Mandy Rhodes interviews former Presiding Officer, the Rt Hon George Reid, about what happened next

Let’s play fantasy political dinner party: Who would be there? Usual suspects; Nelson Mandela (sort of compulsory), Ghandi, Bhutto (all of them), Bill Clinton (you need someone to share a cigar with), Tony Benn, Thatcher, Ian Paisley, Martin McGuiness (well, they come as a pair now), Castro and a few others to make up numbers, add some necessary glamour and to add to the volatile mix.

The wine would flow and the meal would be devoured with the same ferocity as the round-table debates and sitting at the head of the table with a benign smile on his face would be a calm and distinguished-looking man of diminutive proportions – a sort of smaller and less intrusive Michael Parkinson - whose conversation pieces would be as diverse as his own personal experiences; war and famine in Africa, atrocities in the Balkans, peacemaking in Northern Ireland, the building of a scottish Parliament and the very future of civil society. Urbane, charming and knowledgeable but with a humility and experience that allows him to facilitate conversation rather than dominate it. this would be the ideal dinner guest, the one that could build bridges, knows the right etiquette in every situation, can mix a mean Martini, has all the anecdotes and would sprinkle his already sparkling conversation with the odd elegant French phrase that nobody understands but nobody cares because it sounds good anyway. He would be the peacemaker that would smooth out the odd table faux pas and the old-fashioned sort who ensured that everyone had a good time and left with the right coat and partner

He would be the peacemaker that would smooth out the odd table faux pas and the old-fashioned sort who ensured that everyone had a good time and left with the right coat and partner

George Reid was always going to be a hard act to follow as Presiding Officer at Holyrood. Whether he was striding presidential-like through the Garden Lobby with one dignitary after another, presiding over FMQs or standing out in the courtyard having a cigarette (he refused to give up with the ban, saying: ‘I’m a libertarian, nobody is going to tell me what to do’ but then gave up this Christmas and feels no better for it), it was a role he had made his own and few would argue that even as a seasoned SNP politician, both at Westminster and Holyrood – he was elected to Westminster in 1974 and Holyrood in 1999 - that he ever allowed his own politics to supersede the implied neutrality of that post. Poor Alex Fergusson is walking in the footsteps of a legend and sometimes, the abilities of legends become exaggerated. People cried in the Chamber when Reid spoke his final words of ‘goodbye’. He knows only too well his own reputation – he worked hard to secure it - and in typical fashion, has shown polite restraint at not only avoiding being seen in the Parliament since his departure but has also desisted from offering his successor any unwarranted advice. He says that’s not his style and to be fair, he’s been far too busy to think about sharing his pearls of wisdom with the new and, some would argue, under siege PO.

Some would say that Fergusson has done the right thing and not tried to emulate the man who seems to have packed in a couple of lifetimes into his own 68 years. Others may contest that the new Presiding Officer is not only not George Reid but neither is he any good. time will out.

To be fair, Reid may be remembered as the consummate diplomat but those skills were honed over a long career in journalism, politics and a 15 year stint peace building in Africa, Europe and the Middle east as a director of the International Red Cross. For a man that had experienced first hand the tragic results of international conflict, a few sparring MsPs wasn’t even going to alter his stride.

Reid was sometimes seen as a little arrogant but this shouldn’t be confused with the fact that he does indeed have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, has mixed with the great and the good and as a former broadcast journalist, is used to a bit of primping and preening and can be a little fey. But this is also the man who left vanity, of which he undoubtedly has some, at his office door and wandered round the Parliament one day, holding hands with the visiting Dalai Lama, as is the custom of the orange-sheeted one.

He is also the PO who laid to rest the perpetual difficulties surrounding the soaring costs of the Parliament and was not frightened to put an end to talk of Zen gardens and parliamentary gymnasiums or to kick the consultants into touch by capping their burgeoning fees. the issue dominated his term as PO and yet he was sanguine enough just weeks before he departed office to comment on the end to the debacle with the words: “It’s over - let it go.”

Reid played an instrumental part in raising a building dogged by criticism into becoming a Parliament fit for purpose but letting go is the one thing that Reid has not achieved for himself by simply leaving the Parliament. there is no doubt that he had been wary, even nervous, about retirement. He is not the retiring sort and admits that quite soon into it, Dee, his wife of 40 years, did turn to him in bed one morning and ask him how often he would be home – and it wasn’t because she wanted to plan the menus for the next few years.

