Mandy Rhodes interviews Angus Robertson MP about turning round the fortunes of the SNP
When the history of the SNP Government is written, it will feature heavily a castellated Scottish Highland hotel and three unassuming men who are the unlikely heroes of a David and Goliath political battle that saw Labour in Scotland swept aside by a party that had been relegated to the loony fringe for too long.
Angus Robertson, Peter Murrell and Kevin Pringle will be names etched on the furrowed foreheads of Labour’s slicksuited spin masters. How could this quiet, couthie and self-effacing trio of men have out-manoeuvred the kings of spin?
The story, as told by Angus Robertson, the half-German, half-Scottish, SNP MP for Moray and now leader of the party at Westminster, is a straightforward one: “We wanted to win and just needed to work out how.”
As he tucks into a mince pie smothered in rum sauce in the kitchen of his Garmouth picture-postcard cottage, Robertson presents as an unlikely giant killer. Apart from anything, he is being nagged by his wife Carron via the mobile to get the dishes cleared away (he’s an enthusiastic but messy cook) but do not be fooled by this cosy scene of domesticity or his frequent protestations that he was not solely responsible for making the SNP an electable party of power or his consistently congenial manner; he has a razorsharp intellect, is a fearsome combatant, is hungry for change and single-minded about independence for Scotland.
In June 2005, at the instigation of Robertson, a group of 25 or so senior party activists held a two-day summit at the Craigellachie hotel in Speyside which would create the blueprint for electoral success in May 2007. They had come together, he says simply, “as a group of us who just wanted us to win.”
The location was significant; Craigellachie hotel in Speyside, its romantic Highland setting, the embodiment of what Scottishness is all about for many Scots. The whitewashed baronial hotel has a reputation for discreet highland hospitality – it was the stage for the delicate South Caucasus Peace talks in 2003 - and it was in its stately boardroom and elegant private dining room overlooking the Spey and the Craigellachie Bridge that an audacious plan was hatched to unseat Labour and propel the SNP into office.
As a former journalist – he was news editor for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation – and a communications strategist who had worked for the Austrian Social Democrats in Vienna and the UK Cabinet Office before being elected MP for Moray in 2001, Robertson understood, more than most, the importance of planning, timing and execution and now, he believed, was the SNP’s time.
And despite what he says about teamwork, Robertson was in the driving seat at Craigellachie. He had made the reservations and the invitation list he drew up included the best of the party’s “next generation”, the hungry twenty and thirtysomethings, who now feature so heavily in the SNP Government. They included Kevin Pringle, Salmond’s most trusted adviser, party secretary Alasdair Allan – now MSP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, policy adviser Stephen Noon, head of communications John Fellows and the newly elected MP for the Western Isles, Angus Macneil, who went on to initiate the cash-for-honours inquiry that so fundamentally damaged the Labour brand, Richard Lochhead MSP, now Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Shirley-Anne Somerville, now MSP for Lothian, Alyn Smith MeP, Richard Thomson now senior SNP policy adviser and Westminster PPC for Gordon, and Jennifer Erickson, who formed Salmond’s innovative Council of Economic Advisers. Other group members included academics, marketing professionals, businesspeople and policy community experts. Salmond, his deputy Nicola Sturgeon and other key elected members were left out of the mix to encourage freedom of expression.
This meeting was to dovetail neatly with a process of reform already happening at SNP Party HQ in McDonald Road in Edinburgh at the instigation of party chief executive and long-time friend of Robertson, Peter Murrell, which crucially included the development of the cuttingedge ‘Activate’ computer-based campaigning data management system.
The way Robertson tells it, this was part of an organic process rather than there being one specific moment in time that prompted the gathering but there is no doubt that the fact that Robertson, Murrell and Pringle were close confidants – Murrell and Robertson met when they were 16 and sit on the NEC of the party and Pringle was two years above Robertson at Aberdeen University and also knew Murrell, who was working for the party in Peterhead at the time – helped the process gather pace. Murrell, although not present at Craigellachie, was integral to all the recommendations that came from the Highland summit.
