Mandy Rhodes interviews the Secretary of State for Scotland, Jim Murphy MP

According to Murphy’s Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong but for the newly installed 
Secretary of State for Scotland, Jim Murphy, life so far doesn’t hold true to the axiom.
Eleven years ago, Murphy stood in what was thought to be an unwinnable seat for Labour – Eastwood in Glasgow – which had been until then the safest seat for the Tories in Scotland. So sure was Murphy that the game was really just an exercise in promoting Labour’s message (and presumably, his own future political career) as opposed to actually wining that he had agreed with his partner, Claire, when she had said he could go ahead and stand because basically, he had “no chance” of being elected. Instead, against all the odds and homespun predictions, the former President of the NUS swept to victory, becoming, if not the most surprised, then at least the youngest Scottish MP at just 29.
He is still refreshingly wide eyed about the experience and says: “The truth is, I got elected by accident. I stood for a seat that hadn’t been held by Labour since the 1920s, in a seat, that at the height of Thatcher’s power and all the dreadful things that she was doing to Scotland, voted Conservative with a majority of 15,000.

“Of course, I didn’t stand expecting to fail but neither fail nor win. In 1997 I expected to make a good case for Labour and in my eyes, that would have been a success but I certainly didn’t expect to win. In fact when I asked Claire, who I was living with at the time but not married to, whether she would mind, she thought about it and a couple of weeks later came back and said she didn’t mind because she had spoken to her friends and there was basically no chance I would win! So poor Claire thought it would be a four-week campaigning thing and then back to normal life and here we are 11 years later, an MP, married and with three children and now Secretary of State for Scotland.
Murphy tells this story as he wraps his long legs around each other and leans his lean body in a slightly gauche, right angled, adolescent sort of way, looking slightly too tall and gangly for the ‘good chair’ in the very blue room of the Edinburgh home of the Scotland Office. He sips away at a bottle of Irn Bru (which he reminds me repeatedly is “diet”) and looks slightly incongruous in the grand surroundings. He is open, amiable and can’t quite contain his excitement. Although slightly endearing, surely this schoolboy breathlessness at his early achievement, is a bit disingenuous, after all, Murphy is a career politician, having only briefly flirted with getting his hands dirty when he began an apprenticeship as a joiner in his adopted home of South Africa – he moved there with his family as a 12-year-old – which he quickly gave up when he returned to his native Scotland before the inevitable call up to the South African army. Back in Glasgow and living with an uncle, he enrolled at Strathclyde University to study politics and law and quickly became heavily involved in student politics, eventually becoming the full-time President of the National Union of Students. He didn’t finish his degree and has never really worked in the outside world since. The NUS is, of course, a well trodden breeding ground for future politicians and the year Murphy was elected to parliament, he was joined by fellow former Presidents, Stephen Twigg and Lorna Fitzsimmons. Despite what he says, Westminster was surely his destiny. Even as an 8-year-old child, he was filling his primary school jotters with a precocious interest in the political world and says his mother recently gave him his old school exercise books and even he was amazed to see that alongside his tales on how his favourite team, Celtic, were doing and what the priest had said in church that Sunday, were bulletins about what was happening politically in the world.
Murphy does not come from a political family – his father was a plumber and his mother a dinner lady at his school – but he says his parents would have voted Labour “just to do the right thing and try and keep Thatcher out”. He was brought up among three generations of the same family in a two-bedroom flat on a council estate in Arden on the south side of Glasgow, with at least one member of his household unemployed at any one time. When he was 12 and his father now one of the growing army of unemployed, his family had had enough and moved to South Africa in search of a better life.
His own brand of politics – fundamentally a belief in what is right and wrong - is clearly born from a combination of his early childhood upbringing; being poor in Glasgow with Margaret Thatcher in power and then his teenage years; being white and living in South Africa during apartheid.
Both experiences have had a profound effect on him but he brings a faintly naïve and simplistic interpretation of world politics to the table which, perhaps because of its lack of sophistication, manages to placate and embrace a wide range of views. And it is this natural ability to get consensus by accident rather than design which has won him plaudits and is the key to his fast track through politics.
“Of course, I wanted to be a politician but would have liked to have done it when I was a bit older and not at the age of 29 and the truth is, it took me about three years to adjust to Westminster and the remarkable historical institution that it is.”
That deference to the establishment is an interesting insight into Murphy. He also talks about not ever feeling part of the establishment. He is the classic working-class boy done good and while he may use his experience to argue that everyone deserves the same chance in life, maybe there is a part of him that still can’t quite believe his luck.
