David Mundell on devolution, the SNP, and whether the 'vow' swung the referendum

Eight weeks before the general election, the former Tory treasurer Lord Ashcroft published a devastating poll for Scottish MPs. It had Jim Murphy, the then Scottish Labour leader, all but losing his seat to the SNP and Scotland’s only Conservative MP, David Mundell, locked in a desperate battle with the nationalists to hold onto his.

The poll put Murphy only one percentage point ahead of his SNP rival in his East Renfrewshire constituency and predicted Mundell faced a dead heat that would require a recount in the Tory’s Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale seat.

At the time, a Scottish Conservative spokesman said it showed the party was in “a real fight across Scotland” and warned that any other vote than Conservative risked letting Ed Miliband into Downing Street, propped up by Alex Salmond.

And while that ‘vote SNP and get Miliband’ Tory strategy seemed to resonate across the south of England, in Scotland there was little stopping the SNP steamroller. In the end, Murphy lost his seat and subsequently quit as party leader while Mundell hung onto his in a nailbiting count that saw his 4,000 majority slashed to just 798 ahead of his SNP opponent.

Cold comfort, perhaps, that Mundell retained his badge of honour of being Scotland’s only Conservative MP. But with his party winning an overall majority across the UK, he was also promoted to the post of Secretary of State for Scotland and is now steering through the Scotland Bill.

Such are the vagaries of politics that the same Mundell, who could be seen on television screens on election night nervously hovering over ballot boxes as their contents were spilled out ready for the count, is now one of the most powerful politicians in the land, responsible for the largest transfer of powers to the Scottish Parliament since devolution began.

“It was tense at my count,” he tells me, “… because it was one of the few counts where the count really made a difference. At a lot of other counts, people knew the outcome as soon as the box was open and they started to see the ballot papers.

"I spoke to a now former Labour MP who told me he had got a call at 10.30pm saying that he had already lost by 10,000 votes. But my count was one where it was clear on the opening of the boxes that it was too close to call and it wasn’t until the final hour of the count that we knew the result.

“But not only did my share of the vote go up, the actual number of votes I polled went up. What I am proud of is that in each of the three elections I have stood, the number of people who have voted for me has gone up each time and this time, a further 4,500 people had voted for me.

“What I wanted to feel going into that count was that in the constituency I had done everything I possibly could and that I knew in my own mind that if people had chosen otherwise then I would have accepted it.

"I think it is difficult if you lose by, say, five votes because then you think you should have gone up that farm track and maybe spoken to those one or two people more but I didn’t really think I could have done anything differently. I had gone out, knocked on thousands of doors, got my message out, fought the campaign I wanted to and put out all the literature I could.”

Mundell’s efforts didn’t come cheap. Official election returns have revealed that Scotland’s only Tory MP was the biggest spender in the country during the election campaign, splashing out more than £46,000. He spent just over £20k on “unsolicited material to electors” and £3.5k on a campaign manager. Overall, each vote cost the Tories £2.26 while Labour spent £2.33 per vote and the SNP just 70p.

Mundell’s win perhaps justifies the cash but he says he is surprised that others didn’t see the SNP tsunami coming.

“I found that when I was out campaigning in November and December, that while my own vote was solid and in fact was picking up, everyone that wasn’t voting for me was voting SNP. And from November for the rest of the campaign, I actually could find no one that was voting Labour.

"It was absolutely clear to me that Labour was in very serious difficulty and part of that was that people didn’t feel they had a reason to vote for the Labour Party. And while it is not for me to give the Labour Party lessons in campaigning, all I knew about the Scottish Labour Party was they were anti-Tory and that became their sole message and if someone comes along that is more anti-Tory than you and better at setting out that message, that is a problem.

“I accept that what the SNP was very good at was saying they were for Scotland and while I may not agree with other things that they say, at least you could say what they were for. Whereas with the Labour Party, it was impossible to identify what they were for.

“However, I am very clear that the vote in the election was not a vote for separation – it was a vote for people to represent Scotland in the UK Parliament, in the context of people voting in the referendum to stay within the UK.

“I was very clear with the Prime Minister and others that this was not a vote for separation. It was a vote for people who they believed, I would say misguidedly, would best represent them within the Westminster parliament and within the Union and that was what it was a vote for.

“Yes, it was a vote in the context of the referendum but not a backlash in saying ‘we voted No in the referendum and now we think differently’. It was voters asking themselves, ‘who is most effective to represent us within a United Kingdom parliament that we voted to be part of, and who can get us the best deal and ensure that the powers that people wanted and set out in the Smith Commission are on the agenda?’

"That’s the context. It was not a repudiation of the referendum, by any means, and of course there is a core group who will always believe in independence and others who have been awakened and solely focused on independence but I think the bulk of people who voted for the SNP… did so on the basis of electing people into a UK Parliament and making Scotland’s representation, as they would see it, more effective. In a sense, Westminster has become the focus of Scottish politics and there is a greater demonstration that Scotland is part of the Westminster set up and I think that’s a good thing.”

It’s interesting to hear a Tory politician that fought to retain the Union if not celebrating the fact that the SNP now holds 56 of the 59 Scottish Westminster seats, at least finding the rationale for that situation acceptable. Doesn’t he find it bizarre that despite being on the winning side at the referendum, he remains the only Tory MP in Scotland and is now joined by a huge majority of nationalist MPs who were all on the losing side of the argument?

