Davy Russell MSP: I knew I was going to win in Hamilton from the start

Scottish Labour's newest MSP tells Holyrood he’s no “invisible man”, and how a childhood working on a farm taught him the meaning of graft.

“I was a typical boy at school – boisterous. I didn’t have a desk in front of the teacher, but I was quite spirited. I used to always try to do well, but I was always laid back, right enough. With exams, I knew before I would go in if I was going to pass.

“It was the same as the election – I knew I was going to win anyway, right back at the start. The door chappers were coming back and saying, ‘do you know everybody in Hamilton?’ It didn’t happen so much in Larkhall and Stonehouse, but 70 per cent of the vote is here. They would tell me who they’d been talking to, and did I know them, and I’d go ‘aye, aye, aye’. 

“They didn’t all vote for me, right enough – some of them took cold feet because the bookmakers were putting me in third place, and they switched to Reform. They wouldn’t be natural Reform voters, they just wanted the Nats out, and they’ve said to me since they’re going to vote for me the next time. I’m a confirmed candidate for next year.

“The ‘invisible man’ stuff people say about me is a million miles from the truth. It was made up because STV wanted me to go and do a head-to-head debate with the SNP candidate, but that’s not democracy – there were 10 candidates, all 10 should’ve been there. I didn’t think it would be right to do just a head-to-head, and after that Reform caught on to it. It was quite funny but it was totally untrue. I was the one people were seeing chapping doors.

“It was a hard shift. The door knocking started at 10am every morning. That was seven days a week. I always say I used to be six foot four and now I’m five foot four with all the walking. There was one night I’d come in and I’d done 24,000 steps, and I said I’ll take my shoes off and have a cup of tea. I put the kettle on and sat down and fell asleep before it boiled. 

“There was one guy who said the last person to chap his door was [former Labour MP and Nato secretary general] George Robertson, away back. I’d left George in the campaign office literally 10 minutes earlier and I phoned him while I was talking to the guy, and he appears and ends up getting tea and shortbread and blethering. Then most nights I would sit for an hour and phone up people who’d said to other people they’d wanted to talk to me. I was doing 12 to 20 calls every time. The doorstep campaign proved the pundits and bookmakers wrong.

“I’ve always lived in the area, most of the time in Quarter though I was in Hamilton for a while. My gran used to live across from the primary school, and I’d get dropped there and wait for nine o’clock and walk over the road, and that was me for the day. 

“From when I was 12, I used to work on the local farm to get some extra money. I’d milk the cows, I’d drive the tractors, do the fencing and all the general farm work until I was 17. I’m still friendly with the family; I still go up if they need a hand.

Russell helps out on the farm | Supplied

“I was used to earning money and after school I was going to do civil engineering, but I ended up having a chance conversation with someone who said, ‘if you do an apprenticeship you can progress up the ranks and get qualifications through it’, so that’s what I did and I went into the roads.

“I became an inspector when I was 21 – I was about the youngest – and I eventually moved from Hamilton to working in Glasgow. I ended up director at Glasgow City Council in 2017 and I was responsible for just about everything the council did that wasn’t education or social work. My department did street lighting, roads, cleansing, trading standards, environmental health, planning and building control. I loved it. I retired in 2022 – it was the tax rules for pensions that did it. I got a tax bill for £18,000 because of the way the pension tax rules were, and I just thought I was paying to sit at my own desk, and it just wasn’t sustainable. It forced out a lot of directors, senior police etc at the time, but they’ve amended it now.

“Retirement wasn’t for me. The amount of people who phoned up offering me jobs… I ended up starting with Mears Group, who were wanting me to look at their processes. They’d had a lot of bad PR and part of my role in Glasgow was transformation. I started during the January and finished up in the March, because I went into politics after that.

“My best pal in parliament is probably Neil Bibby, he’s a really nice fella. The only ones I’ve found stand-offish are the Greens, but Patrick Harvie aways says hello. A lot of the Nats blether away to me and the Tories are really funny. Fergus Ewing’s a hoot and Jackson Carlaw’s really good. I’m on the public petitions committee with them.

“My greatest fear is that things actually get worse and people move to those parties like Reform that offer easy answers. I had a 24-hour workforce in my old job and I used to have guys from the team phoning me at two and three o’clock in the morning, and I’ve still got a bit of that approach. In my first 100 days I dealt with 300 successful cases. I think I got about 70 done in September and by Christmas I’ll be over the 500-mark of issues dealt with. A lot of them are about the health board, and housing is big. So are jobs.

“I’m probably a workaholic, but I still fit other things in. I play football twice a week and go fishing. That’s great for de-stressing. The last holiday I had was to Benidorm for Cheltenham week. A crowd of us from the bowling club go every year.”