Getting to Know You: Graeme Downie

What’s your earliest memory?

The earliest that I can recall in any detail was in Berlin, where I grew up, and to be honest all those three years there were memorable. 

I was eight when the Berlin Wall came down. We had the day off school and my dad got me up at three in the morning to watch it on German television. It was before the days of CNN and he told me, ‘you need to watch this, it’s history’. The next day we went down to the wall and somewhere on a BBC report there’s a picture of me in my very brightly coloured 1980s-style yellow and blue winter coat.

Why were you living in Berlin?

I was born in Edinburgh. My dad was an electrician. It always sounds much dodgier than it is, he was a civilian but worked for an organisation called the PSA. He did the alarms for places like the National Security Agency listening station and GCHQ’s listening station in Berlin.

We were there from 1987 to 1990, then moved to Warrington for a bit and then back to Edinburgh.

What else do you remember of living in Berlin?

Because it was so different I have lots of memories. You kind of got a hint of what was going on. Even as a seven or eight-year-old I was a bit of a news geek. I remember very clearly [Rudolf] Hess dying, who was in prison a five-minute drive from where I lived. We had Russian defectors coming across, I remember being woken up by Exercise Rocking Horse, which was the preparation for a Russian invasion – you could hear the Russian guns testing a few hundred yards away from me. 
Another one, looking back it was quite daring, my parents took me to Belsen concentration camp.  

What’s your greatest fear?

The only real fear I have is of horses. I’m a Hearts fan and I have a memory of going to Ibrox and being ushered by these huge police horses from the underground station and not liking it. I’m not terrified of them, but I am very cautious. I take two steps to the side if I see one. That happened today coming through St James Park towards the office.

What’s the worst thing that anyone’s ever said to you?
Most of it is not printable. I try to ignore and forget about it. Certainly, the hardest part since being elected was some of the abuse around the grooming gangs vote last year. 

I did a TikTok video at the time, it was a one take, and I posted it. My head office told me they’ve never seen me furious like that. The abuse around it was just everything you can think and more. That week, the level of personal abuse we got and what we were being accused of, and the way it was framed by the Tories really annoyed me. It was genuinely hurtful. 

What’s your most treasured possession?

I have a few. One is a piece of the Berlin Wall, which looks like a bit of concrete – you’d never know what it was. The other is a sock monkey that was made for me by my wife before she went travelling, called Eddie. He’s feeling a bit worse for wear now but he used to always travel with me.

The other one, which is a totally different vibe, my dad worked at Edinburgh Castle as an electrician, and it meant that when things were being announced in the Great Hall he would bring me along, and I got a signed copy of the Scottish Parliament white paper from 1997, signed by Donald Dewar. 

What’s your guiltiest pleasure?

That’s easy, ice cream. It’s really awkward because when I go up to an ice cream van with my eldest daughter, I have to ask my youngest if she’d like one, despite her not liking it, to make it look like I’m not heartless. And she looks at me and goes, ‘no, I don’t like ice cream, this is the 100th time you’ve asked’. 

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

A period that fascinates me is the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s a period where so much was at play and at stake, and it’s all based on a massive misunderstanding.

What’s the worst pain you’ve ever experienced?

When I was four I had my front teeth taken out, and I remember vividly waking up in pain. 

You mentioned something in passing earlier about the IRA and said you would come back to it. What was that?

When I lived in Warrington I played football with Tim Parry, who was blown up by an IRA bomb. It happened just as I was about to move back to Edinburgh. That’s something that sits with me. 

There was a couple of days in there where Tim was in a coma, there was no mobile phones, and you were finding out information by bumping into someone on the street. No one really knew it was him for a day or two. But losing a friend I saw a couple of times a week at football was hard and it sits in my brain a lot. 

I was back in Edinburgh by the time of his funeral; I didn’t go back down for it. My mum and dad were trying to protect me from it, but it’s something I regret.
I don’t know how other people reacted to it, but I didn’t react to it with anger. When I was at university I did my dissertation on the politics of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. It’s a place I have an interest in, although it’s not something I have done much on in politics, which is on purpose.

I try not to obsess on it too much, what happened, but it’s a life-forming experience, having your friend blown up by the IRA. 

When I was communications manager for [innovation charity] Nesta in Scotland and Northern Ireland I ended up having to shake hands with Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly. 

I’d organised the event, but I remembered my boss asking ‘are you okay to do this’, and it probably wasn’t something I had thought through.