Jim Murphy has had a busy week. Since his victory in the Scottish Labour leadership election last Saturday, his timetable has been carefully choreographed, with speeches, events and photo opportunities almost daily, exhibiting an organisational heft and dynamism that the party has been wholly lacking of late.

At the centre of it all, the 47-year-old MP for East Renfrewshire has appeared supremely relaxed, joking with reporters and putting across his chosen point in a measured, constructive tone somewhat at odds with the megaphone blaring of his referendum tour this summer, when he travelled round Scotland delivering the case for the union and sparring with yes voters from his perch on top of a couple of Irn-Bru crates.

He is not, he tells me in a cafe-bar in his constituency on Friday morning, a worrier. That’s doubtless useful for the man who, come next May, potentially holds the fate of Scottish and British Labour in his hands. His task is not only to rebuild the party he cheerfully describes as “gubbed” in the past two Holyrood elections, but to successfully differentiate it from a leadership at Westminster that is viewed at best with suspicion.

It’s an enormous task, and even if he isn’t a worrier, he says that he is not “in any way relaxed” about the scale of the challenge facing the Scottish Labour party between now and next May. Since the referendum, and despite being on the winning side, Scottish Labour has been trailing in the polls behind the SNP, which has enjoyed an unprecedented surge in membership, while Murphy’s party required triage following the resignation of Johann Lamont, who described Westminster colleagues as “dinosaurs” who treated Scotland as “a branch office”.

“The challenge is vast,” says Murphy. “We’re 20% behind. Just to get even we have to close the gap by 1% a week. We’ve had a good week, but it’s just a start.”

Upon his election last Saturday, Murphy pledged to hold every Labour seat in Scotland, while he announced his leadership bid with his intention to be first minister of Scotland in 2016. Given the scale of the turnaround necessary, does he not need a longer-term plan?

“I know we can win in ’16, but the path to victory runs through ’15, and we need to do very well in ’15. I’ve set the bar, which is holding everything we have. We’re going to have a look to see if we can win one or more of the Lib Dem seats. We know that the Labour party has been dragged down by its association with the Tories for one day in September, but the Lib Dems have been dragged down for four years.”

He has “no tolerance” for people who suggest the party should simply do its best in such unpromising circumstances; nor does he countenance Alex Salmond’s suggestion in an interview that the SNP might set aside its convention of abstaining from voting on English-only laws in order to support a minority Labour government. “I don’t think we’re going to need it,” he says, giving the politician’s answer, before embarked on his first footballing metaphor of the morning. (Murphy is an ardent Celtic supporter; his chat is permanently spliced with match references, of which more later.) “I don’t go into anything planning to come second, except when Celtic is playing Barcelona. David Cameron ain’t Lionel Messi.”

“Alex Salmond will face a genuine question from real people [at the general election]: what’s the point of voting for you? Because you’re not going to form a government, and all you’re going to do is deny Labour the chance to.”

Murphy is often described as a consummate communicator, and in person he is far more fun, interesting and (apparently) open than the average party automaton. That he can be a bruiser when less comfortable is in no doubt.

During his leadership campaign, Murphy repeatedly apologised to Labour voters for the party’s failure to head their electoral warnings, but he is clear that strategy ends now.

“What’s the alternative for a party that’s been gubbed twice?” he asks. “With the leadership contest, you had to take a step towards the voters to encourage them to come with us again. An awful lot of people wanted the Labour party to be better, and we didn’t change. But you’re not going to get in the new year a perpetual apology, you’ll get confidence and determination.” The time for apologies, he reiterates later, has drawn to a close.

So it’s on to the attack. When asked where the SNP are weakest, it’s notable that he doesn’t put first a policy but an attitude: “Arrogance, complacency, economics. Contemporary nationalism doesn’t leave space for self-doubt, and their truth is enduring regardless of circumstance.”

He draws an example from this week, which has seen the price of oil plummet further, with warnings of a crisis in the North sea industry. “[The SNP’s] economics were based on a price per barrel of $113. When will we see that like again? But they’ll carry on regardless. Contemporary nationalism is a juggernaut that doesn’t stop for reason.”

But “an awful lot of really decent yes voters bought this argument” during the referendum campaign, he adds. “The Labour party doesn’t get to where it needs to get to by telling yes voters they were wrong. We do that by telling voters the SNP were wrong. Santa isn’t going to bring us a barrel price over $100 by Christmas.”

Murphy’s summer tour showed an understanding of the mood on the Scottish street – a desire for politicians to properly engage with people – that surpassed much of the more stage-managed pro-union campaigning. But Scottish Labour was in crisis long before the referendum vote, and there were plenty who considered his tour to be an extended job application, cleverly inserting himself into the debate while remaining untainted by the unpopularity of Labour leaders north and south of the border.

Why did he deny his interest in the leadership for so long, and if he genuinely wasn’t after it, what changed his mind? “A lot of people had anticipated that after a referendum victory the Labour party would become more confident and seize the agenda, and the opposite happened. Then Johann resigned, and we had a vacancy and a party that was actually falling further, and that’s why I stood. It hadn’t been my plan.”

It’s all a long way from 1997, when Murphy entered parliament in the Blair landslide after unexpectedly winning the formerly safe Conservative seat of Eastwood. At 29, he was Scotland’s youngest MP. Of all the labels flung at Murphy – warmonger; pro-Israel; anti-grants, from his controversial tenure as NUS president – Blairite is the most enduring. What does it actually mean to him?

