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Sunday 7 September 2008

WEB EXCLUSIVE:  Meet the minister for selling the unsellable - uncut

An extended version of Fraser Nelson's interview with Jim Murphy

He gives a resigned sigh. ‘The first email I received in this job said: ‘Congratulations on your appointment. I’ve watched the careers of all of your predecessors and I am certain you will die a lonely death and be buried in a traitor’s grave.’ Was it from Frank Field? I ask. He just laughs (he won’t say whether he believes the whip should be withdrawn from Mr Field for campaigning for a referendum. ‘I like Frank,' he says. 'I try to play the ball, and not the man'). But as to those nasty emails -  ‘I’m relaxed about personal insults. It’s the way it is.  I grew up in a Glasgow housing estate. I can take it.’

Now we’re getting to it. Mr Murphy is the son of a plumber and a dinner lady, who grew up in a deprived estate boarding his wealthy constituency of East Renfrewshire. Opulence sits next door to squalor through the city: this cruel juxtaposition has become its trademark and it can have a radicalising effect. “I grew up on the most outermost street in the whole of Glasgow, my constituency is one street away from where I grew up.  The difference in life expectancy, I think, is seven years as you cross that street.”

In 1980 his father was out of work and went to South Africa where he found work plumbing. The Murphy family spent six years there. He worked as a joiner in an abattoir, an experience which turned him vegetarian. 'I went to work that morning, I had bacon before I left.  I got to the slaughterhouse where they were killing pigs and I’ve never touched meat since.'

And he almost ended up in the South African Defence Force. 'Every Thursday you had to go to school in army uniform, and do drill all afternoon. You didn’t do history, biology, science, you just marched up and down to get ready to go to the army. It was ludicrous. Ludicrous.' Conscription was, then, compulsory for whites – and when Mr Murphy turned 17 he had to leave the country to avoid it. “I left South Africa when the army came and knocked on the door,” he says.

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