Graham Simpson: I'm aiming for over 20 Reform MSPs next year

Graham Simpson has not yet been turfed out of the Conservative corridor in the Scottish Parliament. His office is still sandwiched between those of former party colleagues, despite him exchanging his blue rosette for a teal one this August. It’s largely because, as the only representative for Reform UK in the Scottish Parliament, there’s no obvious place to put him.

“I’m not bothered,” he says, before adding: “I just keep the office locked if I’m not here. You’ve got to be careful.” If you didn’t know Simpson and his deadpan delivery, you might mistake that for real concern. He later tells me that his sense of humour has occasionally caused a stooshie because something he’s said in jest has been taken seriously.

Simpson is an unusual character. He’s not one to push his way into the spotlight – his constant jokes and nervous smiles while the photographer takes his portrait speak to his discomfort – but he’s also not one to avoid speaking out when he feels strongly.

His successful campaign to ban dual mandates, which will prevent anyone from being both an MSP and an MP at the same time – colloquially known as double jobbing – is one example of that. Last year, he tabled amendments to ban the practice as part of the Scottish Elections (Representation and Reform) Bill, despite his (then) party’s reservations. After withdrawing his first attempt, he worked behind the scenes with other parties and ultimately brought back similar amendments which this time had been drafted with Scottish Government help and were backed by Green MSP Ross Greer.

It was a clever bit of politics because it essentially backed the Conservatives into a corner. “I got others on board so that the Conservatives were really left with no choice, otherwise they’d have looked completely foolish,” he says one year on. “But it shouldn’t have been like that. They should have seen that it was the right thing to do and backed it right from the start, but they didn’t. They were more concerned about what would it cost to have a by-election than doing the right thing in law.”

Maybe it worked out because I was able to do something that the party didn’t want me to do

It was also well timed because, just weeks before, the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn had announced he would seek election to Holyrood and planned to retain his Westminster seat if he won. That was met with ire from even those within his party, helping Simpson to gain support from the SNP ranks too. Ultimately, all MSPs in the parliament backed his proposal and the regulations to bring the ban into force were agreed last month.

For Simpson, though, the whole saga crystallised some of his unhappiness with the party he had been a member of for decades. He had already become a little disillusioned and briefly entertained the idea of running for leader last summer in a bid to change the party’s direction, writing in the Daily Express that it needed to move away from “being the ‘no to indyref2’ party and say what we actually stand for”. In the end, he backed Murdo Fraser, describing the Mid Scotland and Fife MSP as “the best candidate to bring about the real change we need”.

A little over a year later, and just over a month since he moved to Reform, I wonder if he thinks he’d have defected if Fraser had won that race instead of Russell Findlay. “I don’t know, to be honest. But he didn’t win it, and then I was put on the sidelines. I was made a backbencher, and I just made the best of it.

“And I think actually, if I hadn’t been, I might not have pursued the dual mandate thing that is now going to be put into legislation. From a personal point of view, maybe it worked out because I was able to do something that the party didn’t want me to do. They were completely against it, even though it was the right thing to do. I came under an awful lot of pressure not to do it, but I felt perhaps more emboldened, as someone who didn’t have an official position, that I could do what I thought was right.”

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WHEN Simpson walked into Reform’s press conference at a hotel in West Lothian in August, a surprised murmur went through the room. He had been pegged as someone who might part ways with the Conservatives – but a move to Reform hadn’t seemed a likely fit because he was very firmly of the centre-right. I ask what made him make the jump.

“I think there’s a misconception about what Reform is,” Simpson says. “I think people assume they are to the right of me, but actually when you look at the party, they’re made up of all kinds of people. In fact, I was talking to one Reform councillor, Audrey Dempsey from Glasgow, who used to be a Labour councillor. There’s a number of people have come from the Labour Party. One or two who used to be in the SNP have come to Reform, they have to abandon their nationalist tendencies in order to do that, but it’s actually a bit of a mix – and that quite attracted me.

“I get that people were surprised at the move. People like yourself maybe weren’t surprised that I jumped – they were surprised at where I jumped to. But I’m very happy with it, I’m comfortable with it.”

