Weary Wendy fades to Mr Gray

Published on Sunday 5 May 2002 01:00

WENDY Alexander had bustled across the tarmac at Glasgow Airport dozens of times before as Scotland’s aviation minister but never without her two mobile phones.

Bathed in sunshine last Friday morning as she approached the whining engines of a jet preparing for a 90-minute journey to Amsterdam, Donald Dewar’s protge found herself cut off from the outside world for the first time in three years.

The Labour MSP had made a string of important announcements during the previous seven days, but the one she made at 7.30am that morning, at the end of a half-hour drive in her Peugeot to Jack McConnell’s Wishaw home, dwarfed everything that had gone before.

The woman dubbed the "minister for everything" had resolved to become minister for nothing, and in doing so presented the First Minister with the biggest crisis of his six-month leadership.

Scotland on Sunday had forecast the resignation three months earlier after the minister for enterprise, lifelong learning and transport told friends she was "exhausted" and wanted to slow down and plan for a baby. But McConnell’s reaction was still one of shock.

McConnell had not seen eye to eye with his 38-year-old minister since a fall-out in 1992, when she objected to him taking over as Labour’s Scottish general secretary. The two had been rivals ever since, but the First Minister reluctantly kept her in the cabinet when she pulled out of the Labour leadership contest after the resignation of Henry McLeish in November - a move which handed him power but lost her many friends.

McConnell never warmed to Alexander, but as the weeks passed he told friends that she was "behaving herself" - getting on with the job and taking her political lead from him. Indeed, the First Minister appeared to believe that the cold war had thawed. He was wrong.

Within a matter of hours, as allies of Alexander blamed McConnell for forcing her out by overburdening her with work and failing to take her portfolio seriously, the Scottish Labour party had descended into something approaching civil war.

One friend of Alexander said her resignation was "clearly a comment on her colleagues and the shallowness of the whole thing. She looked at these people around the cabinet table and must have thought, ‘It’s all so superficial. The emperor has no clothes’."

In turn, McConnell aides, who had branded Alexander "a stupid woman" only months earlier, now denounced her as "selfish, bizarre and isolated". One even indicated that she was emotionally damaged.

Alexander’s sudden departure also revived some old gossip, much of it malicious and unfounded. Enemies have suggested she has been having an affair with a married man, and one friend was forced to spend most of Friday denying rumours she is pregnant.

It should all have been different for McConnell, who had planned to spend a quiet weekend on his native Arran. He should have been reflecting on a satisfactory week for the Labour party, which had fared better than expected in the English local elections: even better, in Scotland, the resignation of MSP Dorothy Grace Elder from the SNP on Thursday had laid bare the bitter infighting among Labour’s main rivals. Then Wendy dropped her bombshell.

It was the last thing McConnell wanted and he is livid, not just at the manner of her going but also at the flak coming his way from Alexander’s supporters.

"Jack’s not a happy chappie," a source close to the First Minister said. "He was very surprised, particularly after all the business meetings they have been doing together. It’s like starting again with the business community - that’s really annoyed him.

"He wasn’t pleased but she’d made up her mind and decided that this was the day she wanted to go. It was a very selfish thing to do. It’s absolutely bizarre. The Dorothy-Grace Elder story was the only story in town."

But, worryingly for McConnell, the criticisms levelled at him from Alexander’s supporters - while she absented herself to Amsterdam for a friend’s 40th birthday party - have been publicly backed up by senior members of the business community and some Labour politicians. These Alexander allies claim McConnell added transport to her enterprise and lifelong learning brief in an act of spite and to keep her too busy to threaten his leadership.

Several sources have told Scotland on Sunday that Alexander was furious at what she considered a lack of commitment to the economy. She had learned that her portfolio was to receive a reduced share of the Executive’s budget over the next two years while the Scottish Enterprise budget was also to shrink, from 398m to 395m, in 2003-04. Relations with McConnell’s right-hand man, the finance minister Andy Kerr, were strained so Alexander did not expect to win the looming scrap over cash.

One Alexander ally confirmed: "She felt Jack was not interested in the economy and she was not getting any support in trying to look to the future."

With an eye on next year’s election, McConnell was prioritising better delivery of public services at the expense of long-term economic issues. Alexander believed the Executive would only carry such an approach off while the economy was strong but, isolated in a cabinet moulded in McConnell’s image, she felt unable to get ministerial colleagues to take her concerns seriously.

John Downie, parliamentary officer for the Federation of Small Businesses, who met Alexander on Tuesday evening, said: "The economic agenda has been slipping down the political agenda. They have to realise that you need a strong economy to create wealth to pay for social justice policies like a better health service and schools. That was her view, and I think she was frustrated that this message was not getting across."

Another friend said: " She felt that she was being frustrated a lot. She was getting things done, but she was having to jump a lot of hurdles that no one else faced."

