooper over a Goldie? No contest.

Of all of the party leaders in Scotland, there is nothing tricksy about Annabel Goldie, nothing contrived, nothing disguised and no evidence of an ego. What you see is what you get. She is exactly the same working on the ground as she seems on television at Holyrood.

She is the only opposition party leader to have made sense of the coming to power of the minority SNP administration. She has done her party a lot of favours with her steady and constructive judgment on this. Their reward for supporting – alone – the SNP Government’s first budget was funding for the Townscape Heritage Initiative that is already contributing to the regeneration of some of Argyll’s major towns.

Goldie remembers people’s names with interest rather than as a mechanical trick. She listens, She argues, She makes points that have to be made whether or not it’s what her audience want to hear. When the MacLeod brothers ask if the project to build a replacement for the Forth Road Bridge is really little more than yet another concession to the spoiled Fifers, Goldie plays no political games.

It’s an SNP Government initiative, There was nothing to stop her doing a spot of cynical local vote-catching and agreeing privately with the view put to her. That’s not her style. She does have integrity. She launched at once into an impassioned and well informed rebuttal, laying out the reasons why this project is an absolute imperative for Scotland.

We did not once hear her play the tired old game – now genuinely beyond tedium – of rubbishing her political rivals.

On the contrary, she clearly has the highest admiration for the skills and abilities of Cabinet Secretary for Finance, John Swinney.  As an aside to this, she describes a meeting with her senior party colleagues at Holyrood, as Mr Swinney’s strategy became clear. Admitting that the act of persuasion was not easy, she revealed her own position, put then to her team: ‘How can we not support a Council tax freeze? We’d be unelectable.’

It is this grounded feel for the realities, this unquestioning need to support the supportable, regardless of its tribal party origin, that makes Goldie an unusual politician in these UK days of self-satisfied ruling androids.

She speaks warmly too of fallen Labour star, the former Leader of Glasgow City Council, Stephen Purcell. Seeing what has happened to him as ‘very sad’, she conjures a man with real vision and very high level abilities, all of which she enjoyed and respected..

Goldie gets it. She may have an inherited albatross of a party around her neck in Scotland, but, on the evidence, she understands that if you are competent, work to be even better and do not waste your time and corrupt your soul in disparaging others, people will trust you. And trust is the philosopher’s stone, the alchemy of politics today.

Anyone would vote for her. Whether they will vote for her party to the degree it hopes for may be a different matter. There’s not long now to wait to find out.

McGrigor – the Holyrood MSP

It’s also interesting to observe the dynamics of the behaviours of politicians in the presence of their leader.

On this trip Goldie is accompanied by Jamie McGrigor, a previous party candidate for the Argyll and Bute seat at Westminster – in the 2005 election. There he came second to Liberal Democrat Alan Reid, the sitting MP.

This was a good election for both men and for both their parties.  Alan Reid improved his own vote to reach his party’s highest score of 15,786 (although, with 36.5%,  not its highest share of the vote – that was Ray Michie’s performance in 1997, with 40.2%) and achieve its highest majority of 5,636. Jamie McGrigor took his party to second place for the first time since 1992 and with its highest vote since 1987.

McGrigor is now a Holyrood MSP, representing the Highlands and Islands and with several notable scalps to his credit in reforming measures. Among these, he got the legislation through to establish the Scottish Register of Tartans. He has also fought a virtually single handed campaign, which was ultimately and recently successful, to restore the bull-hire scheme so necessary to crofters and to the genetic integrity of remote rural livestock.

He is perhaps the only Highlands and Islands MSP who actually does the job he has been given – he travels the entire territory, turning up at all sorts of community meetings from Shetland to Skye and southwards. He sometimes gets bad press  for his travelling expenses – but he endlessly does the mileage around this huge region.

In Argyll, within his area of responsibility, he has won many friends in Mid Argyll with his voluntary efforts to work to find an appropriate sponsor for its much needed and threatened public swimming pool. He was also actively supportive of the residents of Loch Striven when – in common with politicians at all levels, from Government Ministers to Argyll and Bute Councillors – they were rolled over by the brutish Clydeport in the issue of the Maersk ships laid up outside their few houses.

Like Goldie, McGrigor too is an unusual politician with an instinctive feel for the issues important to his constituency and  whose parliamentary speeches and press releases are confined to the issue in hand and do not engage in autopilot party political points scoring.

Gary Mulvaney – the Councillor and Westminster candidate

A key member of the tour party is Helensburgh Councillor, Gary Mulvaney, the Scottish Conservative’s candidate for Argyll and Bute in the coming General Election.

