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Fortnight POLITICAL INTERVIEW


Return of the Mac


New Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh on taking the heat out of parliamentary politics by Alan Robertson


▏ IF 55 VOTERS IN DUMBARTON had swapped Labour for the SNP two- and-a-half weeks ago, Ken Macintosh would not be sitting in the parliament, let alone in the Presiding Officer’s chair. As the Holyrood veteran left the count at Williamwood High School in Clarkston in the early hours of 6 May, fresh from Conservative MSP Jackson Carlaw snatching Eastwood, a constituency seat Mac- intosh had held for the past 17 years, the father-of-six was pretty much resigned to the fact that he, like many of his Scottish Labour colleagues, would not be returning to the Scottish Parliament.


Ten at 4.45am, two and a bit hours after he had watched Carlaw forge ahead, culminating in the Tories overtaking Labour as the second largest party, confirmation came that Labour’s Jackie Baillie had held off the SNP’s Gail Robertson by just 109 votes to win Dumbarton with the smallest majority of Scotland’s 73 constituency seats. Tat news pushed Macintosh, who had been fourth on the west of Scotland list, into third place and ultimately returned him to the Scottish Parliament. Macintosh chuckles as he recounts a text he received soon after his return was confirmed. ‘We didn’t quite keep Ken for East Ren but we did Return the Mac,’ it read, a reference to his carpool karaoke-style video a few weeks before polling day that saw him settle on the 1996 chart-topper as his official campaign track. Beaten into third place by Ruth Davidson’s Conservative party, the inquest began swiftly, as Kezia Dugdale – who thumped Macintosh nine months earlier in the Labour leadership contest – faced endless questions on whether her job was safe. Macintosh’s attentions, however, were elsewhere. “Tere is no doubt about it that the election itself was the trigger, in the sense that


I went from constituency to the list,” he says on his decision to put his name forward for presiding officer. “And just being frank about it, it makes you reassess what can I contribute, what is my role and so on, and the Labour Party itself went to third place as well. You have to reassess what can I do, what can I offer, and I’ve always been a parliamentarian, I’ve always been somebody who works across [the divide]. I don’t hate other politicians, I don’t hate other MSPs; quite the reverse, I’ve always wanted the best for this place, I have always wanted all MSPs to be giving their best. “So here was this opportunity for the first time and I thought, ‘yes, I could do this’.


I’d thought about it in the abstract in the long term but never thought about it as an immediate prospect. Ten I thought, you know, I’m exactly the sort of person who should do this because I believe in the Scottish Parliament, I am not tribal about my politics, I like the idea of returning to a more consensual kind of politics where it’s not even just consensual across parties but you’re reaching out beyond here to Scotland itself. So all the ideas and ideals that brought me into parliament in the first place, I’ve never lost sight of those and as PO, I can actually help get us back on track towards them. “If you’d asked me the day before [election day], in fact if you’d asked me at midnight even on the Tursday, I wouldn’t have scoffed at the idea but I would have said, ‘well, not now’. But you know, electoral circumstances change. I would describe myself beforehand as too young and too political and in the scope of 24 hours and certain ballot results, I said, ‘well, actually, I’m not, I’m neither’.”


12 www.holyrood.com 23 May 2016


One of four to put themselves forward for the position, Macintosh quickly emerged as the bookies’ favourite. Despite nudges and winks from a number of his Holyrood colleagues the closer the vote approached, Macintosh denies he was confident it was in the bag, even joking that his record of losing elections – first losing the Labour leadership to Johann Lamont in 2011 then Dugdale last year – prompted caution. Te west of Scotland MSP had reason to be optimistic, though, as he became Holyrood’s fifth PO – and Labour’s first – on the third ballot, having enjoyed a clear lead in the first two rounds. “I genuinely have not come in with a blue- print or a shopping list of reforms, far from it, but I do have a very strong view about parliament itself, about the role of parliament, about the separation of powers between the executive and parliament,” he tells Holyrood. “I think that it helps parliament and it helps government to have two distinctive identities: the parliament is not an alternative executive, neither are we an opposition or obstructive body, that’s not our role. Our role is to scru- tinise the government and I think it would be helpful to both, government and parlia- ment, for the delineation to be clear.” Tere is, says Macintosh, a “job to be done” to ensure there is “no blurring of lines”, lines that were perhaps blurred under a majority SNP government. Parliament has had to adapt in each of the last four sessions and the early indications are


“If we could get shorter questions, shorter answers, a bit more respect, a bit less theatrics then that would be ideal”


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