This week Scottish Labour quietly abandoned their “biggest party forms the government” election campaign after it was comprehensively debunked by this site and, belatedly, the mainstream media. An alert reader reminded us this evening of how the party wasn’t always so attached to the rules.

Because back in 2007, when Labour was neither the biggest party nor the incumbent administration, it had a damn good try at forming the government anyway.

This Herald article recounting the immediate aftermath of the 2007 election in more detail is seven years old, so we hope they’ll forgive us reproducing it in full.

Jack McConnell may yet be a hero of democracy

Iain Macwhirter

Saturday 8 March 2008

The story so far: the former Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ming Campbell, last week spilled the beans on his and Gordon Brown’s attempts to prevent the SNP taking office after the May election.

Secret talks were held – over the heads of their own Scottish parties – about how to keep Alex Salmond’s paws off the £30 billion Scottish Executive budget. Brown wanted a new Liberal-Labour coalition to seize power even if the SNP won, on the grounds that it would have a majority of seats in parliament.

It may have come as no surprise to learn that Gordon Brown tried to fix the result of the Holyrood election. Do bears defecate in afforested areas? Nevertheless, it’s rare in politics to have conspiracy theories confirmed so soon after the event.

It will now go down in Nationalist mythology that Gordon Brown launched a plot to overturn the democratic will of the Scottish people, like some unionist Robert Mugabe.

Meanwhile Jack McConnell, the former first minister, has emerged as an unlikely home-rule hero for having had the bottle to stand up to Brown. For we also learned last week that Brown wanted Labour MSPs to vote for “anyone but Salmond” for first minister, even if that installed a Tory or Lib Dem in Bute House. McConnell refused and told Brown bluntly to get his tanks off his lawn.

I have been told independently that Jack McConnell was expected to step aside after the election to make way for Wendy Alexander, who would have been installed as leader without a contest on the Monday after the election. McConnell’s refusal to stand down is regarded by influential figures in Westminster as the main cause of Labour’s downfall.

Incredible stuff. But it explains a lot, and suggests Brown was Labour’s own worst enemy in Scotland. Not only did he set his face against any review of tax powers – the very review he has now agreed to – he also failed to grasp the dynamics of a proportional parliament.

In Holyrood, where all parties are minorities, governments cannot be fixed by executive fiat in the way they can be in a winner-takes-all system such as Westminster. Here, things work by consensus, or not at all, and attempts to rig the consensus are invariably counterproductive.

Everyone in Scottish politics knew or guessed what was going on that manic May weekend, including the Tories. They were under pressure to join the “pan-unionist anti-SNP coalition” against Salmond. But they realised this could be fatal to their future electoral credibility.

If the Scottish Conservatives had appeared to salvage a lacklustre Labour administration, which had been rejected by the voters, not just in Holyrood but in council chambers across Scotland, they would be tainted by association. They kept their own counsel, and allowed Salmond to be installed as a minority leader dependent on their votes.

The Lib Dems had a kind of nervous breakdown. Aware their UK leader was in cahoots with Brown, and unable to seize the advantage, they lost the plot. They didn’t want to prop up Labour any more than the Tories did, or to be seen as Brown’s little helpers. But nor were they free to do any deals with the SNP.

The logical thing to do would have been to enter coalition talks, as the Lib Dems did in Wales. Most of the Scottish Liberal Democrat policies were a direct match with the SNP manifesto: on nuclear power, local income tax, student fees and more. The Lib Dems had a strong hand, and could almost certainly have won a constitutional convention and blocked any referendum on independence, since Alex Salmond didn’t have the numbers to deliver a referendum bill. The Lib Dems could have presented themselves as saviours of the union, and kept their ministerial motors too.

IF they hadn’t won an assurance from Alex Salmond on the constitution, they could have walked out of the talks, saying the SNP were only interested in separatism. It certainly looked like a no-brainer, but grey matter was in short supply.

The Liberal Democrats, knowing Ming Campbell’s antipathy to any Nationalist deal, refused even to discuss a coalition with the SNP. Campbell hosted a “pizza summit” at his Edinburgh home with his Scottish leaders, the night following the election after which they: “packed away our pizza boxes and any possibility of a coalition deal with the SNP”.

Why was Sir Ming so opposed even to talking with the Nats? Presumably because Brown would have gone nuclear and told him to forget any possibility of the Liberal Democrats being part of a UK coalition after the next general election.

The machinations over the Scottish government were clearly part of a bigger game in which the LibDems were hoping for a role in the UK government under future-PM Brown if Labour lost their Westminster majority. Sir Ming could reasonably have become foreign secretary, or possibly even deputy PM.

Anyway, having failed to get the Scottish Lib Dems to revive the Holyrood coalition under a Labour leadership, Brown ordered his troops to back anyone who could win a majority in the Scottish parliament, even if that was Nicol Stephen. Jack McConnell balked at the prospect of becoming deputy to his former deputy and dismissed the idea in what is reported as a “blazing row” with the future prime minister.

Looking back, it was senseless for Brown and Campbell to behave like the governors of an Indian province under the Raj. Their meddling has damaged the credibility of their Scottish parties.

Historians will argue for years about what happened during those fateful 48 hours in May, but they are likely to judge that Jack McConnell was the only person in the Labour leadership who really understood the significance of the result; that Labour’s hegemony was over, at least for the moment, and that trying to hold back history would only damage the party even further.

It speaks volumes that the first minister was kept in the dark over the backstage dealings over the future governance of Scotland. But perhaps it was as well for Jack that he wasn’t informed because at least he can say his hands are clean.

For his stand against Brown’s “unionist fix” McConnell may even in time become something of a national hero – the man who defied his party leader and stood up for Scottish democracy. Now there’s a turn-up for the books.