The brutal world of boss McConnell

IT WAS the weekend, but Jack McConnell was still at work. He picked up the phone and prepared to dial - at stake was his political career.

The ambitious 38-year-old hopeful was locked in a knife-edge battle to win the right to stand as the Labour candidate for the Motherwell and Wishaw seat at the forthcoming Scottish elections. It was 1998, and the riches of ministerial office were far, far away. McConnell was expected to lose the ballot, to be held that Sunday, to local union official Bill Tynan, whose grassroots knowledge of the area far exceeded those of Arran-born McConnell. But McConnell was not beaten yet.

Scotland’s future First Minister had a joker in his pack. Unlike his opponent, the former general secretary of the Scottish Labour party was well-versed in the arts of spin. That weekend, a series of stories mysteriously appeared in the newspapers, revealing that allies of Tynan had been involved in a "votes scandal". It emerged that the party was investigating allegations that they had been caught interfering with the postal ballot. Tynan’s campaign was thus mired in sleaze, on the very day that party members were preparing to make their decision. McConnell won - by one vote.

Speaking for the first time about the issue last night, one of those accused of rigging the vote in 1998, told Scotland on Sunday that the entire affair was "nonsense".

Hugh Mulholland, a Labour activist in Motherwell, said: "The allegations were completely false. After they were made, I wrote to the Labour party, asking for them to be investigated, but I was told that the matter had been closed."

The incident is now history, one of many inglorious stories from Lanarkshire Labour’s past. But it has been brought back into mind this weekend, following the farcical events which have paralysed political debate in Scotland for the past week - all surrounding the fate of Scottish Opera.

Six years on from the Tynan affair, McConnell was once again working last weekend. And once again, he was working the phones. The First Minister’s office had got wind that a letter was to appear in Scotland on Sunday signed by 55 of the country’s leading arts figures, criticising the Executive’s arts strategy, and expressing "astonishment" over its apparent failure to secure Scottish Opera’s future. The letter was signed by luminaries such as the Queen’s composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, and authors Ian Rankin, Alasdair Gray and Alexander McCall Smith. McConnell knew that the letter "had legs". Thus, he set about trying to nullify its effects. "It’s a well known tactic," said one ex-minister last night. "When you know that one paper is going to run a bad story, you run a spoiler in a rival publication."

This is exactly what McConnell proceeded to do. With the details of the Scotland on Sunday letter emerging, he contacted the Glasgow-based Sunday Herald and had a conversation with its editor, Andrew Jaspan. The exact detail of that conversation will remain a mystery, as neither party will tell. But the following morning, the paper unveiled a ridiculously labelled "world exclusive": "Scottish Opera bailed out to tune of £5m", the headline declared.

The story triggered a storm, with Scottish Opera chief executive Christopher Barron claiming McConnell had deliberately leaked confidential information. After three days of characteristic bungling from within the Executive, the First Minister emerged on Thursday and promptly brushed the affair aside, declaring himself "bemused". Equally, his ministers dismissed the affair as "froth". Meanwhile, the staff at Scottish Opera enter another week without knowing whether they have a future; their careers apparently deemed less important than the settling of political scores.

Scottish Opera’s future is likely to be settled on June 2, when its board will meet to discuss its options. For many Scots, it will remain a marginal issue. But while the details of the Scottish Opera saga are irrelevant to many, the affair has triggered renewed interest in the behaviour of its central player, and about the way he runs Scotland. Would Tony Blair have personally intervened in an attempt to dull the impact of a newspaper story? Is this the standard of behaviour we are entitled to from a First Minister? As one insider close to Scottish Opera asked last week of McConnell: "What kind of way is this to run a government?"

The evidence suggests that the events of last week are very much in keeping with the McConnell style. According to critics, he has been practising it for more than a decade.

McConnell came to prominence in 1992 when he was appointed General Secretary of the Scottish Labour party. Under his predecessor, Helen Liddell, the job was largely an administrative role - but McConnell transformed it, using the position to make himself the face of the Scottish Labour party.

A former firebrand member of the party’s Scottish Labour Action wing, he also transformed himself, signing up to more moderate New Labour ways as soon as Tony Blair’s star began to rise. He even allowed his radical deputy and close friend, Tommy Sheppard, to be pushed out of his job on the say of London. "If you look at all of McConnell’s friends from those days, they no longer associate with him. He left a lot of bad blood. He is a chameleon," said another insider.

An MP added: "Apart from nationalism, I’d say Jack was a principle-free zone. You’d struggle to think of any act he has been associated with that had anything to do with principle. I can’t see any motives apart from self-advancement."

McConnell was also known for his abrasiveness and authoritarian style.

One party insider said: "There was this occasion when a number of us had a dispute with the party management. Jack was unhelpful to put it mildly. He strode into the office one afternoon, full of himself, and said, ‘You’ll get no help from your union. I’ve just had a round of golf with your general secretary’."

And despite his new loyalty to Blair, he soon began to attract concern from London about his behaviour. In 1996, Millbank insiders believed McConnell’s briefings risked undermining the effect of Labour’s carefully choreographed message from London.