Thankfully for Dee, her husband has been true to form and has taken on an array of roles, from chairing a review on the secretariat of the Northern Ireland Assembly to a variety of academic posts, been a commissioner on the Caucasus- Caspian Commission and sat on a Carnegie trust inquiry into the future of civil society through to the most recent appointment by Royal command of becoming the Queen’s representative at the General Assembly of the
Church of Scotland - an honour he takes over from the Duke of York and which affords him the opportunity to make the opening and closing remarks at the annual gathering. Getting in the first and last word is something that suits Reid and allows him the generosity of spirit to let others do the arguing in between.

“Yes, I’ve been having a nice time,” he reflects. “I’ve been doing things that I enjoy, basically but I haven’t retired away from something, I’ve retired in to something and that is putting together the experiences I’ve had of governance here at Holyrood, at Westminster and in the countries I became involved with while working for the International Red Cross and trying to put that to good use. I thought my immediate calling would be into academia so I could do some thinking but the call to come and do governance head on has come fairly quickly. so I’ve been busy in the Caucasus, quite busy in Moldova, and the one I didn’t really expect to get was to chair the governance review at Stormont. that took a fairly solid four months at the end of last year and I was in Belfast and Northern Ireland far more than I was here. that’s the trouble with retirement - you never get days off.”

In fact, his schedule for this week alone would be enough to slay a younger man; Berlin, London, Aix-en-Province, London and then Moldova.

There is, it would appear, an infinite global interest in how Scotland has achieved its devolved status.

“I think it’s because we’ve done it very well,” he says matter-of-factly. “I mean if our Parliament was anywhere else in the world, with a minority government, with the arithmetic you’ve got at Holyrood at the present time, they would say what a remarkably mature democracy and I believe that’s true. You don’t see it from the inside but everything functions, the committees function, there is a good deal of bargaining and facilitation, that’s how I think republics are going to be in the twenty-first century. the impression from outside is extraordinarily good.

“The second leg, of course, is that politics has changed worldwide, there is a more participatory democracy going on, where it’s not top-down command control stuff, and working with the people. Over eight years, we’ve built up a pretty good reputation in that respect. that certainly was one of the legs that took me into Northern Ireland. I suppose I went there because I came from a nationalist background and also I’m Presbyterian and had a reasonable record in government.

“I’ve known Paisley for a very long time - he was through the wall from me in the Commons in the 70s and I remember his speeches from that period and then I’ve had dealings as a journalist with McGuiness over the years. I suppose that I was pretty dubious about them transforming into the ‘Chuckle Brothers’ but I have found they are. You can’t sit in a room with them, having a cup of tea, without the presence of special advisers, and feel a genuine bonhomie, seriously, and it goes back to the rediscovered craic.

“It doesn’t surprise me. If you take a global view, quite often conflicts of that type are absolutely irreconcilable until the hard men sit down together with facilitation, which is the sort of thing we do in the Caucasus. Once they actually sit down around the table, which had to be around a hexagonal table in their case so that no-body sat at the head of it, by the way….”
No? Is that true?
“Oh yes, civil servants were sent out with about 20 minutes to go to find a hexagonal table. Once they sat down, what did they have to say? Well, I mean, I’ve been with them a lot, the pair of them, I have a shared Irish sense of humour, a shared craic and as a scot, when I’ve gone to Ireland in the past, I’ve never bothered particularly with which community people have come from - I’ve liked both parts - and I think Paisley and McGuinness have realised that. I think together they’ve found humour, a reasonable sense of purpose and a need to look forward, not back.

Does Reid sense a feeling of regret from Paisley and McGuiness, a grieving for lost time, never mind lost lives? “I think, that’s the great scots-Irish problem, we spend too much time looking back - ‘Never mind the future

I think, that’s the great scots-Irish problem, we spend too much time looking back - ‘Never mind the future

“I think also Northern Ireland is very conscious that it’s got a long way to catch up. It is tremendously affected by the success of the south. the joke used to be, ‘how do you know you’re in the Irish Republic?’ ‘the car goes bump, bump, bump, bump, bump.’ Not now with swanky roads, not now you have a good motorway from Dublin up to the border.

“I spent a lot of time with retired civil servants and academics and people like that, from the Unionist traditional camp whose grandfathers had been out with Carson and signed the declaration and so forth, who have actually gone back to becoming United Irishmen and a lot of these people see the north’s long-term future, not in immediate terms, having a much closer relationship with the south. Reason: they’ll always be tiny they say in the north and within the UK but within the Irish state and within it’s wider Council of the Isles arrangement, they could have more power.”

