More On Tommy Sheridan

Iain Macwhirter takes a good look at the poten­tial fall-​out from Tom­my­gate - if I just coined that, sorry - in yesterday’s Sunday Herald, draw­ing rather bleak con­clu­sions, for the Party, if not for Tommy Sheridan:

The other expla­na­tion [for the Party sack­ing Sheri­dan] is that the SSP has become afflicted by the divi­sive germ that seems to destroy all far-​left par­ties even­tu­ally. It’s an old story. Small-​minded people with big ideas about them­selves allow per­sonal jeal­ousy and resent­ment to cloud their polit­i­cal judge­ment. No longer pre­pared to walk in Sheridan’s shadow, and con­vinced his celebrity was some­how unso­cial­ist, they sub­jected their leader to a kind of witch-​hunt.

…In sack­ing him, the SSP are in danger of sack­ing them­selves. Accord­ing to John Cur­tice of Strath­clyde Uni­ver­sity, the SSP needs only to lose 1% of its vote at the next elec­tion to lose all its MSPs. Except Tommy. He will likely go from strength to strength as an inde­pen­dent MSP in a par­lia­ment where indi­vid­u­al­ism is seen as a polit­i­cal virtue.

Back­ing up the sus­pi­cion that it’s the old lefty malaise - split­ters! - to blame is another Sunday Herald report, fea­tur­ing some rather pecu­liar dou­ble­think from SSP policy coor­di­na­tor (and, if I remem­ber rightly, SSP cofounder) Alan McCombes, who appar­ently believes that Sheri­dan is both telling the truth, albeit ‘in his own terms’, and also ‘building a tower of lies’ in his legal deal­ings with the murky Mur­doch press. The piece also con­firms ear­lier sus­pi­cions that it was Sheridan’s insi­tence on that legal action that cost him his job. There was more grace­less talk last week, too, this time from long-​time Sheri­dan ally Frances Curran, who tied her­self in knots on News­night trying to avoid even hint­ing that she sup­ported her old pal.

I don’t know if Iain Macwhirter’s gloomy ass­es­ment is on the money or not. I’d like to think that the SSP’s recent elec­toral suc­cess isn’t just down to them, until recently, having a nice man with a tan to go on the telly. But then Sheri­dan, as I said before, just plain is the Party for most people out­side it. So, assum­ing Sheri­dan will remain safely ensconced in Par­lia­ment as an inde­pen­dent¹, while his former col­leagues floun­der too long under col­lec­tive lead­er­ship (sorry, con­venor­ship), the out­look for the Party could be pretty bleak. Though, to be fair, Alan McCombes, talk­ing more sen­si­bly to the Guardian this time, is prob­a­bly right to sug­gest that it’s wrong to see Sheridan’s depar­ture as an absolute dis­as­ter, and to argue that folk do vote ‘for the mes­sage not the messenger’ (He doesn’t say that a bit of chaos is the norm in the Party, and their refusal to run a tight ‘on message’ ship endears them to voters more than their some­times sham­bolic ways puts them off, another reason why the scan­dal and its mis­han­dling might not be as bad for them as it cur­rently appears to be).

How­ever this mess ends - and there’s talk of more revala­tions in the papers in the coming week - the whole sit­u­a­tion is very depress­ing, broth­ers and sis­ters, very depress­ing indeed.

1 - See the com­ments for clar­i­fi­ca­tion of this point. As Alis­ter Black points out, there is no sug­ges­tion at present that Sheri­dan will leave the SSP.

Posted at 5pm on 22/11/04 by Jack Mottram to the politics category.
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