Scottish Independence: The remarkable story of Margo MacDonald

MARGO MacDonald exploded on to the political scene in 1973 and continued to shake it up right up until her untimely death just before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

Her dramatic by-election win in the Labour stronghold of Govan helped to re-inforce the trajectory of the SNP and the campaign for devolution that took place in the General Elections of 1974.

The epitome of charisma, she continued to be a huge influence on the Scottish independence movement for more than 40 years and was never scared to take on controversial issues such as the legalisation of assisted dying.

Such was the respect she engendered, she was able to convince many voters to support causes that others often regarded as vote losers.

One of her remarkable features was her ability to connect with people who other nationalist politicians on the left could not reach, according to her widower Jim Sillars.

He gives as an example a story of how he was in the well-to-do area of Morningside in Edinburgh one day when a woman stopped him and asked if he was Mr Sillars. When he confirmed he was, she said: “I like your wife but I don’t like you!”

“I think in many ways that summed up Margo as she had this ability to draw in people from right across the spectrum and it was very indicative that her pals in Parliament were drawn from Labour, the SNP and the Tory party,” said Sillars.

“It was her authenticity that reached so many people across the spectrum and got them to listen. She was brought up in very difficult circumstances and knew what poverty was from experience. She knew what it was like to be really hard up and when she talked to people they almost instinctively knew she was coming from the same place as them.”

He added: “In terms of debating on TV I don’t think there was anyone like her at all, as she was both a very likeable person but very tough in debate.”

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Sillars said he had met three really outstanding minds in his time and one of them was Margo.

The others were Jimmy Reid and, perhaps surprisingly, Enoch Powell. The latter, Sillars said, had a “Rolls Royce mind” but could go off on “very dangerous” tangents such as his “rivers of blood” speech.

“But if you are just talking about astonishing minds, he was one and the others were Jimmy Reid and Margo. In this Calvinist-influenced country of ours they were almost unique in their lateral thinking and could choose words to illuminate an issue so people could understand very clearly what it was all about.

He added: “I’m being quite objective as I know my limitations and in terms of this ability to illuminate issues I don’t think anyone has surpassed them. They could produce explanations that people could perfectly understand and know what they said was not spin but something they had thought about and believed.”

Billy Wolfe, leader of the SNP in the 1970s, recognised her worth and gave her free rein to campaign all over the country, which Sillars said was of enormous benefit to the party.

However he said the SNP decided to get rid of her once the Scottish Parliament was reconvened and the party had “gone into the cult of the personality of the leader”.

“That meant no dissent was appreciated but she would not toe any line she thought was not correct, so there was orchestrated effort to get her out of Parliament and out of politics,” Sillars said.

He added: “You have to put a question mark against a party that would want to get rid of Margo. Which organisation would want to get rid of a talent of that quality? They thought they had managed it but it was a big mistake on their part because she was then free as a bird and able to say what she thought and she continued to have a major influence on Scottish public life. It was a loss to the SNP but not to Scottish public life or the independence movement.”

Sillars said that while some might have been bitter, Margo – who was universally known by her first name – did not hold any resentment and wanted to campaign in the run-up to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum but wasn’t well enough.

“She could not campaign and we lost votes because of that because she was persuasive across a wide spectrum of opinion,” he said. “It was a personal tragedy as well because she really wanted to and, although I had retired, she ordered me to go back in when she could not!”

Born in Hamilton in 1943, Margo trained first as a PE teacher, then ran a Blantyre pub with her first husband, Peter MacDonald, with whom she had two daughters. Her rise to political prominence began when she was 30 and beat the odds to win the 1973 Govan by-election.

“In those days, when there was a class battle going on right across the UK between a very right-wing government led by Ted Heath and the working class as represented by the Labour Party and the trade unions, nobody expected the SNP to make a breakthrough,” said the SNP’s Alex Neil.

“But it did because Margo bridged the divide between class politics and identity politics. She spoke with a genuine working-class accent, was clearly on the left and was able to show how – although the Labour Party had been in power in Govan, Glasgow and nationally – the conditions in which people were living in Govan were an absolute disgrace.

“She was called the blonde bombshell but that did not refer to her gender but to her intellectual ability which was far greater than many of the MPs representing Scotland in Westminster. She had a star quality not just in a Scottish context but all over the UK.”

Margo lost her seat in the General Election the following February but although her tenure was brief, Neil said it established her as a national political figure and one of the authentic voices of Scottish nationalism.

She then became deputy leader of the SNP and was heavily involved in the development of the oil campaign.

She resigned from the party in 1982 after the proscription of the left-wing 1979 group of which she was a prominent member.

SHE went on to forge a successful career as a television and radio presenter. She had married Sillars in 1981 after her first marriage broke down and in an ironic twist Sillars, a former Labour Party member who left to found the breakaway Scottish Labour Party, went on to win the Govan seat in 1988.

By the mid-1990s Margo had rejoined the SNP and the return of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 brought her back to the fore as an MSP.

“There was a big question mark over whether the leadership would try to stop her becoming a candidate but I think they realised it would do more damage to turn her down and that they could benefit from her membership in Parliament,” said Neil.

Elected as the SNP list member for Lothians, she was top of the list in 1999 but Neil said there was a campaign against her by some parliamentary colleagues and she was dropped so far down the list she had “no chance” of getting re-elected.

Undaunted, Margo stood as an independent and became the only independent politician to be elected three times, doing so in 2003, 2007 and 2011.

“To be honest Margo was a big figure and the SNP did not seem to be big enough to include her and that was a mistake,” said Neil.

“She had a lot of support even from the so-called blue-rinse brigade because of her honesty. She was a good campaigner and one of her big campaigns was the legalisation of assisted suicide and, although she never lived to see that happen, she put it on the national agenda in a way very few politicians could have done.”

Neil said the greatest tragedy was that Margo, who had Parkinson’s Disease, was not well enough to play a full part in the 2014 campaign.

“With all due respect to everyone else, the SNP did not have a campaigner like her,” he said. “She reached parts of the community that many other nationalists have not been able to reach.

“She would have been a leading figure. She was a great campaigner and a great persuader and it’s a tragedy she did not take part as – who knows – we might have won.”

He added: “She was one of the best brains ever to grace Scottish politics and is a big loss to Scotland. She never needed to give her second name, she was just known as Margo and that sums her up.

“She was a very nice, very caring person, sometimes too brutally honest for her own career, but she said it as she saw it and she made a lasting contribution to Scottish politics, the Scottish Parliament and Scottish life.”