Interview
The Alexander Technique 28 May 2010 In his first in-depth interview since becoming part of government, the Rt. Hon. Danny Alexander reveals the added suspense behind the countdown to power The 2010 general-election result threw up a number of unexpected consequences, not least the new Secretary of State for Scotland’s baby girl being born a Sassenach. Danny Alexander’s mop of red hair became a familiar feature of television coverage in the days following Nick Clegg’s surprise performance in the televised leaders’ debates but in the immediate aftermath of the General Election and its opaque result, attention turned from asking who Nick Clegg was to asking who the tall, ginger bloke always at his side was. Alexander may have been Lib Dem MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey for five years and a well-kent face in the Highlands but he had been pretty much below the national radar before May 6. All of that changed in the five days that followed the election as Alexander was identified as Clegg’s lead negotiator in the coalition talks. And as Clegg’s right-hand man, he stepped out of 70 Whitehall every evening – looking half dazed after a day of power broking – straight into the melee of a media scrum and the flash of cameras, only to repeat the agreed mantra of, ‘we have had a very good discussion in a constructive atmosphere.’ As the nation held its breath, Alexander was locked in talks with key members of his own party and those of the Conservatives, desperately trying to hammer out a deal that would provide stable government. But as the clock ticked down towards a new era of political change, Alexander had his own very personal alarm clock ringing – his wife Rebecca was due to give birth any day. “I have to say that the imminent birth put a pretty firm deadline for the set of negotiations, I can tell you. To have been midwife to a government and father of a child within the space of two weeks has been exhausting, to say the least but also hugely exciting.” The MP, whose new baby, Isla, was born in London two days after the coalition agreement was launched and 12 days after her daddy was appointed Secretary of State for Scotland, admits he has been on a bit of a rollercoaster: re-elected as an MP, thrown into the media spotlight, helped form a new government, been made Secretary of State for Scotland, launched the coalition agreement, got sworn in as an MP, been there for the birth of Isla, attended Parliament for the Queen’s Speech, turned 38 and then taken his newly extended family back home to Aviemore, all within the space of a fortnight. No doubt he pondered that whirlwind as he sipped on his ‘congratulatory pint’ last Friday in his local drinking hole, the Cairngorm Hotel in Aviemore, and wondered ‘what next?’ For Alexander’s journey to the very top of government has been meteoric. Born in 1972, Alexander grew up in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, having spent his first eight years on the island of Colonsay before moving to Glengarry. By all accounts, it was an idyllic rural childhood where politics, and certainly social justice, were just part of the ether for him and his two brothers and sister. His father, Di Alexander, was and remains a well-known campaigner for affordable housing in the Highlands and Alexander’s maternal grandfather, ‘a lifelong Liberal’ and a councillor in Surrey, was caught by Alexander’s mother rocking a young Danny in his pram and saying, “repeat after me, ‘I am a member of the Liberal Party’.” “I guess something just stuck,” laughs Alexander. He went to Lochaber High School in Fort William – the same alma mater as his Lib-Dem colleague Charles Kennedy. His former principal teacher of modern studies and economics has said that Alexander had “politics in his blood” and expressed no surprise that he should now be operating at the highest level in politics. By all accounts a very bright child, Alexander went on to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford where he also joined the Liberal Democrats. It was only during the coalition discussions that he discovered that he had been at Oxford at the same time as the Chancellor, George Osborne, although it appears they did not mix in the same circles. After graduating, he worked as a press officer for the Scottish Liberal Democrats before spending four years at the European Movement where he first met Nick Clegg who was working for Leon Brittan in the European Commission and their close 15- year friendship was forged. He describes Clegg as “principled, clear thinking, and persuasive”. He then spent four years as Director of Communications for the Britain in Europe campaign and in 2003 was appointed Head of Communications for the recently formed Cairngorms National Park Authority. In 2005 he was elected as an MP for the newly created seat of Inverness, Nairn, and Badenoch & Strathspey. He joined the Shadow Work and Pensions team in 2005 and in July 2007 was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, holding the post until June 2008 when Clegg became party leader and appointed Alexander, his trusted ally, to be his chief of staff – just two and a half years after first entering elected politics. He went on to write the Lib Dem manifesto for the recent General Election and subsequently became one of the chief coalition negotiators. Six days after the election, the Prime Minister appointed him as the Government’s Secretary of State for Scotland and since then he has displayed a degree of steely pragmatism that has managed to wipe away years of gripe and grievance politics fought out between the Labour-run Scotland Office and the devolved minority SNP Government at Holyrood. Where Gordon Brown waited four weeks before telephoning Salmond to congratulate him on becoming First Minister in 2007, barely spoke to him during his premiership and did not deign to visit him in the Scottish Parliament – a subject of