Deacon blue

Deacon is no longer prepared to keep the plates spinning. The four-and-a-half hours we spend together at times seems more like a therapy session than an interview, but one thing quickly becomes apparent: her departure marks the end of a dream not just for her but also for many supporters of devolution. It is the death of the new politics.

The idealism of the early days of devolution has lost out to what Deacon describes bitterly as “the raw tribalism of party politics”.

Like others she has taken on the party and lost, her enthusiasm and passion ground down by a relentless system that accommodates no dissenting voices and to which there is no viable alternative.

Like anybody witnessing the defeat of the thing they have worked most of their adult life to establish, Deacon is in turmoil. The huge media interest, the calls from old friends, the demands to justify the decision, the battles with her conscience, the sense of guilt, the compliments, the sleepless nights and the sheer uncertainty about the future have left her emotionally exhausted.

The extent of her isolation at Holyrood — she was cold- shouldered and shunned by some in her party after she spoke out against the war in Iraq — becomes apparent when she reveals she took no soundings on her decision to go. She seems unprepared for and overwhelmed by the response.

Wendy Alexander, the former enterprise minister and the politician Deacon was most closely identified with in the early days, only heard after the news broke. So far all they have managed is one brief, garbled telephone conversation punctuated by updates on the Alexander twins’ gastroenteritis.

“One of the difficult things for me is that normally I would have chatted to people and developed my thinking. I’ve had to internalise that thought process,” says Deacon over a latte in Stirling, where she has been addressing the Holyrood summer school. “Had I introduced any element of doubt about my future, it would have been round the place like wildfire. There is a bit of me that is relieved I can now have conversations with people, not just about my future, but where we go from here.

“I still believe passionately in the whole notion of Scottish self-government and all the work that went into the creation of the parliament, but I don’t think we are getting anywhere near fulfilling the potential of devolution. I have, however, no intention of leaving that debate behind.”

Interviewing Deacon is like peeling an onion. Layers must be gently eased away. She is acutely conscious of how her words will be interpreted and chooses every sentence carefully. She doesn’t do sound-bites; she does word salad — great jumbled streams of consciousness which she tosses, revises and reinterprets.

There is no love lost between her and Jack McConnell. Has she heard from the first minister since announcing her resignation? “Yes,” she says brusquely. “Next question.” What did he say? She flounders. “I got a pleasant phone call from the first minister” is all she will say on the subject.

But everything she says is, by implication, a damning indictment of the current leadership. The message she wants to get across is not about a clash of personalities, the difficulties of achieving a sensible work/life balance or the macho culture of Scottish politics. It is more important. It is that the political system in Scotland — dominated by increasingly out-of-touch party machines — militates against improving the lives of its citizens.

“My overriding interest is how to effect positive change,” says Deacon, one of the few Scottish Labour politicians to champion the reform of public services. “Increasingly there has been a host of different things — and it’s really difficult to separate them out — that have tipped the balance. I’m not achieving what I could or should. I want to do things 100% and be committed and energetic. If you feel you can only do that on the margins and much of what you are doing is not having any impact, it starts to affect your psychology. You become less enthusiastic.”

She denies she is disillusioned or unhappy. Deacon blue is not a hue that suits her but she admits to being “angry and frustrated”. She recognises that if she doesn’t get out now, those emotions could ferment into something darker.

“The raw tribalism in party politics leaves me cold. I also believe it leaves many other people cold. The obvious manifestation of that is in low turnouts at elections. I want to get some of these issues into the open. A lot of members of parliament privately acknowledge these things, but they won’t say them openly. The prevailing culture is to close down more and be ever more defensive.”

Deacon has no other job to go to and is acutely aware she is giving up a salary of £50,000 a year, not to mention office costs and allowances. By announcing her decision now, nine months ahead of the Scottish election, her constituency of Edinburgh East and Musselburgh has time to select a new candidate.

