Mandy Rhodes interviews Minister for the Environment Michael Russel about life second time round in the Scottish Parliament
Loss affects us all in many varied ways but for Michael Russell, the Minister formerly known as Mike, the loss of his parliamentary seat in 2003 saw him thrown into the political wilderness and an enforced period of personal introspection that has seen him return to Holyrood having undergone a remarkable transformation.
The words; acerbic, arrogant and even nasty were regular prefixes to the name Mike Russell but that was pre-2003, before the SNP stalwart who had over 30 years involvement held various positions within the party including chief executive and been an MSP in the first Parliament, lost his seat.
It was a moment of Damascene proportions for a man so steeped in his party and his own ego. Some, even from his own party ranks, will admittedly, have taken great pleasure in this very public humiliation, afterall this was the man that played his own part in the unseating of John Swinney as leader with his comment that the “men in grey kilts” would be paying him a visit if the SNP did not do well in forthcoming elections. This was also a man so sold on his own popularity that he then stood in the subsequent 2004 SNP leadership election battle against Roseanna Cunningham – a longstanding personal friend – and Nicola Sturgeon when he wasn’t even an elected member. He came last in that particular popularity contest, made inevitable once Alex Salmond had thrown his hat in the ring. How some of his detractors laughed.
Russell, on the other hand, has put it all down to a valuable learning
curve. He says that the first person to phone him after he lost his
seat in 2003 was the Conservative Lord James Douglas Hamiliton who told
him that the first person to phone him after he lost his own
Westminster seat in 1997 was Donald Dewar who, in turn, told him that
there was life after politics. “How true those words are,” says Russell.
And that is what makes Russell’s return to frontline politics so
intriguing. Why, when you have a full and interesting life as a writer,
broadcaster and historian, would you wish to put yourself through the
agonies of electioneering, the vagaries of the electorate and the
potential indignity of a repeat performance?
“Unfinished business,” he says.
And this is not a flippant response to a serious question. Russell is
not a man to do things lightly. As an elegant and sometimes pointedly
witty wordsmith, he has spent lengthy periods of time analysing the
actions of others and will have picked up a few lessons in how not to
repeat ?history.
Russell is an intelligent, well read and sensitive man. He is also very
self-aware. Having initially trained to be an Episcopalian priest,
there is something of both the confessor and confidante about him. He
is good company and like any ebullient and bright character with a good
line in reminiscing and political gossip, can sometimes go too far in
the telling. For some, that package can be overpowering and charisma
translates as arrogance, enthusiasm as being overly keen and his
knowledge as being a bit of a know it all. He is well aware that he can
engender those negative reactions and only too conscious of how he may
have hurt people in the past but says he has come to terms with the way
he is and while we should all strive to be liked, he has stopped
apologising for who he is. He made a conscious decision in the 1990s to
stop debating what identity means and simply says he is who he is,
failings and all.
His own political downfall in 2003 coincided with well publicised
personal difficulties, starkly laid bare by lurid newspaper headlines
about his brief liaison with a parliamentary researcher. The episode
caused a brief break up of his 20 plus-year marriage and a much longer
and continuing period of regret. He says now that he wishes to draw a
line under that time but acknowledges that without the strength,
dignity, support and maturity of his wife Cathy, he would not be where
he is now both professionally – back in the Scottish Parliament – or
domestically – back in the marital home. And it is that which is
clearly the biggest prize. For while he acknowledges that he is an
intensely political animal and his love for the life enduring, he also
now recognises that the career of a politician can be short-lived and
can be as ephemeral as it appears.
What’s the biggest lesson he has learnt in the last four years?
“Humility,” he says and it is clear that he isn’t just referring to his experiences at the ballot box.
“I have learnt many, many things,” he says. “It was a very difficult
time and there are elements that are well recorded that made it even
more difficult. It was a profound experience but I am now doing a job
of work and this is where I am now and I don’t want to wear that period
as a shroud.
“There is no such thing as a long political career and so you have to
work as hard as you can and savour the moment when you have it but also
recognise that it is not the be all and end all of everything.
“I learnt lots of other things from the experience of losing my seat
and in many ways it was a good experience but one I wouldn’t want to
repeat. You know, you meet other people who have lost elections, like
Michael Portillo and others and there is something that we all have in
common and that is that we have unfinished business but also that we
find ourselves with time to think and to think about things differently.