“There was a growing sense amongst a group of us that Alex Salmond coming back in 2007, the political circumstances being what they were, all of us being of an age where we all want to go on to do things with our lives after we had gone on to achieve the things we wanted to achieve politically, and the fact that we have, unlike certain other parties, an achievable goal as opposed to a process of improvement or whatever, all combined to make the time ripe for change. So there was this sense that this was the chance, and we called it simply, Conference 2007 and it was absolutely, clearly focused on what we needed to do to win.
“This was about a group of different people who started getting very active and being very focused on 2007 and getting ready to make it happen. So I think that the most important thing that we did was, we asked ourselves a question – do we want to win?
“I know it sounds like a bizarre thing for people in politics to think about but you have to be absolutely single-minded about what it is you want to achieve and be convinced that you can do it.
”This was something that Robertson had learnt in the late 1990s when he went through something of a political epiphany while working in Vienna – his ‘Wahl Heimet’ or elected home – which was heavily to inform those plans to take the SNP to victory. He says it was a lesson in something so fundamental that he realised parties in the UK had forgotten – how to speak to the electorate.
“I was talking with senior political strategists from centre-left parties about elections and what they were doing and the challenges that they had and just how odd some of the challenges sounded and there was an example of a political party, that will remain nameless, that had less votes than party members and I just sat with these people and I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m an outsider and this sounds very strange to me. So you’re saying that you get less people to the polling booth than people who pay you a subscription every year to be a member of your political party?’ he said ‘yes’; and I said, ‘does that not strike you as being odd?’
“And of course, what struck me as odd, as someone who had been involved in politics before I went abroad, was that something that is quite foreign to continental politics is the notion of having a personal relationship with voters. They don’t knock on people’s doors and have a conversation with them and find out where they are coming from, what they feel, if they vote, who they feel most association with, do they vote regularly, that sort of stuff. On the continent, political parties have almost none of that information. So when it comes to election time, they blow an absolute fortune on fantastic-looking posters and great gimmicks but in terms of having a conversation with an organiser of a political party and saying right, how many people do you know about, how are you getting them to a polling station, what are they voting for and why – they draw a complete blank and this made me revisit our notion of connecting with the people on the doorstep. We had to remember that very basic concept of engaging with the voters; talking, listening and persuading.”
This fundamental became the starting point for the Conference 2007 weekend. This hungry-for-power group of SNP activists were not going to be happy languishing in the land of ‘no hope opposition’. They knew that the party’s reputation for whingeing and negativity would never win power. They had to start being positive, professional and get that message across and that was implicit in the agenda that Robertson put together in his PowerPoint presentation:
- Where we are and where we need to get to
Introduction: Angus Robertson
- Communication and Momentum: Internal and external
Presentation: Kevin Pringle
- Policy: Credibility and Perception
Presentation: Stephen Noon
- Winning friends and influencing new people
Presentation
- If I had a million or two: The perfectly funded campaign
Presentation
- Reaching and motivating the young
Presentation: John Fellows
- Action Plan: Timetable for Victory
Over and over again, the group revisited three important points that would become the mantra of 2006, long before the clever advertising men at Golley Slater came up with the ‘It’s Time...’ slogan, and they were: the 2007 election will be a two horse race, only the SNP can beat Labour, and it is a straight choice between Alex Salmond and Jack McConnell. Those three bullet points remained on the white board of the SNP office in the Scottish Parliament throughout the election campaign.
“There were five key aims that came from Craigellachie; they were win the election, get 20 first past the post gains, 629,000 list votes, 250 ward wins and raise one million pounds. We won the election, we made 20 gains, it was split between first past the post and list seats, it was different but we reached the target number, we exceeded the list votes because we realised that you had to get balanced on both to win, 250, well, we won 363 and we raised £1.4m. So we stuck to the plan and exceeded all our targets.”
