With the sudden death of Donald Dewar, father of the new Scottish Parliament, the country lost a statesman of rare ability who had worked steadfastly throughout his career on behalf of Scotland. Many felt it as a personal loss, and feared for the future of the infant parliament. Those who had imbibed Dewar’s optimism about their country, however, clung to his vision and determined to make a success of his legacy.
‘Now I know what it feels like to be a horse,’ declared Donald Dewar. He was speaking at a lunch in Glasgow in May last year, less than a week before the people of Scotland went to the polls to elect its first parliament for 292 years. He paused just long enough to let the words sink in before he delivered the punchline: ‘Because these days I’m constantly being groomed.’
The audience of hardbitten hacks and New Labour apparatchiks dissolved in laughter. Here was Dewar in his element, a stand up comedian in the Chick Murray mould ‘arms flailing like a combine harvester out of control,’ as one friend has described his speaking technique, he was the warm-up man for none other than Tony Blair, his former roommate at Westminster. It is a side of Dewar which was rarely allowed to surface in public. Wry, witty, laconic, dry as a rusk, deadpan as the Rev. I. M. Jolly, he had the personality to charm even the most cynical of crowds. His vanity, he once said, was ‘an incurable delusion that people like me’. But clearly it was not a delusion; people really did like him, for himself and – not least – for his obvious aversion to being ‘groomed’.
Substance not style was his priority. In that sense, he was a politician from a bygone age, to whom a soundbite was an alien language not worth learning. He preferred the unglamorous routine of constituency surgeries and the hard slog of the streets of Garscadden and Anniesland to Saatchi and Saatchi slogans and appearances on This Morning with Richard and Judy. It was as if he was always wary of getting above himself, of giving himself airs and graces, a peculiarly Scottish trait. He knew his roots and remained loyal to them throughout his life.
Famously, he never indulged in holidays. While some of his colleagues last week took the opportunity of the parliamentary recess to take an autumn break, for Dewar, who recently had major heart surgery, it was the usual round of greetings, meetings and briefings. Such a punishing schedule would have left much younger and fitter men peching in his wake, let alone a 63-year-old with a history of heart complaint. Married to politics as many have suggested, he was driven by an insatiable desire to make the parliament, for which he had worked all his political life, succeed and live up to the expectations of those who had fought for the ‘unfinished business’ to be completed. Donald Dewar was under no illusion on that score and was impatient to move things on. In doing so, he probably hastened his death, a price which plunged the nation into mourning and produced heartrending, hypocritical headlines in newspapers which only a few days before he died had been virulent in his denunciation.
How he would have savoured the irony. No one appreciated better than he the Scottish tendency to lambast the living and hero-worship the dead. Only on the night that the Scottish parliament was reconvened after a hiatus of almost three centuries did he allow himself to enjoy a moment of glory, strolling the streets of Edinburgh as night fell enjoying the celebrations, a proud grin fixed on his face as his back was slapped to bruising. ‘It was certainly the most satisfying moment of my life,’ he said later, the apotheosis of a career which had many highs and indelible lows. Throughout it all, though, the remarkable thing about him was how little he changed.
He was the only child of elderly parents, which he did not recommend. However, he was at pains to stress that his childhood was generally happy, if unusual. Both his parents suffered from serious illness. His father, who was a well-to-do Glasgow dermatologist, had tuberculosis, while his mother developed a brain tumour. Donald Campbell Dewar was born in August 1937 as portents of war reverberated around the globe and he was sent at the age of two and a half to a small boarding school in Perthshire which was run by friends of his parents. Two years later he went south to another boarding school, Beverley, at Bonchester Bridge near Hawick, which was used to house refugees from the London blitz. ‘I have memories of the shrubberies, of the pets in the stable block, particularly a black and white rabbit,’ he recalled last year. ‘I suffered from the delusion that I owned it.’ But when he was nine he returned to Glasgow and went to Mosspark Primary School, where he spent a miserable year. ‘I remember being puzzled by that,’ he said, ‘very forlorn and lost because of the sharp change from a small, closed, rural environment. There was a certain amount of teasing because of my accent, which was part Hawick part non-English because of my previous classmates.’
Dewar may have hated his time at Mosspark Primary School – he recalled rushing for the bus at four o’clock ‘and it was not just because I thought it was leaving’ – but there were occasional glimpses of Eden. In the summer of 1945, as war-time Scotland started getting used to the brave new world of the welfare state, he and his parents went on the first of several never-to-be-forgotten holidays to the north-east. He stayed on the farm of their friends, the Allans, near the small Aberdeenshire town of Methlick. Dewar was [sent to] Glasgow Academy. It was a school which championed sporting excellence, leaving Dewar, who had Harry Potter-ish tendencies, cold.
