Jolly green giant: Robin Harper is saying farewell to politics

ROBIN Harper is talking about potholes, being firm but conciliatory before a group of 30 persistent questioners. But this is no press conference, it's a class of P6s from Flora Stevenson Primary. They are as unflinching as any press corps. "Who came up with the idea of trams?" Lots of people, Harper says, it was a ten-year discussion process. "What time do you get up in the morning?" He wakes up at 5:20am for the shipping forecast, then goes back to sleep until 7:30am. "How much money do you make?" About the same as the headteacher of a large secondary school. "How much is that?" About 56,000. "A year? Wow! I want to be an MSP."

But Mr Harper is clearly in his element. A classroom teacher for 37 years, he looks like the kind of teacher everyone liked: white-haired and avuncular, good-humoured but firm. Leaving the room he stops to take a final question: "Where did you get your tie?" (It's a characteristically jaunty one with diamond patterns.) Answer: Selfridges in London.

Striding through the hallways of the Parliament he stops frequently to greet people (he seems to know everyone), and to point out to me art works on the walls or special features of the building. Twelve years as an MSP has done nothing to shake his boyish enthusiasm.

When he was elected to the inaugural Scottish Parliament in 1999, Harper was the first and only Green parliamentarian in the UK. Now 70, he will hang up his rainbow scarf on 22 March. There is a sadness in his eyes when he talks about this, but Harper is a glass-half-full kind of guy. We photograph him sliding down the banisters of the main staircase in the Parliament. "I've always wanted to do this!" he laughs, like a kid on the last day of school.

It is only in the last year, he says, that he has started to feel the pressure of the job. He puts it down to 12 years of accumulating interests but, in fact, he has always had a schedule that would put fear in the heart of a much younger man. Once, his office staff took over the whiteboard in the office and wrote in letters a foot high: "Just learn to say NO."

His autobiography, Dear Mr Harper: Britain's First Green Parliamentarian, written with author and journalist Fred Bridgland, will be published by Birlinn on 12 March. It can't be more than "a series of snapshots", he says, there is so much to tell. He has been teacher, musician, sportsman, even (for a spell) professional actor. One wonders how he ever had time for politics.

But Harper can pinpoint the day he became a Green activist: 10 July, 1985, the day Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk by French agents. Harper watched the news, sat down and wrote out cheques to join Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and the Green Party. "It was this feeling that there are things that are deeply wrong. It woke up all those things like, 'Bad things happen when good people don't stand up and speak'. And that was it. I've never looked back."

He wonders if he always had "green genes", a passion for the natural world which was in his bones since his first six years on the island of Hoy in Orkney. Or later, when the family was stationed in Trincomalee in Ceylon, where he and his brother Euan spent all their time out of doors, exploring the jungle and paddling in the sea.

Growing up, however, Harper wanted only to join the Navy like his father. He passed rigorous tests for a scholarship to Dartmouth, only to fail because of substandard eyesight. That must have been terribly crushing? "It was. Well, yes and no," (glass half full, remember). "At least I'd done well."

At Aberdeen University, he "never settled". Two years in, he wanted to quit but, to pacify his parents, completed a three-year ordinary degree. "I was deeply frustrated, I wanted to do something, I really didn't want to sit studying." He was diagnosed with depression – "but it was only mild" – and given "purple hearts", the antidepressant Dexamyl. "They made me so deliriously happy that it scared me rigid. I threw the box in the bin and got some exercise instead."

He writes that he has continued to suffer from bouts of depression, "though I don't think any more than the average person gets." He adds: "My way of dealing with it is to keep fit, get some exercise. Sleep and exercise always manage to do it for me. I'm an AM optimist. At eight o'clock in the morning, very rarely is there is a shadow of depression." Of the three organisations he wrote to on the day Rainbow Warrior sank, the Scottish Greens were the first to reply, inviting him to their AGM. "I should have been alerted to what might be about to happen when they asked if they could have the meeting in my house," he says, with a wry smile. By the end of the meeting, all three of the other members present had voted him into the role of convenor.

In the next 14 years, he would stand in 11 elections all over Scotland at his own expense, invariably losing his deposit. It takes a special kind of good-humoured perserverance to fight multiple elections you're never going to win. Harper grows oak trees from acorns as a hobby. He understands about the long haul.

In 1994, already in his fifties, he married Jenny Carter. He does regret that marrying late in life has meant that he has no children of his own (he became stepfather to Jenny's son, Roy). "I would love to have had children, but we were both a bit old for it to be a safe idea. Not so much for ourselves, it would have been lovely, but you can't guarantee your health for your future children." In 1999, a political seachange swept in the first Scottish Parliament, with the proportional representation "list" system offering a chance for smaller parties to be represented. Furthermore, the Green agenda had moved into the mainstream. For the first time, Harper found himself fighting a campaign he had a chance of winning – and he won.

He was, he says, "swept off his feet". Suddenly, the full force of the Scottish media was knocking on his door. Jenny found it intrusive. "Quite a lot of journalists wanted to do interviews in the home to get a feel for what this peculiar Green person might be like. And of course they found I was this completely normal middle-class person living in Morningside."

He gives me a mischievous grin. "Had it been ten years before in my flat in Clerk Street, they would have found it more interesting! I'm not going to describe it." Oh, go on. "Shall we say the telephone stand was a redundant electric cooker which also doubled as a store for newspapers. And the rest of the flat was furnished in the same sort of spirit."

From the outset, his political tactics were about conversation not confrontation. Friends were concerned that he was too nice to be a successful politician. It is indicative that he chooses as his lowest point in Parliament the "savaging" of Wendy Alexander over an alleged undeclared donation.

Ever equable, Harper was the opposite of firebrand SSP leader Tommy Sheridan, whom he sat next to for four years. Sheridan had pressed him to join a red-green alliance in 1999, which he roundly refused. "I said, 'Over my dead body, they will fall apart.' Which was fairly prescient. Almost every time a socialist party forms it splits, they're like amoeba! Self-replicating!" And he laughs heartily at his own joke.

But he shakes his head at the subsequent disgrace of Sheridan, sentenced in January to three years for perjury. "That has been absolutely dreadful. It reflects on all of us. It's an embarrassment. I have to say that I have no trust in Tommy. He's a pretty ruthless politician. He's got a very sound political sense – and no sense in a lot of other areas."

Harper's first term in office was regarded as highly successful when the 2003 election returned a further six Green MSPs, though this progress was dashed four years later when the numbers fell back to two. "Election day was not a happy day," he says. But (the glass is still half full) they gained eight council seats, "which was as big a step forward politically as my getting elected in 1999."

He and colleague Patrick Harvie did find themselves in a position of influence, being courted by the SNP who were struggling to form a minority government. After three days of talks, the Greens entered an agreement, but never a full-blown alliance. Harper found himself "fighting a rearguard action" to reassure his own party faithful.

"We said we'll vote against every single one of their policies which we disagree with, and we've done so absolutely faithfully," he says, smiling. Notably, they blocked Salmond's 2009 budget because they felt they had not been sufficiently consulted over funding for housing insulation, leaving the First Minister, by all accounts, apoplectic with rage.

Harper, however, remains mellow. Later this month, he will begin a new chapter as a trustee of the beleaguered National Trust for Scotland and patron of the Scottish Play Association, among other things.

"My energy levels are slightly less but I still bounce about in the early mornings. I want to carry on using my skills and experience to try to make the world a little bit better. I'm still optimistic."