Much of the subject matters and conclusions from Conference 2007 informed a project management process at SNP HQ, over several weeks in the summer of 2006, which came up with the famous Campaign Plan which encapsulated the five key aims and then was broken down into different areas: Communication, Governance, Message, Organisation and Resource. These were then measured against: objectives, critical success factors, performance targets, performance measures, benefits and actions.
A timeline was agreed for all and then monitored at weekly meetings ahead of the campaign and then daily during the last weeks before polling. This professional model was adhered to with military precision.
The idea of campaigning on a ticket of ‘Alex Salmond for First Minister’ also goes back to Craigellachie and Robertson describes it as one of those eureka moments when the group realised that, ‘yes, we can do that!’
Was there any doubt that Alex wasn’t an asset?
He laughs. “Part of that rearranging the mental furniture for people was saying, could they imagine Alex Salmond being First Minister of Scotland?
Part of that rearranging the mental furniture for people was saying, could they imagine Alex Salmond being First Minister of Scotland? 
And I think most people could because he’s got such a track record, is probably the longest-serving, highest profile politician in Scottish politics, is well thought of throughout the country and so on, and we concluded that he has to be an asset, and then all the polling evidence that we did bore that out. So part of that ‘Alex Salmond for First Minister’ was explaining to people on the doorstep what the list vote would do and what the election could be about.
“We had to ensure that people were understanding that it was a two-horse race, that it was a straight choice between Alex Salmond and Jack McConnell and so there was a constant and consistent narrative and if you go back and look at the material we were producing, there were three themes that we were communicating, those were the three things that came from Conference 2007 and we were communicating them until we got closer to the election when we made strategic decisions about fighting an entirely positive campaign. We knew the Labour play book, they were, frankly, lazy and using the same old arguments – I think that was very important because you had this contrast of a degree of confidence from us, with the electorate recognising that we weren’t getting worked up when attacked about everything but instead, we were coolly, calmly, talking about the things we wanted to do in government. On the other hand, you had a mess from the Labour side which was shrill, aggressive, and relentlessly negative; all the things that we know are a major turn-off for people.”
And used to be associated with your party.
“And that’s why we spent a long time thinking about what works and we tested all of that. And we came up with a plan and we stuck to the plan. It’s not rocket science but it does take a very high degree of confidence.
“Firstly, you have to have the best product on the market and I think we’ve always had that. have we always sold it the best way? I think, hindsight is an amazing thing, and it’s not for me to judge. I’ve been involved in lots of campaigns, some that have been less successful and some that have been more. But I think as an organisation, we have learnt a tremendous amount in the last year in terms of being professional, preparing, planning, sticking to the plan, and being as professional as you need to be. That started at Craigellachie.”
The culmination of that process was of course on Friday May 4 when the SNP had organised a rather lavish and presidential press conference at Prestonfield House in Edinburgh ahead of the final results being known. Salmond arrived by helicopter and there were definite murmurings among the press pack that this could leave the SNP with egg all over their faces. Did Robertson think that staging such a piece of political theatre had its risks?
“It was, in my mind’s eye, a question of getting us to that polling day and then getting a little more involved in making sure that the look on polling day was right and that the press statement at Prestonfield House Hotel projected the right image. We did not want to be ending up with hanging chads in Florida and looking like losers
We did not want to be ending up with hanging chads in Florida and looking like losers
. So we went for the West Wing at Prestonfield and where was Jack McConnell? he was on a side street in Glasgow somewhere, looking like a loser.
“Having worked as a journalist, having then advised people about the things you might want to think about, the look, the feel, the tone, the narrative and all of that, to suddenly be in a position where you can help create that reality, that was a fantastically exciting part of that campaign.