“What I found out in the last four years that I was not here was that
[it’s best to] spend a lot of time in politics thinking about what’s
next rather than what’s to be done there and then. I was determined
that if I ever came back that I would enjoy it for what I was doing
there and then. I am very lucky to be back and to be doing a job that I
am interested in, that largely enthuses me, that has some things that I
know about and some things that I am enjoying learning about and it
hugely absorbs me. How lucky is that?
“I have often said to myself that when Alex offered me this job that if
it only lasted a week then I would have been glad to have had the
opportunity to come back and take it because it was a chance I would
not otherwise have got.
“It’s fair to say that I have come back a very different type
of politician and a different type of man.
“It’s fair to say that I have come back a very different type
of politician and a different type of man. 
I’m probably easier
to get on with and much more of a team player than I ever was.
“Losing a seat is something I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy but on
reflection, is probably very good for you as long as you learn from it.
George Reid tells the story which illustrates beautifully how brutal
this game is that when he lost his Westminster seat in 1979, he went to
London to pick up his stuff from the House of Commons and the taxi took
him to the member’s entrance and they wouldn’t let him in. It changes
like that, overnight. I remember I came to get my things on the
Thursday after the election in 2003 and my swipe card wouldn’t open the
door. Your staff go, you can’t get in…it’s painful…I remember having to
go into the constituency office and literally, shed all this
information about constituents. The work just stops.
I think that during the last four years there were things that I did
not do properly or things that I did clumsily but I did learn a lot
about myself and the process and how to do things differently. The big
lesson is spending time on not what’s next but what’s happening now and
do it as well as you can. Second, I was very often over critical and
difficult and not particularly easy to get on with or as much of a team
player as I am now. I apologise for that and indeed have even said
‘sorry’ to some people that I recognise that I may have hurt but time
moves on and so should you.”
I suggest to him that perhaps even in a world so obviously macho as
politics, the need for support and even counselling following the loss
of a parliamentary seat could be a beneficial development. He laughs as
our interview, as our discussions so often do, slides into the realms
of mutual psychoanalysis – we are both middle children, typically a
conflicting mix of insecurity, confidence, sensitivity and a desperate
need to be centre stage.
“There is no handbook on how to handle all of this. Interestingly,
there was an Australian MP who founded a self-help group for
politicians who had lost their seats but it disbanded quite quickly.
?We are not really the sort of people to share our insecurities and
failings in a group setting.
“There is a particular thing about politics that my wife observes when
she comes through to have dinner with myself and colleagues and that is
that all we talk about is politics and that can be very boring for
other people. It is incestuous and we do operate in a bubble and
perhaps it does us good to taste failure and be cast out into the
outside world to experience other things. It might make us a bit more
sensitive to life’s realities.
“I’m not recommending it but if it happens, you have to make sure you use it positively.”
The time out has led to a number of self-realisations. He says he was
always pretty introspective, which could have been interpreted as being
distant and arrogant and he is now at pains to listen and empathise
more. He was always quite self-critical and perhaps “pretty
discontented” but says he finds himself much happier in his own skin.
“I recognise that I may have wounded others and for that I am sorry and
some of the things I have said in the past, to be smart or make a
point, do haunt me but this whole business can be bruising and
unpleasant so the least you can do is to try and enjoy it and recognise
that we are all human beings in this together.
“I rather agreed with the tenor of what Wendy Alexander called her
Buddhist mantra although I did point out that in fact, this was not a
Buddhist teaching but came from the Hard Rock Cafe’s motto “Love All,
Serve All” which was adopted from the guru Sathya Sai Baba. That idea
that we should try not to hurt others and treat others the way we would
like to be treated, is a sound one.”
This is the same Michael Russell speaking who had just come out of a
rather bruising exchange in the Chamber with the Lib Dem MSP Mike
Rumbles over wildlife crime when the word ‘crap’ was certainly heard.
“I admit I wasn’t too kind,” he says with a wry smile before launching
into an attack on the conduct of the former party of government and its
inability, as he sees it, to adjust to the workings of minority
government as some form of justification for his conduct.
“I think you can see individuals across the Chamber who are interested
in having constructive debate and that is what minority government
should encourage. The way I do things is about trying to achieve
consensus and I will circulate a motion to the opposition spokesmen and
hope that they will come back with things they wish to discuss and when
I can, I will make amendments that we agree on…great…if not, we will
have a genuine debate. Sarah Boyack is very good, very straight and
will often say, ‘yes, let’s have a conversation about this’ and other
times will say she can’t agree and we have a fundamental difference and
the Tories will do the same. The people that never come back are the
Lib Dems. Then they will turn up, as they did on Wednesday night,
having had the motion since the Monday with a half arsed amendment
which is illegal, asking for a non-existent committee to do something
that can’t be done and then when I have spent a couple of hours with
the Solicitor General and others trying to persuade them to have a
manuscript amendment, they then decide that, oh, no…they know better.