It may have taken him, as he admits, three years to find his feet at Westminster but it didn’t take him long to know the ropes and get those feet under the Cabinet table. He took his first step on the government ladder in 2001 when he became parliamentary private secretary to Helen Liddell, the then Secretary of State for Scotland. A year later, he was promoted to the role of government whip with the expectation that this straight-talking Glasgwegian would use his natural, saccharine-coated, ‘we’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns, negotiating skills to get potential backbench rebels on side. It wasn’t an easy ride. He may be painted as an uber Blairite - he voted against the government just 14 times in almost 2,000 parliamentary votes - but on Iraq, it was personal. During his time with the NUS he had organised demonstrations against Saddam Hussein’s regime, including staging events to raise public understanding of Saddam’s slaughter of families in the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988. He had Kurdish friends and says he believed at the time that the weapons of mass destruction did exist and to vote with Blair was the right thing to do, for him.
It’s personal experience or emotion that apparently fuels much of Murphy’s politics, which perhaps explains what some may see as occasional leaps of logic. For instance, he denounces the “vile” nature of apartheid while at the same time having a key role within Labour Friends of Israel, a country whose policies have been described by the Reverend Desmond Tutu and President Jimmy Carter as a form of apartheid. Murphy sees no contradiction.
“I can see that you have to ask the question but one of the simplistic analyses of world politics is that the Middle East is South Africa, it’s not. South Africa was a vile totalitarian regime enforcing the will of a minority in a basic, everyday life sort of way, on the lives of a relatively powerless majority with no intention whatsoever of compromise and what you have in the Middle East is, in my view, two countries; Israel and Palestine and the heartbreaking thing is that so many people have had to die in achieving that and so I don’t think you can take one experience and say it is the same as another. Trying to transpose South Africa onto Israel and Palestine isn’t helpful and helps to complicate rather than clarify.
“There are massive differences between the old South African regime and the current Israeli approach and massive differences between the ANC and the way in which they behaved and the way some of the more radical Palestinian elements behave. There aren’t many serious thinkers, geopolitical thinkers that say there is a direct parallel. I have just spent 18 months in the Foreign Office and it is certainly not the Government’s assessment, regardless of their view of either country and it’s just not a template of the Foreign Office’s thinking or any other government in the world’s template of thinking, apart from maybe the Iranians…”
Ok, but would he be a friend of Palestine?
“I was a founder member of one of the Muslim Friends of Labour organisations and went to their first meetings in London and I am involved with Mohammad Sarwar, who is working very hard in this area and I am currently working with Ken Mackintosh, the MSP in my constituency, and we have been fighting for six years, six long years, to get a mosque built. One of the great things about my constituency is we have a very substantial Muslim community and very substantial Jewish community and none of the frictions that you see in other parts of the world are present. There are never occurrences, as far as I can tell, in East Renfrewshire. It was actually two of the Rabbis that asked if they could help when we were trying to build a mosque because they remembered when people didn’t want synagogues built.
“I think the Labour Party’s job is to build a coalition to end injustice or inequalities of any kind and building the coalition is the important thing and that was the mistake that we made in periods of the 1980s to lecture the public, no compromise with the voters. You need to build a coalition with the electorate which allows you to do the things you believe in, which was the remarkable achievement of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown over all these years.”
Building coalitions is what Murphy is good at. He even managed as NUS President to persuade the student population that the Blair reforms on education funding were for the common good, despite the clear consequence that poorer students would not have the same access. He did, however, receive a number of brickbats for his stance which led to a number of motions of ‘no confidence’ in him as a student leader and a question in the house by Ken Livingstone about his competence as a potential MP and whether he displayed dictatorial characteristics.
However, he overcame those doubting Thomases. Testament to his skills at assuaging tensions was that he remained in the role of whip until being moved to a junior position in the Cabinet Office in May 2005. In a mini-reshuffle in November that year John Hutton, his boss at the Cabinet Office, was moved, leaving Murphy as “acting” Cabinet Office minister. He was promoted in May 2006 to minister of state for employment and welfare reform, with responsibilities also including child poverty and he was appointed Europe minister under Gordon Brown’s first reshuffle in June 2007. He said at the time that he was made European minister because he was a “realist” and didn’t come to the job with “any great baggage or emotional attachment to Europe always being right — far from it. But I think that, if Europe can work more effectively, people’s perceptions will change.”
