Ian Murray: 'This is the Ministry of Fun. What's not to like?'

For a Labour government that has made much of its plans to tighten up employment rights by banning the cruel practice of fire and rehire, the very public sacking of its popular secretary of state for Scotland during a mini-reshuffle was heavy with irony when, 24 hours later following a backlash from within its own ranks, Ian Murray was then reappointed to government with not one job, but two.

Murray, first elected in 2010, is Labour’s longest-serving Scottish MP, was the sole Labour MP north of the border from 2015 to 2017, and again from 2019 to 2023, and was also one of the first casualties of a cabinet reshuffle in September following Angela Rayner’s departure. And just as that shock news was being digested and with the Edinburgh South MP heading to the back benches, in what is becoming a habit for Keir Starmer’s government, there was a change of heart and Murray was reappointed to government to a joint ministerial brief in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSit).

It’s fair to say that Murray’s initial removal from government was greeted with disbelief among his Westminster colleagues and Murray tells me now that he still doesn’t know the reason why he was sacked or why he was then brought back 24 hours later. And while one suspects that like so many of Starmer’s U-turns it was more cock-up than conspiracy, it clearly still rankles with Murray.

He has asked the prime minister for an explanation but despite the promise of a “pint and chat”, that has still to transpire. 

Murray was viewed as a safe pair of hands in the Scotland brief that he had shadowed for so long. Since the election last July, he elevated the profile of Brand Scotland at home and abroad; was a popular and collegiate member of the Labour contingent at Westminster; helped broker improved relations between the two governments at Holyrood and Westminster via the Scotland Office; gave a new perspective to ‘take your child to work day’ with his newborn daughter strapped to his chest in a baby sling as he signed an important trade agreement with the Scottish Chambers of Commerce; and was generally considered to be doing a good job. 

Murray tells me that on the day of the much-publicised reshuffle, while he was in Edinburgh launching the Maroon Mile – a trail to celebrate the history of his beloved Heart of Midlothian football club – with the club’s chair Ann Budge, he received an early phone call from No 10 which he assumed meant he was about to be promoted. In fact, it was the opposite.

[my wife] was absolutely f**king furious

He tells me that there was some irony for him in receiving the call about losing the secretary of state for Scotland job while he was actually at Haymarket launching the project for the football club that he had helped save from liquidation back in 2014. 

A snatch photograph later emerged of him on the phone at Edinburgh Airport looking upset, which The Sun newspaper claimed followed his call with No 10 and was him drafting his response while the TVs on the walls around him ran the headlines of his sacking.

It was a humiliating vision. In fact, Murray tells me, he was on the phone to his wife discussing childcare, and his glum face was more to do with a raging hangover than a job move. However, he admits that his psychotherapist wife, Mariam, who has previously told me that her husband’s family can collectively lack emotion, was not afraid to express her feelings about how she felt about his treatment.

“It’s fair to say that Mariam was absolutely fucking furious for three reasons. One, that somebody papped me in the airport lounge and then sent it to The Sun, which I thought was really odd and only added to the public nature of it all. The second thing was that she thought I was massively underappreciated, because she’s seen it from her side about how much I was balancing family life, parliament, being one of the new 37 Scottish MPs, being in government, the travelling up and down, not just in the constituency, but also around Scotland, and all the rest of it. But she was most angry about the fact that the prime minister didn’t have an explanation. Those were the three biggest things from her perspective. 

“But honestly, she also felt strangely relieved, happy even – she’d even started planning a holiday.

“For me, the hardest part was the complete lack of any sort of recognition for doing a half decent job. That’s the hardest bit. The second hardest bit is having no explanation of why I was sacked, and as we sit here today I still don’t have that despite me asking on a number of occasions. And the third bit is that I didn’t think I deserved the public humiliation of it all. I genuinely don’t know why it happened and that feels like an unfair gap.

“Is it because I was balancing the family [five-year-old Zola and 10-month-old Lois]? I don’t know. I mean, there was a bit of criticism in the press from someone saying I missed Keir’s conference speech last February, but I was on paternity leave [Murray was the first secretary of state to ever take paternity leave] that he had signed off so I’m not quite sure that’s the reason. But obviously there was chatter going on somewhere from somebody… I don’t know… but I would like an explanation.

