Cathie Jamieson interview - 'I know all too well the hopes and dreams of working class'

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"WOULD you mind moving a little bit to the left?" the photographer asks Cathy Jamieson, sizing up a shot. "I can always manage that," she replies, quick as a flash. The candidate for the Labour leadership at Holyrood, taking a quick break from campaigning last week, bursts into a proper belly laugh.

Of the three candidates for the vacant job – along with Andy Kerr and Iain Gray – Jamieson agrees that "in terms of my history" she's the biggest lefty of the three. She came to prominence in 1998 as one of a group of rebels who got voted onto the party's National Executive Committee, in defiance of Tony Blair's leadership. Her working-class Ayrshire roots and the view of her as one of Scottish Labour's "wummin" sealed her hard-left image.

But the reality is a little different. Taking a brief time-out from campaigning in Glasgow last week, Jamieson praises Blair's leadership style, and how he had "the courage of his convictions". The much-caricatured former justice minister is a more complex person and politician than her image.

Jamieson grew up in Kilmarnock (her website proudly states that she was "one of the first pupils to benefit from comprehensive education in Ayrshire"). Her first love was art, an interest kindled in primary school when she won a prize in an art festival. In second year at secondary school, she won a silver medal for a competition in Glasgow. "I painted a bird or something," she says, "but the point about it was that it actually reinforced that I was good at this. There was excitement and a level of achievement."

After completing a degree at Glasgow School of Art, studying sculpture, she went to London's Goldsmith College for a post-graduate course. Then, it seems, she caught the politics bug. "As time went on I found myself becoming more and more interested in social issues," she says. A job as an art therapist combined her twin interests.

She's clearly not, I suggest, part of the 'art for art's sake brigade'. "There's a time and a place," she says. "I enjoy as much as anybody looking in art galleries at different things because it gives you a different perspective on life, but I think we can do more with it than that."

She is most interested in "community art and how we use art as part of a regeneration process for communities".

This is the kind of worthiness which endears her to Scottish Labour's activists. Jamieson is the bookie's outsider to succeed Wendy Alexander in the top job, but some senior people in the Scottish party continue to believe she will come out on top, pointing to her popularity with the party's grassroots.

"I come from a pretty straightforward working-class community and I have shared the kind of experiences that people in those communities have. Why would that make me any less able to be a politician?" she says. "Actually, I think it is an advantage because it does allow me to understand where people have come from and what their hopes and aspirations are."

While Jamieson may enjoy support for her character, there are attacks over her record as a minister. This is the avowed left-winger who decided to privatise the prison transport system, who presided over the hiring of Reliance security to ferry prisoners to and fro. She took the decision, she says, because the deal freed up time for police and prison officers.

"It is pragmatic politics," she says. But not socialist politics, I suggest. "It doesn't sit at odds with a principled position if you take the view that communities shouldn't be abandoned to people involved in anti-social behaviour, that people should be able to see people on the streets and prisoners need to have staff in there working with them," she counters.

This is the kind of rhetoric which eventually left Jamieson with admirers in Downing Street – praise which, perhaps, she would rather not have.

Certainly, in this campaign, she is tacking left again. She has proposed scrapping the ScotRail franchise, replacing it with a not-for-profit franchise. She also wants to give people coming off benefits a tax holiday for the first few weeks of work, to encourage them to stay in a job.

The rhetoric has not yet been a ringing success, however. She suffered a major blow last week when the huge Unite union – of which she is a member – decided to back Iain Gray. There were claims from the Jamieson camp that the decision had been influenced by Charlie Whelan, now Unite's political director and former spin doctor to Gordon Brown. Gray is widely thought to be the preferred candidate of the Prime Minister.

Jamieson issues a carefully measured response to questions on Brown's involvement in the campaign. "I would hope that Gordon and people around him will recognise that this is the first time every member of the Labour party and all the affiliates have their chance to put their name on the ballot paper," she says.

The summer campaign has met a mixed response in the Jamieson household. Her husband is a further education lecturer, and they have one son. "On the one hand they are saying this is great but on the other they are saying where has the summer gone?" she says.

But Jamieson is up for the task. " I came into this knowing it was going to be tough. I was very clear about what I was letting myself in for. But this time around I felt the party needed a contest and I was determined to play my part in that."

You can imagine Jamieson winning over plenty of Labour members in the next few weeks with her warm sincerity. Outsider she may be, but don't count her out just yet.