The portrait of Donald Dewar that emerges from Lord Fraser’s report asks us to accept that Dewar was Bush’s equal: a broad brush fellow with no appetite for detail, content to rely on others. It is a portrait I struggle to recognise.
Fraser proclaims: “I knew Donald Dewar well.” Not well enough, because the assertion on which his acquittal of Dewar rests beggars belief. The essential conclusion of the Holyrood inquiry is that chaos and expense stemmed from the decision to adopt a system called construction management, which loads risk on to the client and leaves contractors free of it. But Fraser concludes Dewar knew nothing about it. He was not asked to approve it. Civil servants, some of them anxious, others stupid, kept it secret.
This assertion just does not sound like Dewar. Fraser himself describes Dewar as a man with “the undoubted ability to grasp the minutiae of the issues of the parliament project while simultaneously keeping abreast of the wider political priorities of his new administration”.
He also acknowledges that the late first minister’s approach to government did not always produce written minutes. Fraser records that Dewar liked to conduct regular “informal conversations” with officials. Anecdotal versions of these conversations crop up throughout the Fraser report. They are all deployed to reinforce a version of Dewar that sits uneasily with his reputation and the experience of those who worked closely with him.
The Dewar with whom I shared a tiny Westminster office for three years was dedicated to detail and frantic to be fully informed. He had a network of expert contacts that, throughout Labour’s wilderness years, helped him to combat the vast resources of the old Scottish Office. He trained himself to understand economics, fiscal theory and the complexities of pensions legislation. He believed that the devil was in the detail and worked to master it with singular determination.
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Dewar was never intellectually lazy. I watched him sit, long into the night, reading Hansard or academic texts on his latest area of study. He had a first-class mind, which, combined with a chaotic but relentless dedication to hard work, made him effective.
Fraser asks us to accept that, on entering government in 1997, Dewar abandoned the habits of a lifetime. He stopped asking questions and demanding briefings and became content to leave vital decisions to officials. Experience makes that hard to believe. Fraser’s own evidence makes it nigh impossible.
It was Dewar who decided that he would “endow” Scotland with a new parliament building rather than leave the decision for MSPs to make. Dewar chose the site and the architect. At every stage, as Fraser dutifully records, he asked for detailed briefings.
Fraser says that Dewar was entitled to make the decisions he made as secretary of state. He even resists serious criticism of the “Father of the Nation” for continuing to exercise near autocratic authority when he had ceased to possess it because he was no longer a member of the UK cabinet. Among Fraser’s more astonishing findings is that Dewar and Jack McConnell continued to “take significant decisions in relation to a project no longer within their remit”.
This is crucial. What Fraser means is that Dewar authorised decisions that, following devolution, he was not legally entitled to take. Dewar wrote the Scotland Act. He fought to push it through parliament and past a sceptical cabinet committee. Fraser requires us to accept that he did not understand it. Had Michael Forsyth or Malcolm Rifkind protested ignorance in such circumstances Dewar would have eviscerated them. Lord Fraser knows that.
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Yet he asks us to believe that things like this were insignificant mistakes, understandable in the excitement of the time and that individuals should not be considered culpable. This is the heart of the matter. Fraser admits that, even after responsibility passed to the Scottish parliament in June 1999, Dewar had “a very substantial and continuing personal political investment in the fortunes of the project”.
Damn right he did. And in Dewar’s case that means he checked every detail. That he may often have done so in private conversations that went unminuted should surprise nobody. That was his style.
Do I believe Dewar knew nothing about the flaws of construction management? No, I believe the Holyrood project was his baby. He wanted a prestigious building. He regarded himself, as Fraser records, as possessing “a mandate to act as the most important patron of the architecture of government for 300 years”. I suspect Dewar chose to take risks with money, design and even legality because he believed history would vindicate him. He may have been right. The failure of civil servants was that they regarded him with awestruck reverence. Fraser makes the same mistake.
Tim Luckhurst was Donald Dewar’s parliamentary research assistant and press officer from 1985 to 1988