“That being said, the very public nature of it all also opened up a whole host of other opportunities. I mean, my phone never stopped ringing on the Friday night and Saturday morning with a whole host of offers and interesting opportunities that no, Mandy, I’m not putting on the public record, but fair to say if one in particular had come off, I think it would have been a no-brainer for me.”

I suggest that for him to walk away from government, it must surely have been football related, but he remains teasingly tight-lipped.

“You know, I was sacked at about half past 12 on the Friday, and I then got a call from the chief whip on the Saturday morning to say, would you accept a minister of state role if it was offered to you? And I said, it depends on what it is. He rang me back at two o’clock and said that you’ve got this role if you want it, and I just kept stringing him along until six or seven o’clock on the Saturday night because I wasn’t quite sure, but then I accepted it. I mean, come on, this is the Ministry of Fun, what’s not to like?

“Seriously, though, my big questions about coming back into government were, why was it not offered to me at the time – and it wasn’t – why has the decision now been made and why? If I’m not good enough for the Scotland Office, why am I now number two in two major UK departments? And nobody’s been able to answer those questions yet.

“There was a potentially embarrassing moment when I had just got reappointed to DCMS and DSit which I hadn’t actually accepted until, as I say, the Saturday night, and there was DSit questions on the Wednesday morning ahead of PMQs. I’m sitting on the bench, and I’m question five. We only get to question four and it was busy with people queuing to come in and Keir comes in and sits down right next to me. It was a bit uncomfortable. But to be fair, he had sent a really nice text over that weekend to say, ‘I’m on way back from Balmoral’ – he was up there with the king – ‘I’ve read some of the reports about the leaks from Number 10, about X, Y and Z, none of that is true’. And he reiterated that when he sat next to me, and he said, ‘let’s have a beer one night [and] talk about it’. And to be fair, he went back to his team and said, ‘we need to sort a beer with Ian Murray’… but no, we haven’t had the beer yet. I have had a beer with his chief of staff, who subsequently didn’t tell me the reasons for the sacking or the delay in the ministerial appointments but he said I would need to ask the prime minister…”

I jokingly suggest to Murray that given his party’s much-heralded tightening up of employment rights, he should take the PM to an employment tribunal to get his answers.

“It’d be for unfair dismissal, wouldn’t it,” he jokes.

I didn't want to be seen just as the Scottish guy

It’s interesting hearing even the tiniest hint of snark from Murray, even veiled as it is within humour, because he is such a party loyalist, which also explains why the reaction to his sacking was so overwhelmingly supportive of him. He admits to being completely humbled by messages from people like Gordon Brown, David Miliband and even political rivals like Kate Forbes. He tells me that constituents were dropping off gifts for him at his office and fellow Scottish MPs expressed their disappointment at his move in the media.

It was this reaction that likely led to a quick salvage exercise from No 10 with his swift reappointment to government but also, more damagingly, it hinted at the fact that the operation behind Starmer doesn’t quite get Scotland, and with just six months to go to the May 2026 Holyrood election that has to be a concern.

Although putting veteran politician Douglas Alexander into both the Scotland Office and heading up the election campaign alongside Scottish Labour deputy leader Jackie Baillie MSP also suggests that a more bullish approach was required. Time will tell.

Murray has previously described himself to me as an optimistic pragmatist and it is true to say that, despite the circumstances, he has approached his dual ministerial brief with gusto. He describes how his own background in events – he ran his own events company before politics – and also his experience of the dot.com years when he helped to build an online TV station before the bubble burst and he faced redundancy, bring not just a personal interest, but unique professional intel to both his new roles. 

I also suggest to him that perhaps while it was inevitable that he would be appointed secretary of state for Scotland following the general election in 2024, it wasn’t necessarily the job he would have chosen, and while moving from a cabinet post to junior ministerial ones is clearly seen as a demotion it also provides the opportunity to stretch himself in policy areas that cover the whole of the UK. He agrees that the move has positives and also tells me that he feels “quite liberated”.

