SNP Leadership contest 2004

'Russell has emerged from this campaign as the most adept and flexible political strategist in any party within the national movement.' Robbie Dinwoodie, 2 nd September 2004.

NationalismÕs flexible thinker

Michael Russell is profiled by our Chief Scottish Political Correspondent Robbie Dinwoodie

By Robbie Dinwoodie in the Herald, 2 nd September 2004

ONE thing is certain. Michael Russell will emerge from his attempt to become SNP leader with his stock higher than when he started. He will have charmed many hustings meetings, got up a few noses, not least that of erstwhile ally Alex Salmond, and generally put himself about a bit.

But he will not win, and although he will mark himself out as a future player once more in the party's fortunes, he will remain a couple of stages removed from returning to the top of Scottish politics. Still, the man who has been compared, in both praise and insult, to Labour's Peter Mandelson, and who with Mr Salmond used to scare Labour, is undoubtedly back on the scene.

Some have criticised Mr Russell's purchase of a sports car as a demonstration of some kind of mid-life crisis, citing other horrible domestic events during the year after he lost his parliamentary seat. But Dunoon is a fair drive from most places in itself, and the run over the thigh of the Cowal peninsula to Colintraive is a belter, a mainly smooth but scenic single-track road with passing places, to be taken at pace but with a constant awareness of good people going too slowly or of idiots. It would be hard to think of a better metaphor for politics. The transformation in Mr Russell's personal bearing and political stock in the course of just two short months has been astonishing. At the end of June, at an emotional party council meeting in Stirling, John Swinney condemned those who had turned on him, singling out the author of the remarks about "men in grey kilts" telling him his time was over. The mood was somewhere between the booing of a pantomime villain and an ugly lynch mob, and one of the main targets of that vitriol was Mr Russell, who had not arrived at that point because he was detained at another engagement.

When he did arrive he looked, frankly, pretty awful Ð thin, drawn, a shell of the former smooth operator who once ran the party machine before taunting Labour eloquently from the front benches. Many of his best friends advised him not to stand, as he joked at the time, telling him he needed a psychiatrist's couch, not a nomination paper. But by that point, a mere 48 hours after the ugliness of Stirling, he had decided to go for a nomination paper and looked like a man transformed, running a slick launch to his campaign. He was suddenly on form, as was obvious in his demeanour, and he has never looked back.

The day The Herald dropped by in Colintraive typified the new, energised Mr Russell with freebooting chat round the kitchen table where his wife and teenage son were quick to put their oar in. That night, at a hustings in Dunoon, he sparkled Ð but as often, in a way that sounds better at the time than in the reading of notes afterwards. His speeches were always about the need for new ideas, but the new ideas often went unspecified. "Quite simply, the party has to move forward or die," he said in Colintraive that day. "It has to have policies that encourage people to come in, not force them to stay out, and if that means thinking again from scratch, so be it."

He would vehemently deny it, but there is something very New Labour about this Ð taking as a starting point the policies a fickle public are prepared to accept, then shifting the party stalwarts in that direction. Throughout the hustings he gave examples such as cooling towards the EU and warming towards Nato. Always, his emphasis was on rethinking every policy, not on some ideological scale but on the basis of "removing barriers to supporting the SNP". The notion that masses will shift to the SNP on the basis of its policy on Nato seems fanciful, but Mr Russell appears to have used this as an example of the way the party must re-examine itself. His manifesto's "five steps to independence" sounded at times like a way to get off booze or a high-calorie diet, but again it was about asking the party to think again about issues it has not thought about for a generation.

He was able to deliver his points like a holy roller and they went down fairly well at the public hustings that journalists were permitted to attend. His message about new thinking, a revamped party structure, an emphasis on enterprise, the use of fiscal autonomy as a route to independence, and a broader reawakening of participatory democracy in Scotland, were solid but tended to be outshone by the manner of delivery.

Mr Russell has done enough in this contest to suggest that he is an asset the party must seek to use. To quote the Scots Independent, the Nationalist newspaper: "Convener Salmond must recognise and use the burgeoning talents of Michael Russell. Once little more than an excellent party manager, Russell has emerged from this campaign as the most adept and flexible political strategist in any party within the national movement. What a waste it would be to consign Michael Russell to some secondary role limited to sweeping up after the new leader. If Mr Salmond really does mean to become 'the next first minister, then lead Scotland to independence', then his application of Mr Russell's drive and acumen could be a major step on the way." The problem is that Mr Russell achieved his reinvigoration at the cost of niggling Mr Salmond. When he coined the phrase that Mr Salmond was planning to act like an absentee landlord, with Nicola Sturgeon as his factor, it enraged his former ally and friend, not least because it was a pungently telling analogy. As the hustings progressed there was no disguising the feistiness of the contest between Mr Russell and Mr Salmond.

This is meant to be a leadership that is all but won for Mr Salmond, who promises a new, inclusive approach. The test of that will be whether he finds tasks or jobs for his main opponents. He might think that the more they managed to hurt him, the more their talent should be directed towards hurting Jack McConnell.