Labour divisions follow death of devolution's first helmsman

JUST after midday on a bright cold day in October 2000, Donald Dewar tripped on the pavement outside his official Edinburgh residence and fell to the ground. He quickly picked himself up and got into his ministerial car, assuring his aides that he had simply grazed his wrist as he landed on the stone steps.

The first minister insisted he was fine and went straight to a working lunch in St Andrew's House, the Scottish Executive building at the other end of Princes Street. Seven hours later, Dewar was in the intensive care unit of Edinburgh's Western General Hospital and within 24 hours of his fall, he was dead.

Scotland's first first minister had been in office for just 17 months. Even though he was 63 and had been expected to stand down in favour of someone younger before the next election, his death represented a major blow for both his party and the parliament.

Dewar's health had been an issue before. In April that year, doctors at Glasgow's Stobhill Hospital had detected a "minor irregularity" in the first minister's heart during a routine check.

Later tests uncovered a leaking aortic valve in Dewar's heart and the first minister was admitted for surgery in early May 2000 at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The surgery was a success although Dewar was put on warfarin, a drug which thins the blood but makes blood vessel bursts more likely.

It was a blood vessel burst following that pavement fall five months later that put Dewar into the coma from which he never recovered.

Dewar's heart operation and his subsequent three-month convalescence had given his lieutenants in the Scottish Labour party the chance to jockey for position behind his back.

Liberal Democrat deputy first minister Jim Wallace stepped in for Dewar in an official capacity, chairing Cabinet and answering for the Executive in First Minister's Questions but enterprise minister Henry McLeish – the senior Labour minister and a Scottish Office minister before devolution – wielded the power as far as the Scottish Labour Party was concerned.

But Dewar's incapacity, despite his clear instructions that McLeish was to take over his Labour Party role while he was away, did not provide the calm sort of leadership that he had hoped for. The period of the first minister's absence, over the summer of 2000, was marked by increasingly rancorous manoeuvring by Labour Cabinet ministers.

It culminated when finance minister Jack McConnell published what he thought would be a fairly uncontroversial move to reallocate 435 million of unspent money around departments at the end of the financial year.

But it soon emerged that the underspend included 135m from the crucial and sensitive health budget, only 101m of which was going back to health, with the rest going to other budgets including forestry and historic houses.

This put health minister Susan Deacon and McConnell on a collision course, an internal battle as much about a fight for seniority while Dewar was away as it was about money.

With McConnell and Deacon grappling for power and increasing back-biting in Labour ranks at the leadership of McLeish and Wallace, Dewar came back to his desk in mid-August, earlier than expected and almost certainly to try and sort out the internal problems which were mounting in his absence.

There is no evidence that the timing of Dewar's return contributed to his death but it is clear he had little respite and was back working his traditionally demanding hours three months after his operation.

Like the demise of John Smith six years before, Dewar's death brought the Labour movement in Scotland to a shocked standstill. Dewar's press spokesman David Whitton announced the first minister's passing with his voice cracking at a press conference at 2:10pm on Wednesday, 11 October, less than two hours after his death.

Parliament was suspended, the Scottish Executive convened in shock and then adjourned while friends and parliamentary colleagues gathered in small groups in an attempt to take it in.

The following morning, Cabinet colleagues, some in tears, gathered in St Andrew's House, both to try to stop an undignified scramble for his job and to plan for the next difficult few days.

An early move emerged for the coronation of McLeish but that was stamped out by McConnell's aides who insisted there would have to be a contest.

The leadership contest was put on hold for the next few days while the Labour Party, the parliament and the country tried to come to terms with the loss of its first first minister.

On 18 October, Dewar's funeral took place at a packed Glasgow Cathedral. It was, in many ways, a defiantly Old Labour affair. A single red rose was placed on the coffin and although both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown addressed the congregation, neither carried the power or the emotional effect of the Internationale, the socialist anthem, sung quietly and unaccompanied by the congregation as the coffin was carried down the aisle and away.

The affection with which Dewar was held, particularly in Glasgow, was reflected by the hundreds outside the cathedral, with more lining the route of the hearse to and from the church.

The wake was held in the Kelvingrove Art Galleries in Glasgow. Everybody of note from the Labour Party, north and south of the Border, gathered in the cavernous Victorian atrium to drink tea and talk about Dewar.

But, with the Scottish Labour Party leaderless for more than a week, it was inevitable that the gathering would be used for political purposes too.

By that time it had become clear that McConnell would be McLeish's only real challenger.

McConnell worked the room as subtly as he could, in the circumstances, as did McLeish.

The prime minister did not stay for long but the short time he was there was hugely significant.

Word reached McLeish that the prime minister wanted to speak to him, and his wife Julie, before he left.

McLeish was ushered forward, with Julie just behind. Blair shook McLeish by the right hand, put the other hand on his shoulder and spoke a few words before disappearing.

McLeish's aides beamed. McConnell was at the other end of the room and the prime minister was gone. It was clear that, in that moment, the prime minister had anointed his choice as Scottish Labour leader and the man he favoured as Scotland's second first minister.

• From: Uncharted Territory: The Story of Scottish Devolution 1999-2009 by Hamish Macdonell, Published on 11 May by Politico's, 14.99.

SALMOND SPRINGS A SURPRISE – AND IN STEPS SWINNEY

ON 17 July, 2000, Alex Salmond surprised all but his closest SNP allies when he called a snap press conference in Aberdeen to announce he was standing down as SNP leader after ten years in the job. He said he would concentrate on Westminster, and would be quitting as an MSP at the next Scottish election.

Every SNP MSP had been sent a letter by Salmond that morning, explaining that he was standing down, and the press conference was done with the sort of theatrical timing that had become the SNP leader's hallmark.

"This will knock Gordon Brown's spending review off the front pages," was his opening line at his press conference.

Salmond dismissed suggestions that he was leaving because of the SNP's financial problems, caused by the 1999 election – despite his sacking earlier in the year of the party treasurer Ian Blackford. Instead, he argued it was time to "pass the torch" to someone else.

But it was clear that Salmond didn't enjoy being leader of the opposition at Holyrood. He wanted to be First Minister and his failure to achieve that in the first elections to the Scottish Parliament had started a process which led to his decision to stand down.

He also suffered from a severe back complaint and, as one aide put it at the time: "He is just knackered."

There was definitely a part of Salmond that loved Westminster, even though he spent his whole political life trying to extract Scotland from it, but he revelled in the sort of guerrilla war from the back-benches which he mounted during his time there and he loved the spark of intellectual debate.

Holyrood, at that time, did not carry that weight, in any sense, and Salmond really believed it was time for somebody else.

Two candidates emerged in the battle for Salmond's place. One was Alex Neil, then a firebrand left-winger from the so-called "fundamentalist" faction in the SNP – those who believed that all efforts should be concentrated on independence and that "gradualists" who wanted to work with devolution were weakening the party's approach.

The other was John Swinney, a more reserved and less charismatic politician but one who was much more in tune with the Salmond brand of SNP modernism than Neil.

On 23 September, after a short and only mildly bruising leadership battle, Swinney was elected SNP leader at the party's conference in Inverness.

However, Swinney's moderate and conciliatory attempts to modernise and reform the SNP ahead of the 2001 Westminster elections were, like everything else in Scottish politics, knocked sideways by the death of Dewar just two weeks later.