Alexander came to regard the First Minister’s office as obstructive and was frustrated at the lack of private office help she got for her spread of responsibilities.

McConnell’s supporters vehemently reject such criticisms, but Downie and Ian Ritchie, a prominent board member of Scottish Enterprise, have suggested that the First Minister is to blame for the latest crisis.

In an extraordinary intervention, Ritchie - who was a special adviser to a Holyrood enterprise and lifelong learning committee new economy investigation - said the decision to hand extra responsibilities to Alexander was "just completely and utterly barmy".

He added: "Clearly, in retrospect, it was designed to overload her and switch her off because McConnell wanted to keep her in her place."

Labour MSP Brian Fitzpatrick, a friend of Alexander, added: "There is a view that it is far too much for any one person to be doing with only one junior minister, though I don’t think that’s the reason she left."

Scottish Labour MP Brian Donohoe added: "It is very clear that her job was engineered like that to test her I think to the extremes."

Alexander decided enough was enough and, faced with a lack of support, resolved that it would be best to try to get her personal life back again.

McConnell is nervous about the issue and instructed his enterprise department head, Eddie Frizzell, to spend hours on the phone on Friday, reassuring big business there would be no reversal of policy in the wake of her departure.

Yesterday morning Frizzell posed for the cameras with Alexander’s replacement, Iain Gray, in a further attempt to show that it will be business as usual, and the strategy of basing the economy on homegrown firms and better training will continue.

Most observers regard the loss of Alexander from frontline politics - five years after Donald Dewar appointed her to advise him in the Scottish Office - as a heavy blow, not just for the Scottish Executive but for devolution. McConnell has lost one of the few radical ministers prepared to challenge his views and take on conservative opponents - as she did with the Catholic Church over Section 28.

Alexander was single-mindedly driven by what she considered to be right, rather than popular, among focus groups. But her strongest quality was also her biggest political flaw, earning her more powerful enemies than plaudits during her three-year ministerial career. It led her to clash repeatedly with civil servants driven to work longer hours than they were accustomed to - some resigned and one was rushed to hospital with chest pains.

As one senior Labour source put it: "Henry [McLeish] always took the view that with Wendy you get both the talent and the tantrums, and you have to weigh up one against the other. Henry had a few run-ins with her, but he thought the talent outweighed the tantrums. But there were signs that Jack was less forgiving."

At a time when polls show devolution has failed to live up to public expectations, her exit leaves McConnell as the only Labour cabinet link to the administration of Dewar, devolution’s father figure, following the departure of other ministers including Susan Deacon and Sam Galbraith. But to his certain relief, there is now no cabinet link to Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Alexander’s mentor at the Exchequer, who wanted her rather than McConnell to become First Minister, regularly applied his influence in Scotland through the young minister and is now without any powerful allies at the heart of the Scottish government. It helped strengthen his powerbase in Scotland, thought by many to be vital to launching a future bid to lead the Labour party at a UK level.

It was a point not lost on some observers on Friday night as Labour politicians turned out in force for a party fundraising dinner in Fife at which the Chancellor was guest of honour. "The balance of power has now shifted beyond recognition," said one Labour source. "Gordon is not the force he was in Scotland."

Scotland on Sunday has learned that Brown was not even consulted by Alexander ahead of her decision. Only a handful of senior Labour figures, including Scotland Secretary Helen Liddell and her brother, DTI minister Douglas Alexander, are thought to have been informed days before her announcement. She called MSPs Pauline McNeil and her former ministerial allies, Margaret Curran and Angus MacKay, around midnight on Thursday.

Brown is now thought to be reconsidering how he can once again exert influence over Scottish affairs and has already met with Scottish trade union leaders in London. His talks with John Park, secretary of the combined dockyard trade unions, the GMB’s Robert Parker, Unison’s John Lambie and the T&G’s Andy Baird were ostensibly about the Budget and took place ahead of Alexander’s announcement, but insiders believe the future of Scotland was uppermost in his mind.

This weekend, as McConnell replaced Alexander with Gray, the personable former social justice minister, and brought former local government minister Frank McAveety back into the Executive, political opponents accused the First Minister of surrounding himself with "cronies" while Alexander joins the cabinet-in-exile on Labour’s backbenches after his earlier brutal cull of Team McLeish.

McConnell has once again decided not to extend an olive branch to his critics, among them former ministers, on the backbenches - though he did consider bringing back former finance minister Angus MacKay. Close associates - notably MacKay’s successor, Kerr - advised him against the move. Labour sources say that it is those disaffected MSPs and the latest Scottish ministerial casualty, rather than Brown, the SNP or the Conservatives, that McConnell has most to fear from - as contentious issues, including plans for private prisons, go before an increasingly restless Labour group on The Mound.

And the First Minister can be sure of one thing: he has not heard the last of Wendy Alexander.