Why Cameron should avoid Scotland

Alan Cochrane on the bitching and backbiting that bedevil Scottish politics Eleven months ago Kirsty Wark, arguably Britain’s best-known female television presenter, hosted a New Year party at her Majorcan villa that included among the guests Jack McConnell, Scotland’s First Minister, and his family.

Last Monday, David McLetchie, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, resigned after being pilloried for ten months over claims that he had been guilty of both paid advocacy and of abusing his parliamentary expenses. Four days later Mr McLetchie’s one-time close friend and soulmate, Brian Monteith, had the Tory whip in the Scottish Parliament removed and now faces expulsion from the party after confessing that he had been plotting behind McLetchie’s back by sending emails to a newspaper editor urging him to mount a campaign for a new Scottish Tory leader.

How can there be a connection between the New Year’s Eve party and last week’s events? The answer, according to conspiracy theorists north of the border, is that McLetchie’s woes began just as things hotted up for Wark and McConnell over their festive sojourn together.

As well as back-stabbing and double-dealing of an especially nasty nature, it is a saga of a ferocious and — in some eyes — malicious press campaign against one man that has shocked even the most world-weary and cynical. It is also a story that has unfolded away from the eyes of the mainstream British media, so alien does Scotland now appear to the rest of the United Kingdom since devolution.

But to our tale: unfortunately for Scotland’s First Broadcaster and First Minister, the news of their New Year festivities at Casa Wark in the wee sma’ hours of 2005 was revealed in a Scottish Sunday newspaper. There followed an embarrassing and very nearly career-damaging couple of months for both of them; McConnell was accused of failing to register this holiday as a gift (he was subsequently cleared) while Wark was accused of getting too close to a Labour politician than is deemed good for senior BBC figures.

Although the pair claimed that they had been long-term family friends, the resultant brouhaha meant that Wark suffered the minor — for her — ignominy of losing her customary anchor slot for BBC Scotland’s general election night programme in May.

However, if McConnell and Wark were out of the woods, the trouble was only beginning for Mr McLetchie. First of all he was accused by the Labour-supporting Daily Record of using his position as a Member of the Scottish Parliament to favour clients of the blue-chip Edinburgh legal firm, in which he still served as a partner. Although he denied vehemently any wrongdoing and was cleared by the Scottish Parliament’s standards committee, he felt obliged later to resign his partnership.

Next came accusations that he was claiming expenses for using his car when it was a company car paid for by his law firm. It wasn’t and he was entitled to the expenses.

Gradually building all the while, however, was the issue that would ultimately lead to his resignation — the Tory leader’s use, or abuse according to your viewpoint, of taxis. Yes, that’s right — taxis! Taxigate, as it became known, unoriginally, has dominated what passes for political coverage in Scotland ever since early spring.

Initially week after week, but then day after day, stories appeared in the predominantly left-wing Scottish press alleging that McLetchie had been profligate with his taxi claims. The ‘charges’ against him got more and more bizarre. He was supposed to have been using them to get to and from his law firm. Then he was using them to visit his aged mother. Then there were the visits — and this was the bit the Scottish press loved best — to the home of an attractive, divorced and aristocratic blonde. Why was he going there? they shrieked.

At first McLetchie refused to answer any of the charges. But the drip, drip, drip effect of the relentless campaign eventually got to him. He said the trips to his law firm were justified because he did parliamentary work from there. The trip to his mother’s was to escort that infirm octogenarian to the official opening of the Holyrood Parliament. And as for the blonde, he pointed out that she had been a party worker and he had been delivering papers to her home.

There is no doubt that he was cavalier, to say the least, with his taxi expenses. For someone who earned his spurs as a politician in hounding out of office Henry McLeish, a previous Scottish First Minister, over — you’ve guessed it — an expenses scandal, he should have been like Caesar’s wife in his approach to the public purse. And he did admit to ‘errors’ in that his office charged the Parliament for trips he made to Conservative party conferences. He paid back the cash. He also offered to pay back any other claims found to be unjustified.

His taxi bills were the highest in the Parliament — just over £11,000 in the past six and a half years — but, unlike the Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders, he did not have a ministerial Mondeo and there have been three leaders of the Scottish National party in the same period that McLetchie has led the Tories.

Almost all of the accusations against him have resulted from a line by line, item by item examination of his expense claims, released to journalists under the Freedom of Information legislation. At first the Scottish Parliament refused to give the destinations of his taxis but after an appeal Kevin Dunion, the information commissioner for Scotland and a former special adviser to Mr McConnell, ruled that they could be published.

This resulted in a further bout of accusations against him and culminated, eight days after he had denounced the Scottish press as ‘pariahs’ and as his party deserted him, in McLetchie’s resignation.

Throughout this drama there has been a widespread suspicion that discontented Tories have also been active in assisting hostile journalists in their labours, and confirmation, of a sort, came last Friday when Brian Monteith, a former front-bench finance spokesman and friend and associate of McLetchie, unmasked himself as a regicide. He confessed to Peter Duncan, the Scottish Tory chairman, that he had emailed an editor urging him to mount a campaign against McLetchie.

As is often typical in these cases, Monteith is now trying to bring others down with him, alleging that he was far from alone in plotting against McLetchie.

The attitude of the Scottish press in this case brought a withering verdict from one experienced observer. Magnus Linklater, former editor of the Scotsman and now columnist for the Times, said in that paper’s Scottish edition last week that the McLetchie affair displayed a ‘malice’ on the part of some Scottish newspapers that amounted to a ‘media vendetta, unremitting and unforgiving, whose ferocity was only matched by its pettiness’.

However, my own view is that if it was a media vendetta, it was one that certainly suited the Labour agenda.

Meanwhile, in the comparatively sunlit uplands of English conservatism, Messrs Davis and Cameron are said to be reconsidering their planned campaign trips north of the border. I wonder why.