Mandy Rhodes interviews Linda Fabiani, Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Culture
What makes us who we are?
It’s a question that forensic psychologists pick over as they dissect every facet of a troubled soul attempting to work out what act, what moment, what external force influenced a particular change in a person’s character.
On the face of it, Linda Fabiani, list SNP MSP for Central Scotland, is a straightforward sort of woman. The ever smiling, salt of the earth kind who holds no truck with self-indulgence and one who would certainly dismiss the musings of any old ‘ologist on her character. a Scots-Italian from Glasgow who, while undoubtedly a scholar in the pull-up-your-socks school of thought in terms of her own ups and downs, has a huge capacity to be understanding of the weaknesses of others. As a result, she presents like an open book; warm, funny, self-effacing and above all, affectionate. She’s ‘very Glasgow’.
She’s the kind of woman who throws her arms around you at the slightest opportunity, as if cuddling will solve the world’s ills and over the years, has embraced all kinds of flotsam and jetsam by campaigning on behalf of the homeless, asylum seekers, abused children, victims of domestic violence, female prisoners, and against female genital mutilation and so on and so forth. She is not frightened to hijack an unpopular cause if she can do something to help and admits that she sees the plight of all Scotland’s underprivileged communities as a collective responsibility.
She is flamboyant in her gestures and perhaps it’s the Italian in her that makes her less reserved than some of her political colleagues. At a recent magazine awards dinner, she threw away ministerial po-faced protocol to come rushing over to the Holyrood magazine table to congratulate the team on winning various gongs. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ she gushed, cupping embarrassed faces in her hands as if she was somehow responsible for our efforts. She’s like everyone’s favourite aunty. But what makes Linda Fabiani who she is, is much less straightforward than the woman she has become.
Fabiani was brought up in a tenement flat in Roswell Street in Partick. her home now demolished to make way for the Clydeside Expressway. She was born in 1956 into what she describes as a very fortunate and culturally-rich life. Her father was of Italian descent and he instilled in her a love of opera, books and all things theatrical.
She would spend Saturday afternoons in Partick library, lost in the pages of some classic novel or another and paints a vivid picture of an idyllic childhood surrounded by people who loved her.
“I was so very fortunate in so many ways. My father was a very, very clever man. “He was a bit of an enigma. He had a lovely nature. He was incredibly clever and talented in so many ways. Capable of anything, one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met, certainly one of the most well read people I’ve ever met but he had no real ambition in life, my father was happy just bobbing along. His first job was as an apprentice for the Daily Express to be a photographer but he left and went to work as a sugar boiler because he thought that making sweets for children was one of the best things you could do. It was strange. He worked in all sorts of jobs. He was milkman for many, many years with Sloan’s Dairies. But one thing my father always did was reading. I don’t remember him not reading. I don’t remember not having books. He would come in from work on a Saturday at lunch time and I would get dragged along to the library. So I don’t remember not being in libraries, reading constantly. I remember having to read The Grapes of Wrath when I was about nine or something and having to discuss a chapter with him every night and what it meant for social justice and all sorts of things. That was absolutely fabulous. What a start in life.
“Then there was my grandfather always playing music, mainly Italian opera, so that was always going on, always playing Mario Lanza and my mother worked in the evenings in a relative’s restaurant in Glasgow, the Apollo restaurant, which was right across the road from the Alhambra theatre that was there. It’s not there anymore. And so all the theatre people would be in all the time with their colourful chatter. I lived between my grandpa’s café in Whiteinch, and the restaurant. I was always in the back of the Alhambra theatre. I saw everything. I even sat on Lenny the Lion’s knee…[she laughs uproarishly at the memory]…I saw all sorts of wonderful things. I saw David Nixon’s magic show. I remember being entranced by some of Cilla Black’s dresses, you know, when Cilla Black was up and coming. I saw fabulous things in the Alhambra theatre. Whether it was drama or performance or whatever and that stuck with me. It was just such a privileged start to life.”
It was undoubtedly a fun, happy and secure upbringing. Unlike her schoolfriends, she was used to eating out in the family restaurants and she says that as a family they were fortunate enough to go on holiday once a year and drive a car.
But then, and you knew there was a then coming, when she was 12, she came home from school to be met by her father crying and her mother with her bags packed. ‘I’m leaving,’ her mother said. ‘Do you want to come with me’? When Linda chose to stay with her father and her brother chose to stay with his sister, her mother walked out of the house anyway, leaving her two children behind. It was 1968; a different moral era from now and while 40 years on there may be discomfort about a mother leaving her children, back then it was an unspeakable scandal. The way her family reacted was to never mention it.