Surely, people do not see that as a realistic position, given the bloodshed that it has taken to get to this point? “I’m saying that that is how a few intellectuals see it now but what intellectuals see now has a habit of coming to pass ten, 15 or 20 years down the road and an awful lot of that depends on what happens in the rest of the UK in terms of devolution, etc.”

Not only was Reid instrumental in getting some of the hard men round a table to discuss a way forward but he also smoothed the way for the appointment of Carol Devon, former Director of Access at the Scottish Parliament, as the interim chief executive of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Why did it require someone from outside?

“The thinking was that to force through the forces of change necessary, you can’t have someone there that would be there forever, you can’t be one of them. Carol’s got all the necessary experiences in clerking and she’s had the run of the rougher jobs at Holyrood, she’s good at crisis management and she’s good at getting on with things. they would trust a Scot, I don’t think they would have trusted somebody from somewhere else because we’re close enough. The Irish like the Scots.”

Reid tells the story of Northern Ireland so easily, you could almost forget the decades of violence that preceded the historic power-sharing agreement. But is it that simple? Does it just take that very human act of people sitting down together, to have a shared experience anda laugh to move things forward? Is that what politics is about?

“No. Politicians are actually not very good at conflict resolution because politicians always take positions. Going back to my Red Cross background, I learnt that you’ve got to move them off positions and onto issues and once you begin to teasethose issues out in terms of Northern Ireland, for example, employment, education, peripherality, then you begin to discover they’ve got a common cause. The poor Protestant women have the same problems as the poor Catholic women. If you go to Nagorno-Karabakh, where we’ve been doing some work bringing refugees and journalists together and bringing young women together from both communities, once you get away from the position - ‘we shall negotiate only once the territory is back from Azerbaijan’, - and if you get people talking about the issues, not politics, it’s about feeding your family, having a roof over your head, having a bit of leisure time, looking after Grandpa, these sort of things, then you can actually start to build a common cause. It is the shared human experiences that bond,that sense of belonging that is so important.”

I suggest it is quite a hard lesson for someone who has been a politician to learn that politicians don’t make the best peace makers.

“Well, yes, but then I’m never sure I was 100 per cent a politician. I mean, I’ve been very fortunate because I’ve had a life apart from politics. I think I learned that when I came out of Westminster and found myself in the great African famine. And when you were dealing with people like Mengistu, there had to be non-western ways to do things.”

I wonder if that realisation was why, in the end, being Presiding Officer was an incredibly successful fit for Reid because it took him out of that posturing of politics and into facilitating real governance - he could still be involved in politics but without having to take a stance.

“Well, I certainly took a stance in the early stages when I was an sNP MP but after ’79, the chances of my ever getting office were gone and it was perfectly clear that if there was to be an sNP Government here in scotland, I was too old for that or pushing the limits of that. I enjoy facilitation and sometimes you can get better, lasting results there than you can in the ya-boo stuff across the Chamber. By inclination and temperament, yeah, I think I am made that way and being PO suited me better.”

But he was and is still a Nationalist so how did he feel when the sNP won the elections in May?

“It felt like the rounding of a circle and I think some of them should remember the old men and women who travailed in the past, without whom it would neverhave happened. And I’m not talking just about myself. I’m talking about people like Winnie and Robert Macintyre and Billy Woolf, Gordon Wilson and people who went through a very miserable time in the parliament of ’74 to ’79. Nobody would be here, but for them. The funny thing is, I had a night to rummage in the attic recently and came out with some old election stuff from ’74, where I had described myself as an incrementalist, which is what I will always be; a gradualist; a social democrat, which is what I’ve always been, not as easy to say what a social democrat is these days as it was then, when there was an ideological alliance, but by and large, I suppose that I believe that a society in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is not sustainable in the long run and the State has a duty to look after the vulnerable. so incrementalist, social democrat and always European.

“I was actually punished by the sNP in the 1970s for going to meetings with the European movement - I was supping with Satan. Times have changed. You’ve also got to see people in their mind and time. the key factor for me has always been the natural sovereignty of the scots people; they can decide and I’ve always thought that you get to three just as easily in three hops as you do in one leap.”

Does he miss Holyrood?

“I miss the people, not desperately, I’m not like that. You know me well enough, when I move on, I move on. I’ve had a life outside politics, the people I feel really concerned about are the people who have done nothing but politics all their life and especially these younger men and women in their power suits. they’re desperate to get in at the age of 24 or 25. Oh, come on, go and get a life. There is more to life than politics.”

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