“I think having an affection for our most successful election-winning leader in our history is considered an enormous liability, and that’s the nature of Labour politics for some,” he replies. “Tony Blair and New Labour will be an enduring part of our heritage, but that’s what it is now. I’m no more likely to want to go back to the Blair years than I am the Attlee years, and it’s almost as relevant.”

Murphy on the campaigh trail before this year’s Scottish independence referendum. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

His position on Trident – Murphy says that he wants a world free of nuclear weapons, but is not a unilateralist – is one that poses a particular challenge with the Scottish left. “My view is I just tell the truth,” he says. “The geopolitics of the world hasn’t changed simply because I was elected Scottish Labour party leader.”

“It’s what the SNP are trying to brand me as: the ‘more nuclear weapons’ guy. If that’s all they’ve got, then fine. For me, the label gives me confidence, because what’s obviously come out of their focus groups is they’re up against someone who isn’t shit.” If I were a previous incumbent of his role, I would feel rather burned by that.

Would it help if Miliband were to say something more critical on the subject before May? He mishears the question: “What … critical of me? I know I’m not in the business of consulting him on everything, but I’m not sure him kicking me would help! I mean I didn’t ask him about the clause four thing but … ”

Ah, the clause four thing. One of Murphy’s key announcements this week was his intention to re-draft that item in the party’s constitution, to emphasise that it will act “in the national interest of Scotland”, giving the Scottish and UK bodies distinctively different wordings for the first time. So he didn’t consult Miliband about it? “I don’t need to; I didn’t want to. The Scottish Labour party is under new management, it’s a more confident management, and I come from a politics where I don’t have to consult people on certain things.”

He adds that he did consult the office bearers of the Scottish Labour party over the change. “I don’t need to ask the British Labour party leadership for permission to do things. That might have been what happened before, but as a consequence not enough happened, and I’m not going to be in that business. Time is so short.”

He acknowledges Miliband’s personal unpopularity in Scotland, but insists: “Some of the things Ed’s done have been pretty popular – the energy price freeze and talking up against vested interests, that’s a good Scottish instinct. I have to work on my profile, and so does Ed, and I’m looking forward to doing that together.”

Two other labels often appended to Murphy’s name are “teetotal” and “vegetarian”. And yet, despite these twin liabilities, he still successfully cultivates that particular west-of-Scotland masculine appeal. I’ve seen it in the way other men respond to him in person. At the press huddle after his election at Glasgow’s Emirates Arena last Saturday, he made another journalist swap seats with him so he could see the Celtic stadium out the window. It struck me as an awfully alpha-male gesture.

One on one, with a woman, Murphy is scrupulously courteous, although he does make it clear to me before we begin that I should can any feminine wiles, suggesting that he has been interviewed before by “women who get middle-aged men to say stuff”.



“I’m a vegetarian who aspires to be vegan,” he explains winningly, “but chocolate defeats me”. When did he stop drinking? “It was a new year’s resolution in the 80s,” he explains. “It was a lifestyle choice.” Announcing his new cabinet on Tuesday, he made a remark about Scotland having “an unacceptable relationship with alcohol”: does that come from personal experience?

“No, it doesn’t,” he says clearly. “But when I buy my alcohol-free beer, half the time the checkout person will say: ‘You know that’s alcohol free?’ It’s not unnatural not to want to get pissed. The number of people who say to me: ‘I had a great night last night, I’ve no idea what I did.’ How is that a definition of a great night?”

As for his most-referenced obsession: “I love football and like politics.” He still plays every week. “I know some people take it as ‘I need to prove I’m working-class so let me gather some football credentials’ … I grew up in a football family, not a political family.”

Murphy was born in Glasgow and raised in the Arden, a housing estate on the south-west fringes of the city. He talks frequently about the privations of his early years: he slept in a drawer as a baby because his parents couldn’t afford a cot, and his family was forced to travel round the country looking for work, before finally emigrating to South Africa.

He arrived in Cape Town at the age of 12, a boy with a Scottish accent, on the verge of puberty. For a moment he looks utterly appalled: “I’m not going to talk about that! I’m a Glaswegian guy!” I reassure him that I am not going to probe into his adolescent physiology.The move at that age, though, must have blown his mind. Did his parents explain to him what apartheid was?

“It did. We got that working-class sense of right and wrong, and the upbringing you get is partly through the church. You didn’t need your parents to tell you, because you saw it.” He describes arranging a football game on the first weekend with the children of a black acquaintance the Murphys had made. “We’re going to play football with the only people we know, on one of these fantastic beaches South Africa has. We drove and we drove miles, and it wasn’t a beach at all, it was pebbles and rocks, but it was the only place a black family and a white family could socialise together.”

The church Murphy refers to in his upbringing is the Catholic church. His position as a prominent Catholic politician has a significance in Scotland that is lost on most Westminster observers. Is the country ready for a Catholic first minister? He replies in the affirmative, but not without pause.

“I think times are changing, but they haven’t changed enough yet. There is still far too much sectarianism in Scotland, and we don’t talk about it enough. There’s a conceit that Scotland is more welcoming. But some people – a minority – still haven’t come to terms with [Irish Catholic immigration] and the change and diversity that brought.”

“I think people are increasingly accepting that your place of worship is a matter of personal conscience rather than a political statement.”

“But when I look at the challenges I face, is being a Catholic one of them? No.” He bursts out laughing. “No … the challenges I face are much bigger than that.”