Rightly or wrongly, one often senses a tension between McGrigor and Mulvaney. McGrigor is said to have wanted the Westminster nomination himself. We cannot confirm this but there is no obvious bonhomie between them and the two  men are from different parts of the party, the traditional squirearchy and the modern business world.

McGrigor – now formally Sir James McGrigor, a style he has not adopted – and a gentleman farmer, is what one might call a natural conservative. Mulvaney, a local Councillor from and for Helensburgh and grounded in the experience of politics at this level, has also actually run something. He is a trained accountant and business man, with a family Toyota dealership in the town.

An independent thinker, sure of his values but open to ideas, Mulvaney cheerfully admits to once having toyed with communism. Not the usual run of Tory candidates – although we  forgot to check whether the attraction was the commitment to egalitarian social values or to an authoritarian politique.

On the stump, he strikes up easy relationships with those he meets, not talking at them but listening to them and, interestingly, from our observations, the young relate to him quite easily.

In its own interests, if the party, out of classist traditions, gives Mulvaney anything less than its fullest and most energetic support, it faces two possible costs. He will lose – the party will lose; or he will win under his own steam and  owe the party little, feeling free then to carve his own agenda.

On the other hand, the unconventional conservative and the outsiderness may make Mulvaney more attractive to some who might not otherwise consider voting Conservative.

Is this a team?

However, apart from these frissons, while both men obviously enjoy Goldie’s company and relish the stardust conferred, neither seems comfortable as the support act whose specific role is undefined. Each is somehow ‘less’ than usual – in confidence and in engagement. Basically, they don’t quite know where to put themselves.

The combined impact of the three would be considerably more powerful if there were a greater sense that they really are a team. All three are, of course, elected to their current positions so each has an earned constituency and a spectrum of experience to bring to the game.

Yesterday did not seem like a team game – the most invigorating game to watch and the strongest recruiting force imaginable.

It seemed like three independent molecules in a relationship formed by being in the same petri-dish, progressively  set down in front of a variety of  scrutineers.

There was no real sense that they knew each other much, let alone the presence of the easy interpersonal warmth that a good team emanates.

The team yesterday should have been fronting Mulvaney. He may be the junior partner at the moment but he’s the main event. He is their flag carrier in the coming contest. Goldie’s and McGrigor’s roles yesterday should have been to play soaring and inspirational second fiddles to Mulvaney and to let the light fall upon him. His job would then have been to demonstrate his comfort, authority and promise in that role.

Will the other parties do any better?  Along with everyone else, we’ll be watching.

At heart, politics is a pretty selfish game and, like the dispersed micro-cultures of Argyll itself, politicians never securely learn that divided we all fail.

Note: The group of Macleod apprentices present on Friday are: Ross Addision from Oban; Brendan Austin from Tayvallich; Mark Penrose from Oban; Xander MacNab from Tarbert; Kenneth Anderson from Lochgilphead; Calum Wishart from Lochgilphead; Roddy McAlister from Campbeltown; Richard Goodwin from Minard; Ross Hamilton from Inverneill; John Wright from Tayvallich; Scott Maclean from Ardrishaig.

The photographs above are copyrighted to For Argyll and show:

• Annabel Goldie talking in the foyer of the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool
• Roy Rutherford, in Ms Goldie’s party, talking to Gary Mulvaney; Annabel Goldie talking to Jenny Davies, Board members of the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool, with an attentive Jamie McGrigor.
• The three politicians with, on the right, Kenny Macleod. with apprentices outside one of the buildings at Macleod Construction.
• In Macleod’s boardroom, Annabel Goldie makes a point to Murdo Macleod as Gary Mulvaney looks on.
• Goldie questioning one of the apprentices in the factory.
• Jenny Davies, right, from the Board of the threatened Mid Argyll Swimming Pool, briefs Goldie and McGrigor as Alastair, Acting Duty Manager and Senior Life Guard, listens in.
• Murdo Macleod talks Goldie and Mulvaney through company issues with Tiree, SAP ratings and a calculation base calibrated on Longannet.
• Jamie McGrigor with Kenny Macleod and some of the young apprentices.
• Mulvaney and Kenny Macleod listen as Jamie McGrigor makes a point in the boardroom.
• Gary Mulvaney with Jamie McGrigor in the foyer of the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool.
• Mulvaney and Goldie get to grips with material presented by the Macleod brothers.
• A ‘we were here’ shot in bright light outside the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool.
• Blinking in the sunlight, Jenny and Gillian from the Pool Board are flanked by the three politicians.
• Waiting during the photocall at the Pool, Mrs Jane Macleod, Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Argyll; Roy Rutherford of the Scottish Conservative party, Trish, who works with Annabel Goldie; and Murdo Macleod, from Macleod Construction, whose firm and employees(voluntarily) have been  very real support for the Pool in its time of need.