And it is this, in relation to the continuation of the Union that Prime Minister Brown, presumably, hopes Murphy will bring to his new role at the Scotland Office. He laughs at the 
fevered speculation that went on before his appointment. This publication ran a story in June revealing that the role of Secretary of State for Scotland would become a full-time Cabinet position and that Murphy was the man earmarked for the job.
“You were the first to tell me,” he says. “Thanks for that. All the speculation had gone on but when the phone call came, it still was a surprise. I have been involved in a number of reshuffles from Tony Blair’s reshuffles and Gordon Brown’s two and when the phone call rings and they say it’s the PM, you have no idea how the phone call is going to end, you can go from being a specialist in one area to a specialist in another, to being sacked…so it’s a peculiar experience.
“Was it a surprise, partly, yes but because there had been so much speculation and on the basis of your magazine and other newspapers, I was hopeful but in politics you don’t get to pick your job but I was fortunate enough to get the job I wanted.”
So what does he bring to his new role at the Scotland Office? He clearly has a vision for Scotland with some inchoate sense of what his tenure could bring to the dynamics of a Scotland run by an SNP Government working with a Labour-run UK Government.
“It means that I am Scotland’s man, person, in the Cabinet rather than the Cabinet’s man in Scotland,” he says.
“My general approach is I will work with anyone that works on behalf of Scotland and that is an instinct I have got from being an MP in East Renfrewshire in a constituency where they just don’t vote Labour in large numbers but I have managed to stay there for 11 years and also from being the Minister for Europe and being responsible for the UK’s relationship with more than 40 foreign governments; from Berlusconi’s centre-right party in Italy to the coalition in France, to the left coalition in Germany and to the Cypriot communists. My job was to try and emphasise what we had in common and try and make progress. That is the instinct I bring to this job but that doesn’t mean a mind-numbing unanimity. I don’t believe in independence, which shouldn’t be news to anyone.”
Making the post a full-time Cabinet position and with a seat on the National Economic Council, Gordon Brown’s war cabinet, Murphy’s appointment sends out a strong unionist message – Scotland has more power as part of the UK. “There is a management job that needs to be done for standing up for Scotland. Look at the last few weeks; being a full member of the National Economic Council, which currently meets twice a week dealing with unprecedented times, and you sit there in that COBRA meeting room below the Cabinet Office and the fact is, Scotland needs a voice round that table and I think Des (Browne, the former Secretary of State for Scotland and Defence Minister) was a formidable politician in an impossible position, impossible two positions, and in a time of international economic crisis, Scotland needs a full-time voice around the Cabinet table and in that National Economic Council, so that’s the dramatics of it but then there is the daily experience where, for example, I was making an announcement about Dungavel today and that is important and last week it was discovering  weakness in the UK legislation on football hooliganism and closing that loophole.”
I mention that in fact the SNP Government had been calling for changes to the asylum process and specifically, the detention of children in Dungavel for some time before he came along.
“It is the fact that immigration and asylum issues are rightly handled at the UK level and being a full-time Cabinet minister helps to make things happen and if you put your energy behind them you can make things happen so it was meeting with the UK immigration and home secretary and the immigration minister, the leader of Glasgow City Council and others and banging heads to make things happen.
“You can have the to-ing and fro-ing of the constitutional debate but people will be able to see for themselves the benefit of having a full-time minister around the Cabinet table standing up for Scotland.
“I organised this week the first ever meeting between the Secretary of State for Scotland, the First Minister, the CBI and the STUC and that was a way of showing I would work with anyone who is working for Scotland and in that meeting there were some things that we discussed that I did say I would get on top of and one was about the police and fire-fighters’ pensions and it has gone on too long and is harming people so I said we should just get through whatever has got in the way and fix it…but equally, I will be critical when necessary.
“Look at the announcement by the Prime Minister about new action to stop home repossessions – and I admit, this is going to be a bit party political so it comes with a health warning – but look at what happened, the SNP has been banging the drum, saying London must do more to support them to help them and what they are trying to achieve but while they have been writing speeches and writing press releases, they have been too slow off the mark. Here’s the UK Government announcing for England and Wales, because it is devolved, new protections against home repossessions at this remarkable time and you have charities today saying, what the heck is happening in Scotland and why is there no equivalent protection in Scotland? Now doing what’s best for Scotland means acting, not just talking

doing what’s best for Scotland means acting, not just talking

teetotal, Catholic, vegetarian, supporter of Israel, left winger with a bit of an Irn Bru (“diet”) habit…

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