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The Guardian - UK

Politics

'Loss of office hits you when you get into the back of the car and it refuses to move'

A lone middle-aged man in an anorak was loitering anonymously outside a suburban Edinburgh primary school at going-home time. It was the sort of behaviour that might have attracted attention from passing members of the constabulary. The car that drew up, however, contained an elderly gent with half his teeth missing. He was palpably not a policeman.

"You've got a nerve standing here," he shouted. "You got murdered last time. You must be ..." He paused, searching his mental database for the right expression of contempt, but failed miserably. "Silly," he said finally.

"Could be," replied the anorak urbanely. "Might be completely barking."

"Off your bump," said the other obtusely, and sped off.

"A don't know?" asked the Guardian. "I'll put him down as doubtful," said the anorak formerly known as Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and he chuckled.

Record

This is Malcolm Rifkind, a man whose fall was the most dramatic, if not the most publicised, of the 1997 election. One moment, he was foreign secretary, most gilded of all government jobs. The next, he was not even an MP: beaten by Labour in the Edinburgh Pentlands seat he held for 23 years. His Marcia Blaine School accent was a ministerial fixture for all 18 years of Tory rule, a 20th century record.

Loss of office hits you, he says, when you get into the back of a car and it refuses to move. And now he is back, fighting Pent lands all over again. He has, maybe, a 50-50 chance, no better. A peerage was his for the taking; a safe home counties seat could have been arranged; other beaten Tories are off making dosh in the City. All Rifkind has to show for his 18 years is a meaningless knighthood, as handed out to the dimmest backbencher. And he is suppressing that for the duration of the campaign. Why on earth is he doing this? He has various pat answers. There is a democratic deficit in Scotland because it has no Conservative MP and he wants to address that; it would be "a tremendous personal pleasure" to win the seat back; and - most convincingly - he is still only 54: "I hope to have years ahead of me in public life".

So what's wrong with Surrey or some place where Tories have not been rendered extinct? "I had two or three approaches," said Sir Malcolm. "I thought about them for 30 seconds. But if you're an MP in the modern world you have to live in your constituency, and Edinburgh's my home."

One is forced to reach one of two tentative conclusions from all this. One is that the Priory Clinic should open a special section so that hopeless political addicts can go into detox and be rehabilitated into normal society. The other is that he might actually be doing something rather charming and admirable. That's a tentative judgment and, in this exceptionally crass, cynical and fourth-rate national campaign, it is not one likely to be repeated often.

Rifkind was beaten by 4,862 votes by Lynda Clark, another Scottish QC but of very different temperament. He is an instinctive politician who happens to be a lawyer; she is a lawyer who happens to have fetched up in politics. There is a rumour, which she denies half-heartedly, that she would rather be a judge. Mrs Clark is actually in the government already, in the obscure but powerful position of advocate-general, created mainly to police the boundary lines of Scottish devolution. She loves that kind of nitty-gritty; routine political scrapping, quite obviously, bores her.

She takes a lot of stick for this. The Scotsman newspaper this week called her "ineffectual", and is not alone. Ineffectual is not the word that comes to mind on meeting her, though. She started out in a shared-toilet Dundee tenement, burst through all kinds of gender barriers to succeed at the chauvinist Scots bar, and she knows her own mind.

"It's fair to say I don't have a high profile," she says. "I don't send the papers press releases about everything I do in the constituency. I don't carry a pager either. I have my own agenda and I have my own interests and I'm not fazed by the fact that they are different from those of 80% of other politicians." She is married to a journalist, which may explain why she does not take our opinions all that seriously.

Divided

Pentlands is a tricky place to fight. It has been called the most socially divided seat in Britain. You get a sense of it if you stand on the hilltop by Gillespie Crossroads. In the distance, probably, are the Pentland Hills but this is Edinburgh, it's May and it's "drech", so they're invisible. What you can see below you is the huge Wester Hailes estate, now largely rebuilt, but still giving off a huge whiff of both Irvine Welsh and Stalin. Behind are the houses and bungalows with cherry blossom gardens that form most of the constituency.

There is no obvious centre or focal point, either, as both major candidates complain. That makes it a hard seat to read. There will be no Referendum Party this time but a Socialist Alliance candidate instead, which could be worth a net 2,000 to Rifkind compared to 1997. And, four years on, he is meeting nothing like the same anti-Tory obduracy.

Sir Malcolm is an unexpectedly effective campaigner too. Owlish on TV, he is rather tigerish on the streets. And when he gets a favourable response, he has a punching-the-air gesture with his right fist: half delighted schoolboy, half game show host. Against that, most of these responses come from the old. And there is no sign the seismic anti-Tory shift of young Scottish professionals under Thatcherism has been reversed.

If she loses, Mrs Clark will walk away with a sigh that might at least in part be relief. But Sir Malcolm? I'd worry about him. He insists he has enjoyed the last four years: a consultant and trouble-shooter to various international companies; walking, reading and - that great standby of ex-ministers - spending time with his family. "It was rather nice to wake up in the morning and say 'What shall I do today?'" Another five years might stretch the niceness a bit thin, though. It would be more convincing if he had a real hobby, like building the Eiffel Tower with matchsticks.

Evidently, he will put up with anything to get back, even the modern parliamentary Conservative party. Don't you hate their views on Europe? Not a problem, he insists. "I'm not a Eurosceptic but I'm totally opposed to the single currency. What about the shadow cabinet? Does he know who's in it? "That's very unkind."

Clearly, we can't get rid of this man. Perhaps we should stop trying. He might even be a civilising influence.

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