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Monday 13 October 2008

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

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

What did his parents think of all this? 'Without going into too much detail my two brothers and I were brought up in a council house in Glasgow - a lot of people have a lot worse life, immeasurably worse - but Dad wanted a better life for us.' How bad was his estate? 'It is one of the poorest places in the city. Mum and Dad wanted a better life for us - and it has been good for us. One of my brothers has stayed there, another is in California. Anyway, I don't know how I got into this introspective answer - but there were worse off people.'

It is wrong to say Mr Murphy was radicalised. The whole point to him, from his student politics days onwards, is that he did not don a Che Guevara T-Shirt as was the trend in the city. He became a moderate. Being ‘poor in Glasgow’ politicised him, he says — along with ‘being white in South Africa’. But when he stood for what was than Eastwood in 1997, it was almost an act of defiance. Sure, it was the neighbouring constituency to the scheme he grew up in – but it was also the safest Tory seat in Scotland (in a time when this was not an oxymoron).

'I didn’t expect to win and the truth is I didn’t try to win,' he says. 'The Labour party needed a candidate at Eastwood, I grew up near Eastwood, I stood as a candidate and we did very little campaigning.' So he expected defeat – and a safer seat next time. 'At the age of 29, not yet having had a family, it was something I would have loved to have done later in life.'  His girlfriend (now wife) had, to put it mildly, mixed reactions. 'She was close to tears — and not tears of joy', he said. 'She said: what does this mean? And then, in front of people, she asked: does this mean you’ll have to go to London?'.

The irony is that his winning Eastwood meant he’d do very little of London. As his colleagues started climbing the greasy pole in Westminster, he had to spend all his time campaigning. 'I had to work every minute of every day in East Renfrewshire to have any chance of being re-elected. So in those first few years I just tried to establish myself. Whether people voted for me or didn’t vote for me, I would do my best and that seems to have worked.'

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