She points out she has been a parliamentarian for eight years and her departure from Holyrood does not mean she is leaving either politics or the Labour party. But it is an acknowledgment that the Scottish parliament is no longer a forum for effecting change. Had she stood again she would have been obliged to commit herself to another four years in an institution which, she believes, has become bogged down in bureaucracy.

Wasn’t devolution meant to put an end to the kind of politics exemplified in the past by Labour’s Lanarkshire mafia? “It’s not just the Labour party — it’s wider than that,” she says. “I’ve been around party politics in Scotland for a quarter of a century. It has always been a minority sport, but that is ever more true. Machine politics is alive and well in Scotland and it is horrible. It is stifling and stultifying.

“There is a kind of clubbiness in the parliament, a sort of collective mindset, a social conservatism. It’s the Holyrood bubble effect. I’m uncomfortable with a political debate on issues such as antisocial behaviour or even licensing, where six or seven years of considered discussion is turfed out of the window in an eleventh-hour bidding war in order to look tough.”

Despite her mannish, grey pinstripe suite and the functional black leather bag, Deacon is the antithesis of those game-playing party apparatchiks who appear on the Today programme or Newsnight and stonewall. I am, frankly, astonished at her lack of self- confidence. She seems devoid of any kind of emotional buffer zone. “A lot of it is coming from here,” she says pointing to a place between her guts and her heart.

But isn’t the fact she was able to abstain on the licensing bill and speak out about Iraq proof that the voices of dissenters such as herself can still be heard? “What you’ve identified is the one-tenth of the iceberg,” she says. “What you don’t see is all the times I would have liked to have spoken out but couldn’t.”

The debate on Iraq in 2003 left her wounded. She was one of a handful of Labour MSPs who rebelled or abstained in the crucial vote. “What really mattered to me was that we were having that parliamentary debate in Scotland before the decision was taken in Westminster. It was one of those rare occasions when London was taking notice of what we were saying.

“I think if the Scottish parliament had voted differently that day, it wouldn’t have been an act of gesture politics. It had the potential to make a difference.”

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To understand just how huge a decision it is for Deacon to walk away from the parliament, you have to delve into her history. She is the archetypal, bright, working-class girl. Politics runs through her like mince through stovies.

When she was young, her mother, Barbara, was housekeeper of a large period mansion in Inveresk and Deacon lived in a tiny flat at the top of the house. She had the run of the gardens, helped milk the cow next door and met a host of interesting visitors including Joyce Grenfell and Kiri Te Kanawa. It was a wrench, at the age of 11, to move to a conventional house in Musselburgh. She still lives in the town with her partner, John Boothman, a producer for BBC Scotland.

Her father, Jimmy, was a wages clerk for British Rail and she inherited his socialist principles. He died when she was just 16, the year after she joined the Labour party. She was head girl at Musselburgh high school and that ethos lingers. When I go to order coffee, she sneaks a look at my notes. It is entirely in keeping with her character that she confesses immediately on my return.

Within a couple of weeks of starting at Edinburgh University, where she studied politics and social policy, she was elected to the Student Representative Council and was president by the end of her first year. She chaired the Edinburgh district Labour party at a precociously young age and helped form, with McConnell among others, Scottish Labour Action, the left-wing pressure group on home rule.

“It wasn’t because I wanted to climb the greasy pole. I just get involved in things,” she says and then stops abruptly.

That she put her name forward as an MSP was no surprise, although she only squeaked on to the party list on appeal. Her daughter Clare caused a kerfuffle when she pricked the pomposity of the swearing-in ceremony by yelling “hello” and “mummy” as she took the oath as a Labour MSP in 1999.

But is was Deacon’s immediate appointment to health minister at the age of 35 that caused a shock, surprising even her. Those two-and-a-half years in office were not an overwhelming success. She was unfocused, antagonised the clinicians and failed to see the looming crisis at the Beatson cancer hospital in Glasgow, which eventually cost her the job. Would she have done things differently with the benefit of hindsight? “Millions of things,” she says. “I don’t know where to start. I’m not the sort of person who has regrets, but that doesn’t mean you can’t look back and learn.”