much mischief-making during FMQs – Danny Alexander and the new PM, David Cameron, flew to Scotland within days of being in office to meet with Salmond and the other party leaders -a marvellous piece of political diplomacy that could only silence any criticism of Westminster ignoring Scotland. Where the UK Labour Government refused to bow to Holyrood pressure to end child detention at the Dungavel asylum centre in Lanarkshire, Alexander moved to halt it within a week. Indeed it was the first topic for discussion between him and the new Home Secretary Theresa May on their first full day in office. Where the Labour Government refused to entertain Salmond’s grumbles about being unable to access Scotland’s share of a fossilfuel levy, the new coalition government is already reviewing its release and as the Queen’s Speech last week revealed, Alexander and his Lib-Dem colleagues have also persuaded Cameron to dramatically accelerate the implementation of the recommendations of the Calman Commission that would give more powers to the Scottish Parliament. And where the former Secretary of State for Scotland, Jim Murphy, was accused of using the role as a flag-waving exercise for the Labour Party, Alexander says he is there ‘for Scotland’. “I firstly want to ensure that there is a good and constructive relationship between our government and the Scottish Government and over that last couple of years that relationship has been soured by political disagreements that seem to me to have been manufactured rather than real and secondly, I want to ensure that this government delivers for the people of Scotland. There are a lot of areas, some of them already mentioned in the coalition agreement, where I think this government can do an awful lot of good in changing people’s lives for the better. “We have set out our intention to implement the Calman Commission ideas and that is something we want to move relatively quickly on and also move to resolve some of the other outstanding areas of dispute. We have already said we will look at the fossil-fuel levy and I think we are also going to look at this issue of how we can potentially relieve the high cost on things like high fuel prices in rural areas. We are keen to make progress on wider issues like taxation, environment and freedom, which is why Theresa May and I talked about the detention of children at Dungavel on our first day in the post and it will take a bit of time to work out how you implement that commitment but it shows we can deal with some of those issues that, frankly, the previous government just made it look like they couldn’t be dealt with. “I think there is a lot we can do to improve the lives of people in Scotland and as someone with a strong voice right at the heart of government, I intend to make sure that voice is heard for Scotland to the full.  “This government is founded upon a spirit of very strong and fruitful co-operation between two political parties that have been able to form a coalition and I want to see that same spirit of co-operation between the Westminster Government and the Scottish Government and Parliament.” He is a remarkably unfazed kind of guy. Sound rather than exciting. He says he is “temperamentally very relaxed” and takes things in his stride, which could be aided and abetted by being married to a Rebecca who holds two psychology degrees and is also features editor on Psychologies magazine but independent of that, he also has a strength of character rooted in his Highland upbringing which gives him an inherent confidence in challenging vested interests. There is something in that sense of community and cooperation forced on those that live in the Highlands; an awareness of self and yet a co-dependency forced by circumstance that affords an innate aversion to being impressed by social standing – the original ‘we’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns’. Alexander’s early political awakening came when he was about 13 and Russell Johnston, the late Liberal MP and a personal hero, faced up to powerful Ministry of Defence officials in front of a packed public meeting in Invergarry town hall. “The MoD wanted to construct this huge aerial for communication with nuclear subs 25 miles down Glengarry and people were, understandably, very concerned and Russell brought the officials down a peg or two. I was just really impressed by him doing that but also by the way he conducted himself and his ideas that challenged who held power and that got me interested then in what politics meant but also, what it could do. “Fundamentally, being a Liberal, to me is about power and who holds power in society and for me, it is about challenging vested interests and if you look at the coalition agreement, that is what we are going to be doing all over the place; whether it’s in the banking system, whether it’s shaking up politics, or the reform of public services and I think liberalism is about saying power should be held by people and not by big institutions.” This begins to sound very ‘Mr Cameron’s ‘big society’ but as someone who once claimed there was a “huge gulf between the sunny rhetoric of Cameron and the grim reality of Tory policy”, surely he must understand that many Lib Dems were confused if not angry about the coalition because they would have considered Labour as the natural bedfellow of the Lib Dems? “Yes, I think that there were people that simply assumed that the Labour Party was the natural bedfellow of the Liberal Democrats but actually, if you look at the Labour Party’s record in the last 13 years, it was a highly illiberal government, whether you measure it in terms of social fairness, or the environment or in terms of civil liberties, actually, in any of these tests, it has totally failed and when you compare what this coalition is promising to do in terms of, say, fairness and taxation or environmental policies or civil liberties or fixing the economy and reducing the