Simpson had quietly decided to not seek re-election for the Conservatives earlier this year, though no official announcement had been made. He’d intended to retire from frontline politics and perhaps get a job in housing policy, the shadow portfolio he had been in charge of between 2017 and 2021. But over the summer he started having informal chats with Reform and then went down to the London HQ for further talks. “I was impressed by what I heard. So I thought, well, let’s give it a go,” he says.

We are going to have to produce something that’s not just immigration and net zero

He didn’t actually meet party leader Nigel Farage until the day of his defection, just before making the announcement to the press. But he talks warmly of the “good people” in head office, including deputy leader Richard Tice and head of policy Zia Yusuf. He’ll work closely with Yusuf going forward to shape the party’s policy offering in Scotland as it heads for the Holyrood election in May.

That’s no small task. There’s now less than six months to go until voters head to the polls and Reform has been criticised for not being clear about what it would deliver in government, particularly in devolved areas. Simpson accepts this is a “fair point”, adding: “That’s what we’ve got to fix. And we will fix it. And we’ll fix it very soon, now I’ve got this role. I will make sure that happens.”

The fact he’s got “a blank slate” is part of why he was attracted to Reform. At the press conference in August, he said the Conservatives had not been able to become the “centre-right party” Scotland needed due to the independence referendum, which had “prevented both good government and good opposition”. Reform were the “new kids on the block” who might be able to provide “at least one of those” going forward, he said.

“It’s a big task,” he says of his job now, as he works to produce a Scottish manifesto. “You’re right that not a lot of thought has been given to devolved issues, but I think you’ll find that in all the UK parties. I know from having been in the Conservative Party that there was often a disconnect between London and Scotland, and London and Wales. When I had the transport brief, I managed to bridge that gap for a while. I had good relations with Mark Harper, who was the Secretary of State at the time, and my counterpart in Wales. We managed to get some joined-up thinking there. But it doesn’t always happen that way. I did have some frustrating times when I had the housing brief and Robert Jenrick was the housing minister. I just couldn’t get any engagement with him. That’s more the norm.

“What I’ve found refreshing with Reform is that we completely get that there are devolved issues and that we need people in Scotland to lead on those, which is why I’ve been asked to do it. So it’s a massive job. We are going to have to produce something that’s not just immigration and net zero.”

Simpson with his new Reform colleagues | Credit: Alamy

He’s also hopeful that a glut of Reform MSPs next year will help shake up an institution which he says has become “stale”. He believes this is partly the reason why the “establishment parties” view Reform “as a threat”. “But irrespective of Reform coming in, the parliament needs to improve. It’s not very effective,” he adds.

He’s unhappy with the way parliament holds ministers to account, saying government “can ignore committees and often does”, and backs the recent recommendation made by the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee for electing committee conveners.

One common criticism of the parliament is that committees have become too influenced by parties, with MSPs unwilling to leave their party-political hats at the door. Simpson agrees, saying this is most evident when considering amendments to legislation and MSPs arrive at committees with voting sheets in hand.

“They never go against the voting sheets. They never change their mind, you know, in response to some brilliant argument. It doesn’t happen. So you think, why are we doing this? That’s not the way you should do legislation. You should actually listen to reasoned debate and make your mind up… But it’s such a rare thing. And if you do it, you’re called a rebel.”

He continues: “But you need people, if I can blow my own trumpet, like me who see the bigger picture and just want to make things better. And there’ll be people like me in other parties who are prepared to take their party hats off and say, well, actually, we’ve got a parliament here, it needs to be the best it can be. At the moment, I don’t think it is.”

One of his own proposals for driving up the standards of parliament is his Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill, a member’s bill designed to establish a system of recall for Holyrood. The stage one debate took place last week.

He acknowledges it has been difficult to get right because, unlike in Westminster, there are two types of MSP: regional and constituency. He says this has meant he’s “had to devise maybe an imperfect recall system”. He backs a broader overhaul of the current electoral system.

“We should change it so we don’t have list MSPs. I just don’t like that system. I think it puts the power in the hands of the parties and not the electors. My own preference, if we’re going to have a proportional representation system, would be for single transferable vote, which is what you have at council level. And having been a councillor, I thought that was a good system because people have to directly put a number next to your name. If you want to get re-elected, you’ve got to earn their trust and work hard in a way that the list system doesn’t really do. It’s a bad system.”