They waste time and what the Scottish people should know and get
annoyed about is that this is political posturing at its worst. It
wastes time and we don’t have a huge amount of time to get things done
in Scotland.
“What I always hoped minority government would do is focus
debate and some parties have not quite understood that.”
“What I always hoped minority government would do is focus
debate and some parties have not quite understood that.”
Indeed Russell has been a long time proponent of the benefits of
minority government. As a columnist for this publication, he wrote
about it many times and he says it would have been on that sword he
would have fallen had he been involved in any attempts to not embrace
it when the SNP won the May elections.
“Minority government has reignited interest in politics. We had eight
years of coalition, which meant that there was no real point in trying
to debate anything as the opposition. Minority government works but it
can be scary.”
How would he have felt to have come back into Parliament as an opposition member?
“Thank God, I came back just at the right time,” he says with
remarkable honesty. “I think I would have wondered if I had done the
right thing if I had been sitting on the opposition benches but
luckily, that’s not something I even need to consider because we are in
government and we are doing a good job.”
Did he feel Alex Salmond was making a point about previous fall-outs,
misdemeanors or the fact that Russell had had the temerity to stand as
a contender in the leadership battle by not giving him the Cabinet
Secretary’s post in Environment but making him a minister to Richard
Lochhead?
“Absolutely not.”
Does he have any regrets about not being the leader of the party?
“None what so ever.”
He says that he is glad that he stood in the leadership contest, that
it allowed him to say things he wanted to say, think through things he
needed to think and changed his perspective on personal ambition and
success. And while he may have lost that leadership fight, he remains a
true believer that democracy always and, in the case of the SNP,
eventually, produces the right result. With that thought, he turns to
Gordon Brown who he sees as a tragic figure.
“This is a tragedy of enormous proportions being played out in front of us all and you cannot fail to be moved by this.
“Here is a man that wanted something so badly that he focused his
entire being on it without stopping to think whether he was the right
man for the job.
“Just because I don’t want to be First Minister, or lead the party, or
whatever, does not mean I have no ambition anymore but it does mean I
have accepted the idea that you are mature enough to recognise your own
strengths and those of others and your ambitions become different and
move in other directions. People, especially those in politics, think
the ultimate ambition is taking the top job – that is not how I see my
own ambitions these days and perhaps there is a lesson in there for
someone like Gordon Brown.”
What does he think of Salmond as First Minister?
“What distinguishes Alex now as First Minister from every other First
Minister we have had is that Alex knew exactly what he wanted to do
with it and why and that is what makes him so formidable.
“Quite frankly, apart from Donald Dewar, no one really understood what
this should be about. Donald knew what had to be done at that time
because he was the first and it was about starting a process. Poor
Henry didn’t really know what he was doing and Jack just wanted to be
leader for leader’s sake. You look at Wendy as leader and she hasn’t
the faintest idea what she is doing because there is no ideological
context or policy context and as for Nicol and Annabel Goldie, not that
they would ever get the position of FM, they would have no idea at all.
Alex knew exactly what he was doing and that is what is so impressive.
“It was a very emotional moment for me when we pushed the buttons to
vote for Alex to be First Minister and at that moment I thought of my
father who had been an SNP supporter – as was my mother, although much
later in her life, although still of sound mind – but even he had said
to me throughout my career that he didn’t know why I bothered with the
SNP because they would never get anywhere. I thought of those words as
I voted for Alex and thought how wrong he had been and how on that day
we overturned conventional wisdom and showed we could win as a party
and that is a profound change in party politics.
“Being in opposition for 80 years should teach you something if only a
bit of humility and I recognize that I and the party have been given a
uniquely privileged chance to do something right for Scotland and we
are not going to mess that up now.”
Russell says he has never seen the SNP work together as a party as well
as it does now and pays tribute to Salmond for putting together a
Cabinet that works so cohesively. He says that he and Lochhead share a
“fantastic relationship” and that the Cabinet Secretary’s knowledge of
fishing and agriculture is second to none. He says that his keynote
would be to say that now he is back, he is going to enjoy it for the
here and now.
Loss can do many things but the resulting transformation of a sometimes
scary, big political beast into a prolific and hardworking Minister of
Furry Animals proves a leopard can change its spots. Interestingly, he
describes his current role as Minister for the Environment as one of
conflict management.
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