Chancellor’s disservice

Published on Friday 6 September 2002 01:00

IN THE many words that have been written about the rise and fall of Scotland’s second First Minister, Henry McLeish, there is a strange absence of comment regarding the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Chancellor, for all his technical brilliance, is also a consummate politician in the way Mr McLeish was ultimately only a local councillor. Mr Brown pursues long-term ambitions with a tenacity and focus that is unique. And that requires maintaining a personal base in the Labour machine, which Mr Brown has assiduously massaged no matter what is happening to the stock market or the money supply. It was Mr Brown who ensured that Henry McLeish was anointed First Minister after the death of Donald Dewar, despite the fact that a majority of Labour MSPs supported the rival claim of Jack McConnell. Mr Brown deemed McConnell too uncontrollable.

In retrospect, Mr Brown did the new Parliament a disservice by putting his own interests first. And Labour in Scotland, particularly Mr Brown’s friends in the trade unions, did the new Parliament a disservice by playing party games and backing Mr McLeish. The McLeish affair tells us that Labour still considers devolved Scotland its own personal fiefdom. Fortunately, as Mr McLeish found out, the public scrutiny that devolution has brought in its wake will ultimately undermine such arrogance.

And Mr Brown, who has proven a formidable Chancellor, is surely able to let his undoubted talent speak for itself rather than ever play the control-freak.