If somebody in Reform has fallen foul of those standards, I’m happy to say that

Between the dual mandate ban, recall, and his calls to improve parliament process, Simpson is a man clearly interested in standards in public life. To some, that might make his move to Reform – a party no stranger to controversy – even more strange.

Over the years, there have been multiple questions about Farage’s income and on his tax affairs. The latter came to a head more recently when he criticised former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner for not paying what was owed in property tax while there were questions over his own residence in Clacton, which is owned by his partner Laura Ferrari. While there was no question of illegality on Farage’s part, there were accusations that the house purchase was structured to avoid a tax bill.

When I put the situation to Simpson, he says: “For any elected member, a) you have to follow the rules, b) you don’t have to be a hypocrite, and c) if you’re a government minister, you are rightly held to a higher standard. In Angela Rayner’s case, I think she fell foul of that. Without getting into the individual cases, those are the standards that you should work to, whatever parliament you’re in.”

Asked if he believes Farage met those standards, he says he has “no idea” because he hasn’t “looked at the case in any detail”.

I then ask about Nathan Gill, Reform’s former leader in Wales who took bribes to make pro-Russia statements while a Member of the European Parliament. Farage described Gill as a “bad apple” and said he was “deeply shocked” by the news.

Simpson says: “He sounded like a bad apple to me, and I saw one clip of Nigel Farage saying how let down he felt by Mr Gill, who I don’t know. But look, if you know me, you know what my standards are. If somebody in Reform has fallen foul of those standards, I’m happy to say that, as long as I have the details. I’m not afraid to say that. I’ll call that out.”

Yet even Simpson himself has not been immune to criticism for his own behaviour. Almost immediately after news of his defection was reported, a Scottish Conservative source sent out the following statement to journalists: “Graham Simpson is a pathetic, nasty little man who won’t be missed. Just last year, he had to apologise to a young female member of staff for acting in a totally inappropriate, bullying and intimidating way towards her. The way he spoke to her was so bad that he was forced to sit down and say sorry in person.”

When the allegation was put to him at that press conference, Simpson described it as “absolutely untrue”. I ask now if he recognises the situation to which it refers.

He replies: “I think that was a very, very disappointing thing for them to do. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a bully and they know I don’t engage in inappropriate behaviour and I’ve always been like that. I resist being bullied and I don’t bully, and actually Russell Findlay knows from our time working on The Sun together, when I was a union rep, that I stand up to bullies. And that’s the way I am. That’s all I’m prepared to say.”

Despite this initial attack, on the whole Simpson has found that most of his parliamentary colleagues do not treat him any differently now he’s a Reform MSP. He admits that he was worried he might lose friendships over the move, but that hasn’t been the case. Even his former leader, Findlay, has spoken to him “properly and sensibly” – though it did take him a few weeks to come round. In fact, across the whole parliament, Simpson says there is just one MSP, a Conservative, “who’s just not even looking at me, let alone talking to me” – but he refuses to name them.

That’s because he believes MSPs are there to focus on policy, not people. “Look, there’s a difference between slagging off Reform, which you’d expect to happen in the run up to a Scottish Parliament election, and slagging off the individual. I’ve also been very clear that I won’t indulge in that kind of behaviour. I’m not going to get down and dirty and start attacking individuals for their character or personality, when it should be a debate about policy.”

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BORN in Aberdeen, Simpson spent most of his early childhood moving around. His dad kept changing jobs and so the family moved to Edinburgh, then Manchester, and then Carlisle where they ultimately settled. His mum, now a widow, still lives there.

While he says his family wasn’t “particularly political”, his dad did work for the Scottish Conservatives for a time. Simpson was in his teens when his own interest developed and, at 15, he joined the Tories. It was at the tail end of the Callaghan government, when Margaret Thatcher was leader of the opposition.

“It was generally a very exciting time in politics. I just got wrapped up in it and I wasn’t the only one of that age who decided to join the Conservatives. I had a number of school friends who also did the same thing,” he says. He insists that it “really wasn’t that unusual” for a boy of 15 to join the party, but then he goes on to tell me how he delivered a speech at a Young Conservatives conference – in front of former PM Harold Macmillan, no less – about the report from the Independent Commission on International Developmental Issues. “Maybe that was a bit unusual,” he admits.

