Public life in Scotland I

Kenneth Roy
Let us have no more talk of stress

Until the BBC published a photograph of him yesterday, I would have been unable to put a face to the name Steven Purcell. He may have been the most promising figure in Scottish politics – a man with a dazzling future now behind him – but all that was widely known of him was that he was gay. We knew this because the Scottish media kept banging on about it. The relevance of his sexuality to his professional life remained elusive to the end. I suspect there was no relevance. It was simply something to say about him. This is Scotland and we are, alas, a little bit behind the times.
     The oddest thing about his departure – apart from its abruptness – is that, before entering hospital suffering from exhaustion, he found it necesssary to hire a firm of PR and crisis management consultants, chaired by a fomer Scottish editor of the Sun newspaper, to handle the media coverage. Could Mr Purcell not have handled the media coverage himself by issuing a brief factual statement and going back to bed? Why did he require the former Scottish editor of the Sun newspaper to do it for him?
     The stress of office seems to be involved in Mr Purcell's temporary withdrawal from public office. It is a common complaint. You would not believe the stress of putting this magazine out in two hours' flat three mornings a week; I am fit for nothing for at least 20 minutes afterwards, often resorting to the music of Enya, that Irish sweetheart, to calm me down. But I make no claim for my own stress. I love it. Real stress is the stress being experienced this morning by the 1,200 gifted people at the AstraZeneca laboratory in Leicestershire who have just been told they are to lose their jobs. Real stress is the stress experienced by nurses and classroom teachers.
     But I have never associated Scottish public life, of the kind enjoyed by Mr Purcell, as stressful – or indeed exhausting. I think it must be absolutely wonderful. He apparently looked on top of the world just a few nights ago, attending a reception at the Glasgow Hilton Hotel in the company of Gordon Brown and Walter Smith (the latter a football manager). As well he might have been. Most of the people suffering real stress or exhaustion – the people doing important work at the sharp end, saving lives, teaching the young – would appreciate the occasional night at the Glasgow Hilton, even if it did mean mixing with such miserable-looking chaps as Brown and Smith. But the fabulous world of celebrity receptions is not open to society's most valuable citizens. It is reserved for people like politicians and public servants, and their chums in the media, none of whom is a stranger to hospitality, all of whom lead a privileged existence.

As it happens, I got to know Mr Purcell's predecessor, Charles Gordon – Charlie as he prefers to be known – quite well. He and Bridget McConnell, the city's head of culture, were helpful to me when I was setting up the Institute of Contemporary Scotland (publisher of this magazine) in the autumn of 2000. They arranged for us to have offices rent-free for a year or so, let us have the run of the old High School of Glasgow debating chamber for meetings and conferences, and even laid on a civic reception for the inaugural meeting in the City Chambers, chaired by the late, great Magnusson. When I hit big trouble with the temporary trustees, Charlie gave me a shrewd piece of advice – a politician's advice – which proved valuable.
     Charlie seemed to me to be relishing his work leading a large city in transition, and doing it rather well. He invited me one day to his office, a commodious set-up, where he had the services of a full-time assistant. He talked expansively of his various plans and projects. He was clearly having the time of his life.
     Rather stupidly I asked him if he did not have ambitions to be a member of the Scottish Parliament, which was then in its infancy and perhaps a more exciting gig than it appears now.
     He laughed derisively. 'Why I would want to sit on the backbenches in that place when I could be running Glasgow?' he asked. There was no answer to that.
     And yet, a few years later, after we had lost touch, Charlie was suddenly no longer leader of the City Council. He was sitting instead on the backbenches of the Scottish Parliament, where he sits still, a man of somewhat undervalued ability, and it would not surprise me in the least if he missed 'running Glasgow'. I never heard what went wrong, if anything did, assuming that his departure was just another passing episode in the long and brutal history of Labour politics in Glasgow, as Mr Purcell's departure is too. But, unless Charlie was hiding something, he never struck me as someone who was stressed or exhausted.
     It is true that some people in local politics, and public life generally, socialise too much. Some attend too many receptions and official dinners when it would be better for their health to have an early night. I fear the attractions of an evening with Walter Smith are often too strong to resist.
     Others do too much. Mr Purcell's temporary replacement as leader of the council, James Coleman, spends a week a month as a senior board member of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. It will be fascinating to observe how Mr Coleman manages to 'run Glasgow' at the same time. Perhaps he intends to do without sleep altogether. But it would be good to hear no more of stress or exhaustion from public figures. If they don't like it, they could always get a proper job.