At the heart of Deacon’s damning critique of the parliament is the question of leadership. “Of course there are issues about leadership,” she says. “But it would be wrong to single out individuals. What we need is collective change. I think there should be a discussion about what we want out of politics and politicians and that discussion has to be wider than the 129 members of the Scottish parliament.”

There has to be a place at Holyrood, she believes, for people who are not lobby fodder.

“There are people out there with views, opinions and ability who would be a great asset to the parliament but who don’t fit the party’s profile. We have to move outside party divides to do what is right for the good of Scottish democracy.”

But the fact remains, Deacon could have chosen to stand against McConnell and challenge for the leadership. She didn’t take that opportunity to effect the changes after which she now hankers.

There has been much wringing of manicured hands in the parliament about women’s lack of power, but none of the Labour women have been prepared to put themselves forward for the top job.

Alexander came closest to challenging McConnell but pulled out prematurely. There were rumours Deacon and others were bitterly disappointed in what was seen at the time as Alexander’s lack of bottle. Wendy’s house would have been very different from the one that Jack built.

“I don’t want to go into that just now,” says Deacon. “It takes me into personalities. What I can’t understand is people who plan their career in politics. I think politics should be a vocation. I believe that quite passionately. There was a frustration in the first cabinet that, while some of us were rolling up our sleeves, others were much more focused on their futures.”

It is to Deacon’s credit that she doesn’t cite the difficulties of being a full-time working mother or the death of her mother two years ago as factors in her decision to go, although these must have played a part.

She’s glad she turned down the job of social justice minister after losing the health portfolio. It allowed her to spend more time with her mother who was ill for 18 months before her death. But she does not want to cloud the uncompromising nature of her message that politics isn’t working with forays into domesticity.

I put it to her that old-style politics has won and the new politics, the politics Scotland voted for in the devolution referendum, the politics articulated by everyone from Dewar to the Queen at the inauguration of the parliament, is over.

“There is a lot in that analysis with which I would concur,” she says. “But what you have to remember is that Dewar was passionate about issues. There was more of a moral compass at that time. More than anyone who has followed, he empowered his ministers. It was hugely scary but hugely liberating and rewarding. He let us get on with it, but he was always there for us.

“He backed his ministers. You weren’t always looking over your shoulder. You knew where you stood. What is sad in politics is when the going gets tough there is this culture of blame and spin.

“When Jack arrived there was a greater emphasis on stability, but stability cannot be an end in itself. We have to look to the future. There do need to be changes in the way politics works in Scotland. We need to rekindle some of the enthusiasm and hope that was there in the beginning. We need to get away from the lowest common denominator consensus and the tit-for-tat spat.

“Devolution hasn’t delivered change on the scale or at the pace it should have done, but the people who are saying that are the sceptics who were always anti-devolution. I think the parliament needs more critical friends.

“All of us who care about it have to think about ways of shaping developments in the future.”

Deacon is hopeful that others will join her in the debate. Despite the exhaustion and the emotion of the past few days, there is no disguising her passion or commitment. Far from being a victim of the party machine, she may yet prove to be the spanner in its works.

THE LOST GENERATION OF MSPS

Andrew Wilson called on Scots to support England in the World Cup and activists effectively forced him out as a candidate in the 2003 election by placing him so far down the list it was impossible to get re-elected

Duncan Hamilton was a young nationalist tipped for the top. As list MSP for the Highlands and Islands he stood out as a powerful debater. But by 2003, frustrated with the direction of the party, he stood down

Wendy Alexander was once regarded as a serious contender for first minister. Now the mother of six-month-old twins, she remains a backbench MSP but is not ruled out as a future first minister

Ben Wallace was elected for North East Scotland in 1999. Now MP for Lancaster and Wyre, where he regained the seat from Labour in 2005. He has one of the biggest Tory majorities in England