Christine Grahame: There are a lot of MSPs I admire... but some are just passengers

Having served in every Scottish Parliament since 1999, the former deputy presiding officer is getting ready to retire. She’ll take her famous brooch collection with her – but leaves some advice for the next intake of MSPs...  as told to Kirsteen Paterson

“I’m now part of history. This is terribly upsetting.

“Being a politician isn’t a career, it’s a vocation. It’s not like going into banking. When somebody says to me ‘I’ve always wanted to be a politician’, I blanche. I don’t like that. You should want to be here to be in a job that matters and helps people. After all, we are elected by people to serve them. If you want to do it, do something else first. Live. Get buffeted about a bit.

“My jobs have been like that. I was a teacher because I knew that education was the way to open doors, then I became a civil court lawyer, mainly on legal aid, matrimonial matters, custody and children, because it was a job that was in amongst people. 

“When I was 10 I wanted to be a vet, but when I said to my mother, she put me off. She said, ‘you’ll have to be ready to tackle bulls’, and that was it. I loved art, and I went on to study it. I wanted to be an artistic vet who would paint and draw in the afternoons. 

“I’m a very practical politician. Speeches are one thing, but you want to be able to deliver practical things. Every year I do a summer tour of the constituency, so I have now done my last one. The idea is to go round all the wee villages, and we get a lot of cases that way. We hire a people carrier with seats facing each other in the back to talk to people, and my brother Tony drives. We got T-shirts made up saying ‘Christine’s Final Summer Surgery Tour’ with our names on the back.

L-R: SNP candidate Calum Kerr, Christine Grahame, and her brother Tony | Image supplied

“My proudest achievement is the Borders Railway, no doubt in my mind. I remember walking around Galashiels and meeting a campaigner who had a petition on it and said she was going to take it to London. I said, ‘what are you taking it to London for? It’s devolved, and I’m on the petitions committee – bring it to them’. This was a fresh parliament and government, and it was a chance to do it. 

“People write to me about my brooches. There’s one that’s so long even I think it’s a bit big. Margo MacDonald got me into them when she gave me a Butler & Wilson brooch with two cats. When she died, I gave it to her daughter.

“When I was deputy presiding officer (DPO) a woman from Perth got in touch saying she had this brooch, and could she send it to me? She was in the last stages of cancer, and she wanted to pass it on. I told her ‘I’ll wear it in the chair, and that way you’ll see it’, and I did. She emailed me back and said she had seen her brooch. I find that extremely moving.

“When I was DPO I was always very tough. Linda Fabiani, my fellow DPO, was moderately tough, and Ken Macintosh as PO was laidback. I was so hard with the MSPs that when they saw that I was going to be in the chair they would take three sentences off their questions. They began to edit their work. Ken said to me, ‘could you ease off a bit?’ I said no. And I was tough on dress. [Labour MSP] Neil Findlay got promoted temporarily to the front bench, and he was sitting there with his sleeves rolled up ready for a debate and I went past and said, ‘you should be wearing a jacket, it’s not a good look’. He said it was hot, but what did he do after that? The jacket went on.

A bejewelled Grahame as DPO | Alamy

“When I joined the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body I thought it would be an easy life, but you don’t know what you don’t know. Linda [Fabiani] told me I’d enjoy it and it would be quite testing, and she was right. Flags are always contentious, and when a message came up from security in London about putting up a sign about protests on parliamentary premises, we had to go back to MI5 and open up this big security channel to change the wording.

“It could be open war in the public gallery with all the T-shirts before we brought in restrictions on that. It’s like wearing a banner or a great big badge. When Tess White wore a T-shirt with a slogan in the chamber, I raised a point of order to complain about it.

“I get on with Tess, and afterwards I saw her sitting in the restaurant with some of the women who had been in the public gallery, and I went up and said to them, ‘you do know why I questioned that? Because if any of you had been wearing that you’d have been told to either put your jacket on or leave’. I take the view that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander – if you’re not allowed to do it in the gallery, we shouldn’t do it in the chamber. And they agreed with me.

“My advice for new MSPs is make sure you’ve got the right team around about you, because you will need them. When you arrive, you think you need to know everything. That’s rubbish.

“Everybody on the planet sent their brochures when we arrived in 1999. Four times a day mail was delivered, and I put all these pamphlets up like a library, and I remember being really shocked at Winnie Ewing. She was taking those brochures, going, ‘bin, bin, bin’. I thought, how could she do that? Of course, what do we do now with emails? Delete, delete, delete. Everybody thinks they’re the only person to email you, and theirs is the biggest problem.

“In those days I shared an office with others overlooking Deacon Brodie’s [pub]. When the parliament building was ready and we had to leave, I nearly chained myself into it. 

Tess White MSP | Alamy

“The quality of debate was far better in those days. We had David Steel, George Reid, Henry McLeish, Alex Salmond, David McLetchie, Annabel Goldie – a lot of quality speakers and intellects.

“One of the best debates I heard was on whether we should go into Afghanistan. It was the first time I broke the whip; Michael Matheson broke it with me. Dennis Canavan was masterful – eloquent – about the difficulties of going in and disentangling yourself after. It should have been a conscience vote, but whips were green and we were green. I remember the whip came rushing up to me and said, ‘I believe I’m having difficulties?’, and I said ‘yes, you are’, and we simply didn’t vote.

“There’s a lot of people in here I admire. They may just be attack dogs for their party, or people who are very balanced, but you need that mix. There are some that are just passengers, I don’t know what they contribute. But I’m not going to start naming names. Although I might do it when I’m out of here.”