Steven Purcell

I regret the skepticism displayed over Steven Purcell's surprise resignation and his motives displayed by many commentators. Admittedly, the way he handled his legal and PR front is puzzling - perhaps explained by his being admitted to a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre - but I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Here's what I wrote about him last March. I still feel that way, and wish him well in his recovery. I hope he sees the light and changes his party to the SNP, but whatever he does, he will do it well and honourably.

Of course, I may be wrong and his critics right, and if so I will eat crow.

FROM MY ARCHIVE
Sunday, 15 March 2009
Sunday, Sunday - and Steven Purcell
Oh, the Labour Party! What it has become is both tragedy and farce. Someone should dramatise its decline and fall. It could tour the world, like Black Watch. Brian Cox could play Gordon Brown as a Lear-like figure, crying in the political wilderness. There would be parts for Iain Gray, for Wendy - tears (crocodile variety) would flow copiously ... Stop, stop! This is serious - I mustn't get carried away.

Among the ruins, however, I find wholly admirable Labour people, still alive and kicking, albeit a little damaged. Today, one of them, Steven Purcell, leader of Glasgow City Council, is in the news, for all the wrong reasons as far as Iain Gray and the Labour leadership are concerned.

He is the kind of young Glaswegian I recognise and celebrate. He was born in 1972 in Yoker. Now to men of my generation, born in the centre of Glasgow (E1) but living in Dalmuir, near Clydebank in the early 1960's, Yoker was a kind of frontier town, on the Clydebank/Glasgow border.

When the pubs shut at 9 o'clock (yes, my children, 9 o'clock) Yoker pubs, lawless and rumbustious, stayed open until well into the night - well, half-past nine, to be exact. With a fast car from Dalmuir - say a Hillman Imp - you could be thrown out of the Park Bar in Dalmuir at closing time and be in the Cawdor Vaults for a final swally before half-nine. When the Clydebank licensing laws changed to permit opening until 10 o'clock (oh, bliss!) we were all skint by 9.30 and had nowhere to go but home.

But our hero, Steven, missed all that. A 16-year old school leaver, and a YTS trainee in a building society, he was precocious politically, apparently (I look twice in astonishment) joining the Labour Party at 14 and being elected to Glasgow City Council, for the Blairdardie Ward, at the age of 23. He just rose and rose, being elected - unopposed - as Leader at the age of 32. That career path is not down to luck - it must be due to formidable ability and political nous, allied to superb people skills. And if all this was not enough, he seems like a genuinely nice guy. There is still hope for politics, and for Glasgow, if not for Labour.

It's such a pity you are in the wrong party, Steven, but you've got all the years ahead of you to see the light.

You will be a worthy opponent for Alex Salmond when the hapless Gray disappears. I look forward to the contrasting styles at First Minister's Questions. Good luck.