When the PM phones...

The votes have been counted and the show must go on. Forty-seven Labour scalps have been taken but 355 remain. The survivors, having shed tears for fallen comrades, will also have found time to muse over the impact on their own immediate employment prospects.

In other words, will the phone ring to be followed by the magic words from those fabled operators of the Downing Street switchboard who can mysteriously track you down anywhere in the world: "The Prime Minister wishes to speak to you."

Not even the Downing Street switchboard is infallible. In the euphoria of 1997, my Ayrshire colleague Brian Donohoe was gratified, if a little surprised, to receive the prized call. Sadly, his conversation with Tony Blair served only to establish that the switchboard should have summoned Lord Bernard Donoghue, who was to return as an agriculture minister!

Back in 1997, it was all so new for the great majority of us. The last time a Labour Prime Minister had called on the Downing Street operators to perform this task had been 23 years earlier, when Harold Wilson was restored to power for the third time. Since 1979, the grind of powerless opposition had been our staple diet.

Waiting for a phone call from a newly elected Prime Minister is an extreme form of "watched kettle never boils" syndrome. He does, after all, have a few other things to do - like take congratulatory phone calls from the world’s presidents and potentates. In 1997, the whole machinery of Whitehall was adjusting to the election of a brand new government. So Saturday rolled into Sunday and the phone call still hadn’t come.

I had been on the Opposition front bench for virtually all of my 10 years as an MP. But a year before the election I was rendered non-departmental when Tony Blair asked me to head up Labour’s media rebuttal unit - an operation which led Jeremy Paxman to dub me the Shadow Minister for Newsnight but didn’t exactly have an equivalent position in government. I had no idea what I would get and had given it remarkably little thought.

Inevitably, it was not Tony Blair who broke the news to me but my old friend Kenny Macintyre, BBC Scotland’s political correspondent. "You’re going to the Scottish Office," he announced. By this time it was known that Donald Dewar would be in charge at St Andrew’s House and not George Robertson, who was bound for Defence. I was delighted with Kenny’s news - if it was true. And the phone declined to ring.

By Sunday morning, Kenny was reporting that there were to be two Ministers of State at the Scottish Office - myself and Henry McLeish but that Henry would be designated as Deputy Secretary of State. I clocked this latter piece of intelligence with minor irritation but was more excited by the positive side of what he was predicting. Around 1pm, the call finally came and the conversation with Tony lasted about 20 seconds. Congratulations. Great. Thank you. Goodbye.

Immediately after, Donald phoned and I thanked him for taking me back into the frontline of Scottish politics. I also said that I was a wee bit puzzled by Kenny reporting that Henry was to be "Deputy Secretary of State" since I didn’t know such a title existed. "Of course it doesn’t," said Donald. "That is complete rubbish."

Two minutes later the door-bell rang and a government driver announced that he was there to take me to St Andrew’s House. He had been waiting round the corner since 9am that morning. Government drivers, as I would learn, are the people who always know before you do about your imminent career moves.

I made one more phone call before leaving - to Kenny. "You were right," I said, "but according to Donald, this stuff about Henry being Deputy Secretary of State is crap. Where did you get that?" Maybe for the only time in his all-too-brief career, Kenny couldn’t stop himself revealing his source. "The bastard," he roared down the phone. "It was McLeish himself who told me." Welcome to government and the murky world, which I have always despised, of off-record briefings.

Henry upsetting my post-election karma became something of a habit. Four years later, I was asleep on the Friday afternoon when my wife came in and told me there was a story on radio about Henry bad-mouthing me with a microphone switched on. "He said something about you always being in Ireland and that you’re a liability." I was sufficiently awake to reply: "Well, it’s always nice to be judged by an expert."

Back to 1997 and St Andrew’s House was a flurry of introductions, congratulations and photo-calls on the roof. Donald was as excited as a child with a new toy; installed in the post for which he was born but which he must often have thought he would never achieve. Donald told me that he wanted me to be Education and Industry Minister, which sounded like a great job to me. He also made me the first designated Minister for Gaelic, an act of personal friendship since he knew what it would mean to me.

As today’s new ministers will discover, decision-making starts straight away. The in-tray has been building up over the election period. The first lesson is to guard against being bounced into signing anything off in the euphoria of the moment. From these first contacts, the civil servants are watching for signs of how "difficult" or compliant you are going to be in order to organise their strategies accordingly. Believe me, Yes, Minister was deadly accurate.

When I went home that night, the first phone call I took was from the late Donnie MacKerrell, a councillor on Islay. Argyll and Bute were trying to close two schools on Islay. Could I stop them? Maybe Portnahaven could be designated Gaelic-medium? Of course I would try to help. The constraints that existed on my newfound power were the last thing on my mind. That would come later and often. For the time being, on matters small as well as large, it was possible to make a difference - the whole point of being in politics.

The next day, I arrived at my new Whitehall office - the size of a tennis court - in Dover House. Its previous occupant had been Raymond Robertson, the Tory education minister, and the pictures on the walls reflected his penchant for sailing ships. I asked if it might be possible to replace them with some decent modern Scottish art from the vast government collection. Six months later, the ships were still sailing and had become symbols of the message: "Things change slowly around here."

I have a minute of the first meeting that I had with my principal civil servant, Gerry Wilson, who was as amiable a mandarin as you could wish to be manipulated by. Gerry’s watchword, he once told me, was: "Never get too close to a decision." At that first encounter we went through the card of current issues and looking back on it is a reminder of just how much has changed in these eight years, even if it sometimes took too long.

For instance, the first item on that agenda was provision for pre-5s. As recently as eight years ago, only about a quarter of Scottish four-year-olds had a pre-school place. The Tories had introduced a voucher-based scheme to build up the private sector. My first administrative act was to tell Gerry that I wanted vouchers phased out and universal provision - later extended to three-year-olds - put through the local authorities. My second was to decree an immediate end to the Assisted Places Scheme which siphoned money towards private schools.

We were back in the business of government. The most pernicious slander against Labour governments is that nothing changes. In reality, everything changes - but is almost immediately discounted as if it had never needed a Labour government to change it. The first lesson of politics is that many memories are short - but, fortunately, not yet too many.