His flowering, however, came when he went to Glasgow University, which brought him into contact with a group of men who were to influence him throughout his life. There was John Smith, already a political animal but also a great party-goer. His death in 1994 devastated Dewar but it galvanized him, too. Like Smith, he subscribed to the view that we are not put on this world simply to enjoy. A Scottish sense of duty impelled both of them, as did the idea that there could be no privilege without responsibility.
His was by any standards an outstanding generation. As well as Dewar, Smith and [Angus] Grossart, there were Menzies Campell, the Liberal Democrat MP, Jimmy Gordon, now Lord Gordon of Strathblane, Ross Harper, the lawyer, broadcaster Donald McCormack, Cameron Munro, until recently the European Union’s representative in Edinburgh, and Derry Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, who was to cause Dewar huge emotional upheaval when he had an affair with his wife, Alison.
Dewar first did a history degree, then law, which would give him a career to fall back on. But of more significance was the milieu of the university and the role it played in transforming the geeky, bookish, bespectacled teenager into a confident and accomplished student, which he later confirmed. ‘I came up to university remarkably inhibited and limited in my social experience and all that kind of changed, which was a great thing. I discovered in the debating society that I could, in a staccato kind of way, string together words and phrases. It wasn’t the debates that were important, frankly, it was what was built around them. In those days there was a tremendous social structure, drinking structure, social experience in every sense.’ The hub was the union where, he said, ‘you could eat, drink and find yourself a lumber for the night, or whatever’.
You can almost hear the smile in his voice as he said that. There can be few more incongruous notions than Donald Dewar on the prowl for female prey. It was also at the university that he acquired the nickname ‘Gannet’, on account of his gargantuan appetite. It stuck with him, as did his friends.
The image of the endearing eccentric is in danger of overshadowing the immense achievement of a man driven by a passion to eradicate inequality and poverty. Menzies Campbell was spot on when he said that Donald Dewar and Scotland were made for each other. With his knowledge of his country’s literature and history and his respect for artists, particularly the Scottish Colourists, Dewar had the kind of hinterland once common in cultivated Scots.
But it was not just book learning which provided fodder for the mind and clutter for his flat in the West End. Scotland helped form him in many other untold ways. Not only was he a product of his Glasgow middle-class roots, the lace-curtain respectability celebrated by the novelist Guy McCrone, which gave him his early education and his collection of Peploes, Fergussons and McTaggarts, but his training in history and law helped form the radical inside the anonymous – if crumpled – suit.
Partly, he was affected by Scottish Labour history with its totemic figures of Keir Hardie and the more recent Red Clydesiders, the Wheatleys and Maxtons who vowed to export the revolution to Westminster. But these connections are too obvious. There was always the touch of the Covenanter about Dewar that even his best friends could not ignore – not the mood of religious exaltation which took fanatics such as James Renwick to the scaffold, but the calmer and more considered views of Robert Baillie, who struggled with his conscience before signing the National Covenant in 1638. In the late 1980s, when it seemed that devolution was as far away as it ever would be, Dewar once confessed to a Scottish historian that he felt many affinities with Baillie, also a Glasgow graduate. It took time and much soul-searching before the young minister of Kilwinning agreed to throw in his lot with the Covenanters, because he realized that in so doing he might be violating his loyalty to the Crown. His heart told him that the National Covenant had been produced to protect Scotland’s interests and was a statement of the country’s intent. But he also knew that it might be construed as a threat to the authority of King Charles I. ‘That’s the beauty or the terror of Scottish history,’ Dewar said. ‘We are all affected by it and its influences are never far away.’
The comparison with his own position on the devolution issue was left unsaid but its shadow hovered uneasily over the conversation. Now he has sculpted his own place in the country’s story. His modesty would doubtless have it otherwise but there is no denying it. ‘I am asked what I am,’ he said in Dublin at the end of September. ‘I am a Scot, a citizen of the United Kingdom, and someone who has a very real interest in the future of the European Union.’
It was a brilliant speech, casually erudite, humourful, urbane and broadranging. But to those present it was clear the heart surgery had had a profound physical effect. He told the historian Tom Devine that in the next few months he would have to reappraise the situation if there was no surge of the energy of old. Sadly, he never got the chance. But he leaves a legacy which cannot be easily ignored. It can be summed up in the six sonorous words he himself wrote and which will be his epitaph: ‘There shall be a Scottish parliament.’