McConnell quit the job in 1998, taking up a post at a PR firm. But the lure of headlines - and the funds that came with them - proved too much. Just a few months after quitting as General Secretary, he revealed he would be writing a diary of his time as General Secretary, promising to blow the lid on the inside workings of the party.

Donald Dewar was among those appalled by McConnell’s sudden move - particularly as it proved likely to stir up the bitter and tragic events surrounding the suicide of Labour’s Paisley MP Gordon McMaster. "There was stuff in them he had written about McMaster," said a Labour source. "I remember John Lambie [the late union official] commenting that at best it was inept and at worse, just gross. Donald Dewar nodded his head."

The rights for the diaries were bought by this newspaper, but McConnell was threatened with having his name removed from the list of candidates for Holyrood and, according to another Labour insider, "had to beg Scotland on Sunday not to print the stuff".

McConnell escaped from the tawdry affair and defeated Tynan to be elected to parliament, where he was made Finance Minister by Dewar. But no sooner had he arrived than he was engulfed in the so-called ‘lobbygate’ scandal - when allegations were made that PR executives had offered an undercover journalist preferential access to Scottish ministers and boasted that McConnell was a former employee of the firm. McConnell toured TV stations, denying the claims - before a parliamentary inquiry cleared him of any wrongdoing. Again, he survived.

However, his chutzpah apparently undimmed, McConnell continued to plot a path up the greasy pole under both Donald Dewar and Henry McLeish. One Labour supporter - and avowed enemy of McConnell’s - said last night: "During the Donald and Henry era, there was stuff in the papers constantly. Then when Jack became First Minister, suddenly the leaking against colleagues in the cabinet stopped. Why was that? Was it because peace and harmony and fraternal love overcame the party as they were led by their wonderful new leader, or was it because all the shits who had been doing the leaking were now in post?"

McLeish claims he suffered enormously from the instability caused by ministerial briefings, and regularly pleaded with his cabinet.

McConnell, however, was known to be gathering support among backbenchers and awaiting a possible fall from grace for the embattled boss.

"He spent a lot of time chipping away at them. McConnell’s people even met in the Espionage pub on Victoria Street," said a source.

McConnell’s chance came earlier than expected, following McLeish’s resignation in November 2001. The succession exposed once and for all the extreme ruthlessness of the man.

Personally, and through intermediaries, McConnell assured members of McLeish’s cabinet team that they would hold on to their jobs.

One insider recalled: "He was quite specific. After he took over, he went around telling people that he wanted his cabinet to be one of all the talents. People like Angus MacKay [then Finance Minister] were told there would be no night of the long knives."

Yet, just days later, having secured the party leadership unopposed, McConnell unexpectedly and brutally swung an axe around the cabinet table, sacking MacKay, Tom McCabe, Jacqui Baillie and Sarah Boyack, and demoting Health Minister Susan Deacon, who resigned. In their place came a handful of largely untried Labour members who owed their position entirely to McConnell’s patronage - collectively known as "McConnell’s Cronies" or "The Jackolytes". "The phrase Jack the Knife was never more pertinent," said one insider.

McConnell has run, by common consent, a far more efficient government than either of his predecessors.

Yet he has failed to deflect criticism that his government style lacks vim and ideas. Having reached the top of the pile, the questions remain about what he is doing with the power he holds.

"He puts more importance on holding a position than other people. Even if he is compromised in that position, the holding of that office is paramount. It is an apolitical mindset. That is the goal," said a former associate.

Question marks also hang over his judgment: over the Carfin affair three years ago, when his close ally Frank Roy MP deterred the Irish Taoiseach from visiting a Catholic shrine at Carfin on the day of an Old Firm game; over the Red Rose dinner affair when allegations about missing funds were made at party officials; and even over his excruciating choice of a sporranless pinstripe kilt in New York last month for Tartan Day.

More seriously, critics say that McConnell’s style of government has now lurched towards heavy-handed authoritarianism; one in which agencies and organisations which rely on it for backing - such as Scottish Opera - are intimidated by the flexing of power.

One public sector source said: "McConnell isn’t averse to ringing people up personally when there is a dispute. It’s done deliberately to scare them - they have to speak to the First Minister."

There are even dark claims that some groups are told that if they create a public fuss, their funding will be compromised.

Despite the criticism of McConnell by chief executive Christopher Barron, Scottish Opera has similarly backed off in the past week - fearing a head-on confrontation if it continues to protest. According to sources who attended the House of Lords function on Wednesday last week to promote the opera company, senior figures in the organisation were "resigned" to their fate.

"They said there would be resignations. It was quite a depressing atmosphere," the insider said.

Sadness is indeed the pervading mood in the arts world this weekend, after another week of buffeting at the hands of the Scottish Executive.

Yet McConnell may now find himself dragged into their crisis.

"The problem is that his limitations are now coming to the fore," one Labour insider said. "He has always been, in my view at least, a small-town student politician. He’s been much more able at the cut-and-thrust and manoeuvring and tactical shuffling that you get in student politics, rather than anything related to principle."