Fabiani realised, by his absence, that her mother had actually run off with the next-door neighbour, whom she later married. She didn’t speak to her mother for almost a decade despite passing her a couple of times in the street in Glasgow and the reasons why her mother left or what the adolescent girl might be making of all this turmoil were never mentioned again. She was, she says, just left to get on with it but she also clearly had a precocious perspicacity for what was expected from her. a skill that remains apparent today.
“My father needed me and that’s why I stayed,” she says by way of explanation.
He did need her, in fact, he had a drink problem which had been somewhat disguised from his children with his wife still at home but, when she left, the true extent of his problems became apparent and his young daughter changed from being a cared for child into a carer. Sometimes, he just didn’t come home and it was up to Linda to get herself and her brother to school and make sure everything was in order at home.
One particular memory was of that first Christmas, just weeks after her mother had walked out. “I remember a knock at the door and when I went out to answer it, there was a man standing with a big box for us. It was full of food and presents and must have come from some benevolent organisation or something, who thought we were a charity case. I felt like ‘Tiny Tim’ standing there and my father went apeshit that that is how we were viewed. I was being the little adult and all practical, saying we could use the things but he returned the box so someone less fortunate could benefit. He said there had been some misunderstanding about our circumstances.”
Fabiani laughs all the way through this bittersweet memory but then casually mentions that the same year and every year after that, her mother would send presents but they would be returned by Fabiani unopened. Why? “Probably an unsaid pressure. I just felt it would be disloyal to my father.”
And it is pragmatism that Fabiani, the adult, still applies to that time in her life. “No one died,” she says. “My mother left but I still had a father who loved me and grandparents who made sure I never felt rejected. I felt he needed my support more than my mother and that’s why I stayed.
“Of course, it was difficult. There was the difficulty anyway of being an adolescent then feeling responsible, as I did, for my father’s life as he didn’t cope too well. “You look back and think, hard though that was, it wasn’t nearly as hard as some folk had it. Hard times can give you that ability to cope. I think maybe that’s what makes me so positive now.”
To say she glosses over what for many would have been a life-changing, never mind life-threatening event, is to minimise what she has done to compartmentalise things that happened and how they affected her.
Christmas is often a time for reflection and perhaps that is why Fabiani now feels it is OK to talk about these issues. That, and the fact that both her parents are now dead. “What effect has this had on me? I’m self-contained and I try not to judge anyone,” she says. “And I realise that nobody is infallible.”
Fabiani’s younger brother, Douglas, went to live with their mother a couple of years after she had left and the siblings remain close but even during secret meetings throughout their childhood, Fabiani refused to discuss her mother even when her brother tried to raise the subject.
Both children left home early – she at 16 – and while his elder sister decided at 22 to meet with her mother a decade after she had walked out on them, her brother was never reconciled with his father, who died in 1998.
Fabiani says that her mother and she grew close until her death in 2002 – just before her daughter was re-elected – but they never, ever discussed the whys and wherefores of her abandoning her children.
“When you were a child, you think everything is very, very clear cut and then you grow up and think nothing is as simple as it seems
When you were a child, you think everything is very, very clear cut and then you grow up and think nothing is as simple as it seems 
, there are shades of grey in between. So I sought out my mum and we ended up having a very good relationship and we became very, very good friends and I loved her dearly, and I miss her but we never actually addressed any of it.
“I suppose I decided there was no point in mentioning it and I took almost an objective interest in the life that she had built without us. Despite it all, we because very close but with this one great taboo between us. We skirted round about it and I’ve often wondered why but I think maybe I didn’t want some of the answers and she didn’t want some of the questions. We just never did it and I regret it.”
She is remarkably sanguine about the effect this momentous time must have had on her but she admits that her decision not to get married or have children clearly results from the experience. Did she have problems making relationships?
“I did for a while. You know that old cliché about girls who adore their father? Well, I absolutely adored my father and yeah, you always look for your dad in another relationship and I did a bit of that, which wasn’t very healthy or good for me but I got over it and look at me now, I’ve been with Duncan for 20 years.
“It’s an easy cliché to look at family breakdown and blame someone’s subsequent behaviour on that but you can look at any particular aspect of society and say some managed it well and some didn’t. You know that old argument about single parents being to blame for everything but everybody’s case is different. I feel very grounded and had a very privileged childhood. Some people don’t get the benefit of that and that’s why I feel we do have a responsibility to all our children to try and give them a degree of certainty, a degree of love and a degree of stability in their childhood and if, for whatever unfortunate reasons, they are not able to get that from their own family, I think as a society we need to look to give some collective provision.”
She says that she sees children in Scotland who have had to endure much worse than she ever did and her heart goes out to them. You get the impression that although she never had children of her own, she feels responsible for all Jock Tamson’s bairns.