“I think you’re right, that there was an inevitability about becoming secretary of state for Scotland and of course it was good to see it all through because I had been shadow for two separate stints and shadow for the whole of Keir Starmer’s time as leader of the opposition. But there is always a danger you get stereotyped, pigeon-holed, and it is true to say that I was always concerned that I didn’t want to be seen just as the Scottish guy and nothing else, but I desperately wanted to see it through, and I desperately wanted to sit at that Cabinet table. 

“What did I manage to achieve? Well, there’s probably a number of parts to that, because there’s an internal part and an external part. So, what I wanted to achieve in the Scotland Office was one part and another was for the 36 other Scottish Labour MPs to find their place, to find their voice, to find what they were interested in, to get as many of them into government as possible. That was always going to be a longer process, because apart from Michael [Shanks] everyone was relatively new. I mean, Martin McCluskey had been around politics in parliament before and Kirsty McNeill had worked for Gordon Brown, but being elected was going to be difficult and then getting as many as possible into government was also going to be a challenge but look how many we have in there now. That was one part. The other part was making Scotland relevant again in Whitehall, which to be fair to the prime minister, he also recognised that need too. And the third thing was just relentlessly trying to drive the profile in Scotland and deliver stuff. I think I achieved a lot of that.

“I think the experience has taught me that no matter how hard I work and how successful I may be in that work, it may not be recognised so I need to shout about it more, which I hate doing. But others do shout very loudly about themselves, so you have to do it too to be heard.

“But look, the upside of all of this has been threefold. One is, as you’ve already alluded to, that I feel, and others have said, that I left the Scotland Office in a really good place and did a good job, so I’m happy and content with that. Secondly, I do feel quite liberated because not having to get up every single day and be completely and utterly swamped by Scotland after being in the trenches for 15 years on my own is quite liberating, particularly when I’ve got a really meaty policy portfolio in areas that I am really interested in that are UK-wide, and I am working with great people like Liz [Kendall] and Lisa [Nandy] which is another upside.”

As minister for creative industries and the arts alongside being minister for digital government and data, Murray has a bulging in-box, and I suggest there must have been some compensation in losing your job one minute but then getting to meet Angelina Jolie at Pinewood Studios the next.

“It’s not bad, is it?” he laughs before reeling off the names of other A-listers that he’s done meet-and-greets with in his first weeks in the job. However, one of Murray’s first serious tests as the new UK minister for digital government was, of course, dealing with the fallout from the announcement about the introduction of controversial mandatory digital ID cards, which his SNP opponents in particular have criticised as ‘mission creep’. The responsibility for the scheme may now sit with the Cabinet Office given what the prime minister described as its “cross-government priority”, but Murray came out strongly for the scheme and remains a supporter.

He says his view of a digital ID scheme is “quite hawkish” and describes the nationalist opposition as “opportunistic”.

The SNP are just trying to find a fight in an empty room

“Look, I can see why people wouldn’t have wanted it 25 years ago with a physical ID card, and what all of that signifies, but now, I mean, I’ve got my whole life on my phone, my bank accounts on it, my boarding passes, my train tickets, you know, everything is contained on that phone. That is how so many of us manage our lives these days. So having a digital ID that would allow you to access and modernise government just seems to me to be a no-brainer.

“The SNP are just trying to find a fight in an empty room because they realise it’s potentially controversial and could be potentially unpopular for Labour. There was a Westminster Hall debate taken by Pete Wishart and I read two paragraphs of policy out on this and he’s bawling and shouting at me all the way through it, and what I had read out was his government’s policy – the Scot Card one – which is basically identical to what we’re trying to do. And as I kept saying to him, a passport is not mandatory, but it’s mandatory if you want to travel, and that’s what this is about. Now there could be arguments from the left, from the right, and from within the party, about whether or not the first use case of mandatory for right-to-work checks is the right place to go, but when you broaden the argument out to all the other potential use cases and what it could do to transform people’s relationship to stay, I don’t see why we wouldn’t do it. And actually, the people who are furthest geographically from the centre and furthest economically from government are the ones who benefit the most. I think the SNP, in that sense, are just seizing on something that they think could be unpopular for the Labour government and have decided to go against it. I think it’s as nakedly political as that. 

