Veteran MSP Christine Grahame looks back on 25 years of Holyrood

It’s something which has also come to characterise her 25 years as an MSP, with all of that quarter of a century being spent as a backbencher.

She is one of a handful of MSPs who can proudly say they have served in the Scottish Parliament since day one, with celebrations having been had this weekend for its silver anniversary, so to speak.  

But most of those who became MSPs in 1999 – the likes of John Swinney, Nicola Sturgeon, Jackie Baillie – have all held government or frontbench positions in their party.

It’s something that has never been of interest to Grahame.

“I’ve never been a minister, never wanted to be one,” she told the Sunday National.

“I like freedom, and as a backbencher, you can bring forward your own bills. You can move things on.

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“When I came into Parliament in 1999, I established the crossparty group for the Borders Railway, campaigned for it throughout. I campaigned to get the Great Tapestry of Scotland to come to Galashiels, not Tweedbank.

“You can do things as a backbencher that ministers can’t.”

Now 80, the Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale MSP has announced she will be stepping down from Parliament at the next election in 2026, insisting that “unlike Joe Biden, I go while the going is good”.

She might never have been a minister, but Grahame will be taking away a huge amount of experience from the Parliament when she departs, having been a list and constituency MSP, convener of several different committees, and deputy presiding officer during her tenure.

She’ll also be taking away that increasingly rare trait in politics of having the bravery to speak your mind.

It’s evident she’s continued to enjoy that freedom so many others lose when they climb the political ladder, having received rapturous applause just a few months ago in the chamber when she tore into now Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay, calling him “self-indulgent, flamboyant and frequently reckless”.  

Grahame (below) – who won Holyrood Dog of the Year title in 2022 with Mabel – was also a vocal critic of the XL Bully dog ban brought in by the Scottish Government which she maintains is a “bad law”.  

When asked if she thinks there are enough MSPs who are able to go against the grain, she said: “No, and that’s across all parties.

(Image: Fay Sinclair) “It’s very difficult in a small parliament. In Westminster, with hundreds of them, you can have more individuality in the backbenches. You’ll hardly hear a Tory or Labour [MSP] breaking the whip [at Holyrood].

“It’s bad for politics, it’s bad for policies and it pervades everything.

“I don’t break the whip for the fun of it. Someone once came to me, one of the younger ones who had just come in, who was thinking about it and I said, ‘think carefully’.

“But you have got to live with yourself at the end of the day. You can’t vote for something that in your heart of hearts [you think] is completely wrong.”

What she hopes she has been able to do in her time as an MSP is impart wisdom to those who are still learning the tricks of the trade at Holyrood.

Her background as a teacher really came to the fore during the five years she spent as deputy presiding officer from 2016 to 2021.

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“If they [MSPs] saw me going into the chair they’d say, ‘are you in the chair this afternoon?’, and then I could see them scoring out whole sentences [from their speeches],” said Grahame.

“I was really hard, but I was hard on everybody. The SNP group thought I was hardest to them, in fact, I wasn’t. The Tory group said one of the things they liked about me was I was tough on everyone.

“No-one got to make spurious points of order when I was in the chair.”

However, Grahame never saw the position as being just about discipline in the chamber. Her teacher training also came into its own when she was approached for advice outside of the chamber too.

“I remember someone had just come in and they were very nervous, somebody you’d be surprised about,” she said.

“They used to come up and say to me, ‘Christine, do you think I could say this?’ And I remember saying, 'well, the mere fact you’re asking me means you’re not happy with it, so think of something else. Use your own judgement'.

(Image: PA) “So you did have a role not just in chairing, but [MSPs] would come and speak to you about things.”

As well as embracing freedom and speaking her mind, being approachable has always been a cornerstone of Grahame’s time as a politician.

Holding her surgeries to this day in supermarkets, she has never wanted people to feel there is a societal barrier between her life and theirs.

Recalling the time someone first suggested she try and become a politician, she said: “I said, ‘I don’t want to be a politician, they’re rubbish. I had the same view of politicians as people have of us now'.”

Her election in 1999 came as a shock to her, having got in on the SNP’s South of Scotland regional list and, while she’s never given up on politics since then, she’s always tried to ensure people in her constituency see that she is just like them.  

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She went on: “Although I’ve been a politician all these years, I do my surgeries in supermarkets.

“I want people to feel they can come and speak to me without fuss and see me as I am, an ordinary person. It’s wonderful and again it breaks that barrier between them thinking that you’re different.

“I’m not different at all. I hang my washing out before I go to my surgery.”

When asked if anything had ever annoyed her about the Parliament over the 25 years, nothing in particular sprung to mind, but of course, there is one huge hope she still has for its future – that it is one day independent.

While some of her colleagues may be nervous to admit it, Grahame believes Scotland cannot currently call itself a nation and she hopes that can one day change.

Asked what her biggest hope for the Parliament was, she said: “I want it to be independent.

“I was in front of a school the other day and I was with Craig Hoy, chair of the Tory Party. I said to this class, is Scotland truly a nation? I said we can’t sit at the United Nations, we can’t apply to be an independent member of the EU, we can’t make treaties with other nations.

“Two or three put their hands up after what I said and when I asked them why they still thought Scotland was a nation, they all went silent. I said they could send a paragraph when they have an explanation. I haven’t had one yet.

“The other thing I said to this class was I don’t know a single place that has become independent – Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania – that has said they don’t want it anymore.

“Really, we’re a quasi-nation at the moment, we’re not a nation until we can do those things, run our own economy, make our own decisions and make our own mistakes.”