She says she is astonished at the resilience of children and recognises that she may well have issues that still need to be resolved but one suspects she is unlikely to do anything about it. Instead she has thrown herself into politics, which could well be her way of healing wounds. She joined the SNP less than 17 years ago, having been won over by the idea of independence before she became a member. She was elected in 1999 and has enthusiastically embraced life at Holyrood.
Fabiani has an infectious laugh, an engaging manner and an openness that is refreshing and honest. She takes life as it comes and while she may appear surprised that she has ended up in government so early in her political career, she says ‘it feels natural’. She would turn up at the opening of an envelope and still express her excitement to be there in her capacity as a minister in the new SNP Government, and the arts world, renowned for its elitism, appears to have endorsed her appointment.
“I think culture the label, is very difficult for me. Define culture, well, we can’t. there’s so much involved in it; that sense of wellbeing, the sense of being part of something, the sense of there being something out with the tiny little cocoon that you start off in, of heritage, identity, and an awful lot of it is about enjoyment and celebration too and I feel absolutely strongly that everybody is entitled to these great feelings that these things bring. If you feel part of something, it gives you a basis and strength.
“I think part of it is about belonging. There’s nothing better than going along to see a fantastic performance or something and you feel enriched and you can feel quite transformed by it. You see it all the time; you’ve just seen a fantastic theatre thing and you’re standing about in the foyer or in the bar or whatever and complete strangers are all talking because they’ve shared a wonderful experience and it doesn’t matter that you’ve never met this person before or perhaps that maybe in day-to-day life it’s not somebody you would want to communicate with or even like but you’ve shared something in common, which has been pretty fabulous.
“There was a wee bit of criticism about some of the things we did for St Andrew’s Day, that it would exclude people, absolutely not. I was at that ceilidh for a wee while down the road in Princes Street Gardens and there were folks of all nationalities, all walks of life, whether they lived here or whether they were just on holiday, or studying here for a wee while, they were enjoying being part of what Scotland is, because that’s where they are at that point. It’s like if I was in Spain or France and they were having a national day, if I was in France on Bastille Day, I would be French for the day because I would be loving it. It doesn’t mean I’m French but the privilege of taking part in someone else’s national day would be brilliant.
“Culture is such a minefield, I wish we could come up with another word.”
You could be Minister for Fun?
“No, Minister of Enjoyment. The enjoyment of what our society and people in it can create. It’s fantastic.the heritage that’s part of culture, whether it’s young people going along to a museum and interacting with some of the displays, or children who love books going along to the library and sitting for a couple of hours reading fantastic books, learning about other people’s experiences, that’s all part of culture as well.
“Without using clichés, since I hate clichés, I would like people in Scotland, everyone in Scotland, just to be having an enjoyment of what we call culture in all its different elements as a natural thing that happens in life. It’s just something we take for granted. I actually think there’s an awful lot of that going on that we don’t recognise. One of the things that I find quite strange is that after eight years of so-called cultural provision, we actually don’t have any mapping at all of what happens. We have national companies that we have never mapped collectively so we need to know what they do in outreach and education work. Everywhere I go, I’m stunned at the work that people do. I turned up on Monday at the Bo’ness Railway Museum, stunning collection, but I was also amazed to discover all the community work they do. The work they do with schools, the fact that they, for five years, have been running a programme for ex-drug users to get them back into the work market. These things are not mapped across the country to find out everything we are doing and I believe that it’s only when you start to do that, that you can see where the gaps are.
“The first thing I am doing to rectify that is demanding that everybody who can map this starts putting it into the bigger picture so that we can look and see what happens. I want to see what the national collections do in terms of outreach work. I want to know what national companies do. I want to know the outcomes of the youth music initiative. Who’s reaching out to whom?
“Almost like an arts audit, yes, I would say so because what strikes me is that there have been an awful lot of initiatives over the years, many of them very, very worthy but how can you have initiatives without knowing what’s there in the first place?
“We have some wonderful things in Scotland. Let’s see what we have already and what we’re doing. It’s about time government had a handle on exactly what’s being done out there that’s great and enriching the lives of people in Scotland
It’s about time government had a handle on exactly what’s being done out there that’s great and enriching the lives of people in Scotland
.”
Maybe it’s her Scots-Italian-Irish genes that dictate her la dolce vita approach to life, politics and the arts. She is certainly one of the most positive people to ever walk through the Garden Lobby in the Scottish Parliament. Maybe it’s because she is fairly new to this business of politics that she is not weighed down with political baggage and remains optimistic and unscarred by the cynicism that so marks so many of her political combatants. But perhaps it is also because Fabiani does not take life too seriously.
‘Worse things happen at sea’ could easily be her mantra and frankly, worse things have happened to her and she has weathered the storm. The way she describes her portfolio could easily apply to her upbringing: “It’s genuinely full of so much pleasure, interspersed with moments of terror.
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