Emma Cowing: And so, farewell to our favourite Auntie

Published on Monday 9 May 2011 18:04

SCOTLAND always did need a national Auntie. Someone to wipe the country's nose and tell it off when it ate too much shortbread. And when it came to stern looks, cut knees and the occasional double entendre, Annabel Goldie always woman stepped up to the plate.

The outpouring of sadness over Goldie's departure as leader of the Scottish Conservatives, which she announced on Monday, is both genuine and surprising. Genuine because of all the parliamentary leaders at Holyrood, Goldie was almost universally loved, and surprising because, well, in the rough and tumble of frontline politics, that just doesn't happen.

Look, for example, at the outpouring of not-very-much-at-all over the departures of Labour leader Iain Gray and Lib Dem Tavish Scott. Stuck in a battle of the lesser of who cares, their resignations have been greeted with little more than a shrug of the shoulders and perhaps (whisper it), a little titter.

Goldie's resignation is an entirely different kettle of fish. Shoulders have sagged. Laughter silenced. Handbags clasped that little bit tighter.

I remember seeing Goldie give the Reply to the Lassies at a Burns Supper a few years ago and being blown away not only by her rhetoric but by her charm and wit. She was immensely, raucously, outrageously funny, a true orator who could command a room merely by casting her beady eye round it. It is this, I think, and not her at times dubious politics, that has made her such a firm favourite not just with political friends and enemies, but with the population at large.

She has often been accused of being old-fashioned - the sort of blue-stockinged Tory with a framed photograph of Margaret Thatcher on the mantlepiece and a wardrobe full of sensible shoes, but for many that was part of her appeal: you knew what you were getting with Bella, and even for those who disagreed rampantly with her politics, that was somehow rather comforting.

Bella's departure will, one suspects, do nothing to help them. If anything, she is the one who has made the Tories acceptable in Scotland, even if she never managed to translate that into more votes from the electorate.

Of course, it cannot be denied that in recent times she has looked weak. At several points during the election campaign she appeared distinctly off her game, and came off particularly badly during one nit-picking Newsnight Scotland interview. Perhaps she already knew in her bones that it was time to go, or perhaps her heart wasn't in it any more. I'm not sure. But at Holyrood, a Scottish Tory party without Goldie at the helm will, I suspect, seem like a cup of tea without the milk: distinctly unappetising and probably worth avoiding.

But perhaps Goldie's greatest legacy - and the one that will truly ring down the corridors of Holyrood in the years to come - was that she proved that a woman could lead a political party in Scotland.Unlike Wendy Alexander, who made herself unpopular amongst her own party before being swallowed up by an expenses scandal, or the eminently able Nicola Sturgeon who, despite being more than capable and having served as caretaker leader of the SNP while Salmond was at Westminster, will never run the SNP as long as Alex Salmond draws breath, Goldie has been quietly chugging along as the only female party leader in the country for five-and-a-half years. It's a role she performed admirably and well.

She treated the notion that she was a woman as an incidental issue, a thoroughly modern outlook that marked her out as a female leader for the 21st century.

Scotland may have at one time boasted more female MSPs than any other country in Europe, but those numbers have slid recently, despite the much-trumpeted family friendly parliamentary hours.

If Holyrood is to retain credibility in the months and years to come we need to see more influential women, and hopefully, more female leaders.

As three of Scotland's political parties sit down to take stock, ponder their future and start the search for a new leader, it is something they would do well to take note of.