“Most of the issues that people are bringing up are about privacy, security, the police asking for it on demand and so on. Nobody’s really said, ‘no, this is a disgrace for right-to-work checks’. We do it anyway. Well, it’s not compulsory in law, but it’s illegal in law for an employer to employ someone who’s not able to work in this country, and therefore, by default, it’s mandatory for employers to check.

“The Westminster Hall debate had, I think, 30 MPs who spoke – 27 of them, or 28 of them, were opposition MPs, and not one of them made an argument against the actual policy. They all made an argument against what they thought the policy was – a Britcard, a physical card, all kinds of stuff that actually is not the case.

“Digital ID has gone to the Cabinet Office from DSit, to Darren Jones in the Cabinet Office, because if you want this to work properly, you’ve got to get every single government department, particularly the big ones, HMRC, DWP etc, to buy into it and DSit would have just spent all of its time fighting government departments so it’s best it sits with the Cabinet Office.

“I’ve still got data, the national data library, modernising government, and all that stuff around tech and AI copyright relationship, etc.

“Do I understand it all? Well, I guess, in some ways, I feel a bit like when I used to try and show my dad how to work a video recorder in that I might be a generation away on some of this but I am not saying I can’t work an iPad because, actually, I feel quite technology savvy myself but when it comes to AI and quantum computing, it is hard to get your head around some of it.

“For me, technology is about ones and zeros, but it’s not like that any more. But it is about making it relevant and what is really interesting is when you put politicians in the room with technicians, the conversation is completely different. Because Liz Kendall, the secretary of state and myself, will always ask, ‘but what’s in it for people, how does this translate into X, Y and Z’s lives, how does it affect the high street in Grimsby or in Edinburgh?’ And the language has to change, be understood and be applicable to ordinary people, because unless we can use technology to improve public services and transform people’s lives there’s really no point, is there?”

In terms of his other portfolio responsibilities and with the BBC charter renewal and secondary ticket touting sitting high up the agenda, Murray describes culture and sport as “the glue that binds our communities”.  

“It’s big sporting events, big global cultural events, music, film, TV, the games industry, the arts, it’s all of that stuff that is at the heart of communities. So we’ve got a really good story to tell in that sense. It’s about jobs and our future and how we see ourselves, and if we can crack the impenetrable nature of trying to get kids from poorer backgrounds like mine into culture, then we’ll have done something pretty special and that drives me.”

Which brings us back to what this Labour government has done on the back of its manifesto of change. With Labour trailing in the polls, things do not bode well for Murray’s party next May at Holyrood and you sense his frustration. He says that while John Swinney was like a “wounded animal” when Starmer flew to Scotland after the election to reset the relationship between the two governments, the “calendar has moved, and the political volume has been turned up”. However, as a plus, he says the relationship between Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar is the best there has ever been between the leader of UK Labour and Scottish Labour since devolution and that they have filled the vacuum in centre-left politics which he says was “being lost because of the extremes of nationalism versus a sort of Corbynite left”. He says both leaders “get out of bed every morning wanting to do the right thing” and Scots now need to feel the benefit of having their MPs in government at Westminster.

“It is up to us to tell the story. We’ve already done so much with the ending of austerity, the largest financial settlement in the history of devolution, the largest pay rise for the lowest paid ever, affecting 200,000 of the poorest Scots, showing that NHS waiting lists can fall and fast when there is a political will to do so, the extension of the warm homes support to millions of Scots, huge increases in the state pension through the triple lock (over £1,000 per year already this parliament), huge industrial investment in defence, GB Energy and the massive investment into renewables, the largest R&D budget ever for our universities, scientists and innovators, five interest rate cuts, saving of shipyards, £10bn on the Norway frigate deal, record inward investment, etc. Yes, people need to start to feel it but we have laid the foundations for people to start feeling it and we need to tell that positive story [about] an awful lot done but much more to come. I would apply here the lesson I have learnt about myself in all of this, that it is up to us as a party to shout about our achievements because no one else will do it for us.”