Book review: Tommy Sheridan: From Hero To Zero?

In fact, according to Professor Gregor Gall, the project commenced in 2003 with Sheridan’s personal approval, and Gall has 14∫ hours of interview tapes to prove it. Then came the News of the World defamation case in 2006, centring on Sheridan’s sexual indiscretions, followed by his conviction for perjury in 2010.

Between the two, Sheridan lost his seat at Holyrood and his far left Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) blew up. This political soap opera not only delayed completion of the book but made Sheridan uncharacteristically shy about further interviews – and he didn’t give evidence during the perjury trial.

Sheridan need not have worried. Gall’s book is as fair as anyone, especially an SSP activist such as Gall himself, is likely to be, particularly given the attempt to blacken the author’s professional reputation.

Throughout Gall refers to Sheridan as Tommy, perhaps a subconscious sign the author is more disappointed in his lost hero than wishing to be censorious. What would one conclude about the author of a “serious” biography of Margaret Thatcher who referred to her only as Maggie?

If anything, Gall’s book tries too hard to be aca- demic. The first half, buttressed by first-hand interviews with Gail Sheridan, is solidly but also stodgily historical. It loses its narrative thrust in the second half, as Gall becomes over-didactic and a bit repetitive in trying to psychoanalyse Tommy Sheridan.

Personally, I preferred another Sheridan book, Downfall, by Alan McCombes. This makes no pretence at objectivity and is painful in its sense of personal loss. But then McCombes was the real brains behind the SSP and Sheridan’s closest comrade until they split.

From his ringside seat inside the SSP, Gall suggests that Sheridan is essentially an actor knowingly playing the political hero. Not out of personal inadequacy or out of opportunism (shades of Tony Blair) but because the class struggle demanded that someone charismatic step up to the plate.

Gall claims Sheridan’s suicidal decision to lie in court stems from a political calculation to “protect” this public persona, lest the SSP lose by it, hence his ire at McCombes for not supporting him.

I don’t buy it. By any calculation, Sheridan’s court action was ill-disciplined, politically reckless and highly personal. It hazarded the future of the SSP to a far greater extent than any tabloid exposés of his sex life. Sheridan’s theatrical speech on “winning” his defamation action in 2006, in which he radiated false innocence, was bravura acting by someone who is clearly self-delusional.

In the book, Gall says I was “way off beam” in predicting, in The Scotsman in May 2003, that “the SSP is inherently unstable and will likely founder when the Trots start to fall out with each other”. He argues the SSP broke up because of Sheridan, not disputes between rival factions.

Sheridan was the catalyst, not the cause. Not only did the SSP explode as I predicted, the split was precisely on sectarian grounds, with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Militant factions lining up with Sheridan in his new Solidarity party.

The SWP were wise to Sheridan but used his break with McCombes opportunistically for their own factional ends. This is the same SWP that went on to split with George Galloway’s Respect party in 2007, before splitting itself last year.

Tommy Sheridan, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and bonkers Hugo Chavez. The question Gall fails to answer is why the revolutionary far left clings so pathetically to the cult of the personality. Is it youthful romanticism? Or is it, as Gall sometimes implies, bound up in a new, contemporary need to package complex politics via instantaneous images for the electronic media?

Tommy Sheridan was a street agitator for the television age. We may see more Tommy Sheridans.

• From Hero To Zero?

Gregor Gall

Welsh Academic Press, £25