“You can sometimes be put on a bit of a pedestal and that wouldn’t be fair because this was about a team of people recognising a time and being crystal clear about what we wanted and how we would make it happen. I think we managed to help create, capture and then deliver a mood.”
That Craigellachie gathering in 2005 may not have had the cosmopolitan cache of the infamous Granita moment when Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Alastair Campbell sat around a designer glass dining table at the swish Islington eatery on Upper Street, eating nouvelle cuisine while manufacturing new Labour, but Craigellachie gave the SNP a solid base to formulate a new approach for its party, which won it its first government and may prove to have a longer legacy than the Islington soiree.
For Robertson, now back at Westminster as leader of the SNP, there remains a job to be done. “You’ll find a lot of examples of me standing up in Westminster and talking about things that don’t even affect Scotland directly but you will also see me stand up for Scotland on the issues that we have to stand up for Scotland and that’s what the public voted for us to do, which is to address the issues where policy making is lax or is wrong. Take the farming support issue - just absolutely childish - and you would hope that DEFRA would never be as childish as that in the future.
“And why would Gordon Brown not speak to Alex Salmond for three months? Why? he’s a busy man, of course he is, and he has to spend his time doing all sorts of things but you just don’t do that. I speak to Des Browne, who’s sort of my opposite number at Westminster almost on a weekly basis. Now I just get that and so does he. Why doesn’t Brown? It goes back, in part, to misunderstanding devolution, of not being a good people person, of being in the bunker. I don’t think Alex Salmond is the only person that Gordon Brown doesn’t speak to regularly, my goodness, he barely spoke to Tony Blair when he was Prime Minister and so it’s about a style, a way of doing things. I have never come across anyone more accessible to colleagues and to others than the SNP Government and that’s the way it should be.”
Perhaps too accessible, I suggest, considering the furore over the Trump affair. “I think, this is me wearing my former journalist hat, there comes a point where there has been an accepted wisdom that something is the way it is and the accepted wisdom was that the SNP Government was doing very well and to an extent that press coverage was perhaps too positive and oh, let’s just wait, there will be a trip up on something and one has now decided that this is the issue on which there has been a trip up and I’m sitting here, 45 minutes away from a potential £1bn investment in the north of Scotland and if there is any ‘ouch’ moment, it’s been looking at Nicol Stephen signing away his political career because he will not be the MSP for Aberdeen South after the next parliamentary elections. For having been in opposition for such a long time, you realise when the opposition’s job is to hold the government to account, which they’ve never understood. There comes a point where scaremongering and chasing headlines and feeding the monster are counterproductive to the general good.
“There is, literally, only one issue where Alex Salmond, the First Minister of Scotland, can not reply and it’s on a planning matter. So if you’re going to choose a coward’s issue to have a political stooshie over, you do it on one where the Government has one hand tied behind its back. It is political cowardice and he’ll pay the price, and his party will pay the price because in the North East of Scotland, people see through that very quickly and it was an immeasurably foolish thing to do. I am in favour of economic development, I am in favour of more jobs and more growth and a better tourism, improved tourism potential for the North East of Scotland and I’ll do everything I can to support that.”
As a Westminster MP, has he thought what he would do if Scotland gains independence? “Well, that’s quite difficult because I lived and worked in Vienna for seven years after I was in university and I gave that up to come back to Scotland because I thought it was important to put my shoulder to the wheel and be a part of this emerging Scotland and I suppose if Scotland became independent as soon as I would like that to be, then I can imagine being somewhere else, promoting Scotland. I am an internationalist.
“I suppose the thing that really interests me is helping define a role for Scotland in the world and I think we have great potential in peace and reconciliation and this actually ties all of this back to the Craigellachie hotel where, in December 2003, the first peace and reconciliation talks took place between parliamentarians from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Why Scotland? People are very intrigued by Scotland’s civic nationalism, the move to self-government that is democratic and peaceful. I think Scotland could take a lead in that kind of movement and I would like to do something with that if I could.”
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