As an adult, Simpson went into journalism and had to leave his party colours behind. He moved to East Kilbride, where he still lives with his wife, and rose through the ranks at The Scottish Sun, where he was latterly chief subeditor. He eventually rejoined the Conservatives, though, and was elected as a councillor under the party’s banner in 2007. He stood unsuccessfully in both the 2010 and 2015 Westminster elections before being elected as a Central Scotland MSP in 2016.

But one of his proudest moments in politics is separate to any elected role he’s had. It was a speech he’d delivered at a Scottish Conservative policy conference, during which he called for a change to the double jeopardy law. That law prevented anyone from being tried more than once for the same crime – and for Simpson, it was a deeply personal matter.

Simpson’s younger sister, Vikki Thompson, was murdered when she was 30 years old. On 12 August 1995, Vikki, a mum of two, was attacked by Mark Weston. Weston then dragged Vikki across a field onto a railway line to make it look like she’d been hit by a train. When she was found, she was still alive – but after six days in hospital, the severity of her injuries meant her life support was switched off.

While Weston was arrested, he was acquitted following a trial in 1996. Simpson says this was due to a lack of evidence – and when fresh evidence surfaced a decade later following technological advances with DNA testing, Weston was able to be retried because in England the double jeopardy rule had been changed in 2003. Weston was jailed in 2010.

She had a really good [golf] swing, and I never had a good swing

This couldn’t have happened had Vikki been killed in Scotland. And so Simpson joined the campaign to have the law updated here too – starting with garnering support within his own party.

“I’d never told anyone about Vikki. My speech was basically, ‘I’m going to tell you about this woman who was attacked and subsequently died. And if that had happened in Scotland where she was born, that would have been the end of the matter’… And then at the end of the speech I said ‘that woman was Vikki Thompson, and she was my sister’ and there was a huge gasp, because nobody knew. [Then Scottish Tory leader] Annabelle Goldie was in the room for that and it really made an impact on her.”

The Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act was passed in 2011, with the support of the full parliament. It was during its passage that Weston was convicted, the first person to face retrial for murder in Britain for 800 years, which helped to cement the matter for MSPs. And in an odd twist of fate, it was Keir Starmer, as director of public prosecutions, who gave the go-ahead for the retrial.

Simpson clearly still finds it difficult to talk about Vikki. Even though I checked before we sat down that he’d be happy for me to ask about her, he warns me when we get to it that he’s “not going to open [his] heart”. He tells me the last time he ever saw her was when she and her husband, Jonathon, came to visit him in Scotland. They played golf together – “she had a really good swing, and I never had a good swing,” he recalls fondly – and then she left the course for home.

And he remembers the day she got attacked clearly. “My mum and dad had come up to stay with us and we got a phone call from my nana who had been just trying to ring us – we’d gone out for dinner – just saying something’s happened to Vikki. I phoned her house, and something had happened to her, she was in hospital. So my parents fled, just went, got in the car and went [to be with her].”

On the double jeopardy campaign, he says: “I was very proud that the law got changed. I wasn’t entirely responsible, but I think if I hadn’t mentioned [Vikki] when I did, maybe it wouldn’t have happened when it did.”

I suggest that he’s managed to win quite a few changes in law despite not being a household name. He ponders that for a moment. “Yes, I suppose I have. It’s true I’m not that well-known, but I’ve achieved some things. Hopefully I’ll achieve more, maybe more important parliamentary reforms. Who knows?”

I’d love to be in government… transport secretary would be brilliant

As for his next main ambition, it’s to produce a manifesto for Reform that appeals to voters and “get a good number of MSPs”. What’s a good number? “I’d like over 20. Aim high. It might sound ambitious, but you may as well be ambitious… At the moment, I would say around the 20-mark would be good, over that would be very good.”

He sidesteps the question of whether he’d want to be leader of that new bloc, whatever its size, but says he does feel a responsibility to “make sure that my colleagues know how parliament operates and that they’ll be effective MSPs”.

“We’re taking this very seriously – as we’re taking the election in Wales very seriously, where we’re polling very well. That’s also going to be an interesting one. I’m fairly sure there’ll be a change of government in Wales. And there might be one here.”

Would he want to be in government?

“I’d love to be in government.”

Would he want to be first minister?

“I don’t know about that… transport secretary would be brilliant.”