deficit and making the economy strong and in any of these tests, which any Liberal Democrat would want to set, I would say that the coalition is so much stronger and more in the national interest than anything that Labour would have offered. “I never saw it as us consorting with the enemy, as you describe it, because to be honest, as a Lib Dem I have been equally opposed to Labour and the Conservatives and indeed the SNP in the past. The people sent us a message that ‘we want you to work together’ and that is what we have done. “I think this is a coalition government, two parties working together, and the blend of policies, the blend of ideas and the sense of common purpose we have in terms of freedom, fairdom and responsibility isn’t something that needs good PR because it has good substance. It is genuinely going to change the way things work in this country and we have already changed the way politics work; we are going to change a lot more than that. I think it is a genuinely reforming and radical programme that we have published.” Despite how well things have progressed, Alexander admits that this is one scenario he could not have predicted.  “If you had said to me a month before the election was called that this was going to happen, I would have thought you were pulling my leg but it is very exciting and after all, people sent a message that they wanted politics to change direction; that’s what people were saying to me in my constituency as I knocked on doors in Inverness and elsewhere in my constituency, that they wanted politicians to sit down together, put their differences to one side and work together to take the country forward and that’s exactly what we have done. “I had been leading preparations for any discussions that may happen after the election for several months before the election took place so I knew we were well prepared but we didn’t know what the result could throw up and there were so many possible scenarios. I think on the day after the election, in the afternoon when David Cameron made his speech in response to what Nick had said in the morning and he demonstrated a willingness on the Conservative side to look at the key things that we had said during the election and be open minded about how we could take something forward, then I knew something was possible but it was only as those negotiations went on during those long days immediately after the election that we explored that in detail, and only then that I realized something was possible. There were three things: one, that there was very good chemistry between the individuals, and that was obvious from the very beginning; and secondly, a very shared sense of purpose in terms of stability and those core values of fairness, freedom and responsibility we very much shared; and lastly, as time went on, a willingness on both sides to hammer out agreements on the key policies that we both felt comfortable with. “I am not sure I was actually surprised because from the very start of negotiations there was a really good vibe and while we didn’t know each other that well before discussions but we really hit it off and one of the things that David Cameron said, which is 100 per cent right, is that we need to get away from this informal sofa governmenttype politics and make sure we are using Cabinet properly and that is the way to get good decision making and was sadly lacking under both Brown and Blair. “I think what we genuinely have with this coalition agreement is a blend of the best ideas from both parties. I believe that we have done the exactly right thing for the country and I am very confident about the future and our ability to do as a government what we have promised to do.” Speaking to Alexander in his palatial office at Dover House in Whitehall, just yards from No 10 and with a fantastic view over Horse Guards Parade, he does appear remarkably at ease with his new set of circumstances. Is he in shock, I wonder? “I honestly have just taken this all in my stride,” he laughs. “I am not focused on the trappings of office or the size of Dover House or power for power’s sake and all that stuff but look, it’s a nice place to entertain people and that’s part of the job and it’s a nice welcome to Scotland’s home in Whitehall but I am focused on delivering and that is how we will be judged and I intend to make sure we do it well. “I came into politics, number one, to serve the people of the Highlands that’s where I am from and where my roots and values come from and secondly, to deliver the changes we need as a country, whether that is cleaning up politics or delivering fairness across the board. “I believe as a politician that you have ideas and things you want to do for the country and you need to be in government to get them done and while I might not have thought the opportunity would happen this quickly, now it has, I intend to take it and go with it because that in the end is what politics is about; delivering the changes that you think are important for the people that you are serving.” Alexander carries his political convictions with pride and is resolute in the direction of travel for this historic coalition government. He has already squared up to challenges that would have diminished those with much more experience. Some might say he has a youthful enthusiasm, even a naivety but as one that slipped well below the political radar before the election, the spotlight is now firmly on him and this is one commentator that suspects his demeanour will dictate that any sleepless nights will only be caused by meeting the needs of his new-born baby and not doubts about his ability to govern. Related articles: Moore of the same 5 September 2010 Taking power 5 September 2010 What Labour did next 25 June 2010 A liberal view of life 11 June 2010 Made from girders 26 April 2010 See all articles in this category Submit a comment |
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