“My personal situation isn’t any different because for 10 years it’s been me and 58 other MPs and now it’s just that the 58 are slightly differently configured,” he smiles. “As I sit down to Scottish Questions, it’s not that different – it’s just the people are stage right instead of straight ahead.

"So therefore, my mindset isn’t that different in terms of how I approach what I do. I think Scotland was very important in the last parliament and it’s going to be very important in this one. I have a very big job to do because I have to ensure the Scotland Bill is delivered in legislative terms but, more important than that, that it is implemented in a timely manner and that is my objective at the moment.

“I want to make sure the Bill gets through to Royal Assent by February and onto the statute book by March when the election campaign begins because we are looking to ensure that the tax and welfare powers, in particular, are delivered in that timescale for the next Scottish Parliament and so at the next elections in May, there will have to be a debate about tax and about welfare in the context of what the parties in Scotland will actually do with them.”

Mundell and I sit down on the same day that he appeared before the Devolution (Further Powers) Committee at the Scottish Parliament – an appearance that the SNP’s Linda Fabiani described as “embarrassing” and prompted further calls from the SNP for the UK Government to bring the Bill up to the standards set out by the Smith Commission.

Mundell rejects the claim that the Bill falls short on Smith. Indeed, he says that the chronology of events that led to the Bill are being wilfully misconstrued.

For some in Scotland, ‘The Vow’ – the precursor to Smith – was something designed to dupe the electorate into voting No. Mundell says that is not so. He evidences the fact that the Scottish Conservatives had, with the Strathclyde Commission, produced a radical set of proposals over more powers in June 2014, which preceded the commitments made by the Lib Dems and Labour during the referendum that were then cemented by ‘The Vow’ made in the final days before the vote.

“I was very clear, from a party point of view, that we had to set out our proposals and see that the Strathclyde Commission, which Ruth set up, was as expansive as it could be and that had support from the Prime Minister and colleagues from Westminster and I would argue the Strathclyde Commission was the most radical in terms of the proposals.

"Then during the referendum… there was a joint statement in the Daily Record and The Sun – an advert – signed off by Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, setting out that they were committing to more powers. However, it became clear towards the end of the campaign that that message just had not resonated with the public and had to be made more explicit, hence ‘The Vow’. That’s what its purpose was – to reiterate what we had all in fact said earlier.

“There is no evidence to date that ‘The Vow’ was the definitive reason as to why people voted as they did and I would repudiate what some Yes supporters would say, which is ‘The Vow’ came along and changed people’s minds and meant the result was No, not Yes. I just don’t believe that.

"It simply set out what had already been set out previously so that people had no doubt about it. What it did add in, importantly, was the retention of the Barnett formula and from my perspective, that was a really positive addition, although Cameron and Osborne had always been clear that they had no immediate plans to change the Barnett formula because it would be too complicated.”

I suggest that this is a disingenuous argument. If the purpose of ‘The Vow’ wasn’t to encourage a No vote, why would the unionist parties have bothered to make it?

“It was an appropriate thing to do in order to achieve that but what I don’t buy into is this post-referendum narrative that if ‘The Vow’ had not been made that it would have been a Yes vote and [that] somehow ‘The Vow’ duped people into voting No that would have otherwise voted Yes. People wanted more powers but the overriding reason people felt the equally strong commitment to the Union, as some did to nationalism, was economic. It was the economic arguments that won a No vote.”

Didn’t the Prime Minister feed into the argument that people had been somehow tricked into voting No when he almost immediately linked further powers for Scotland with the need to address the West Lothian question and English votes for English laws?

“Well, I know that he hadn’t done that because what he was seeking to say, which is what has happened, is that we are moving forward with very significant devolution to Scotland and we can’t leave the English question, which is what I think is a better way of describing the West Lothian question, unanswered. We need to deal with that at the same time but what he didn’t say, which obviously some of our political opponents wished to categorise it as, was that it was conditional.

"It wasn’t in any way conditional because we are committed to moving the Scotland Bill forward and that couldn’t be clearer. There are many people that pop up and say we need a UK-wide constitutional commission and we can’t do this because we’ve not done that, and we say no because specific certain commitments have been made to Scotland in relation to the Scotland Bill, to Northern Ireland with the Stormont House Agreement, in relation to Wales, there are provisions to Wales, and also, to the ‘northern powerhouse’ in relation to England.

"There are certain things we are committed to do and we are going ahead with them and, of course, you can look at that landscape, which is very consistent with our British non-constitution, and look at ways to make sure that these things don’t rub up against each other in unhelpful ways and that we have a consistent approach to governance where that is appropriate. But what the Prime Minister didn’t in any way do was to set back or seek to dilute the commitment to more powers.

“We then had the Smith Commission itself and that really was the opportunity for all the parties to make their case and to die in the ditch for things they really wanted. There wasn’t any statutory or legal requirement for the Smith Agreement to be signed at the moment it was and so then people that then come back and say it is incoherent… well, why did they sign it at the time? That’s what I don’t get.

"Obviously, anything which is an agreement between five parties has a degree of compromise and a degree of acceptance of arrangements that are acceptable to everybody that everyone can live with. But if you genuinely thought this package was incoherent or would be detrimental to Scotland, then you shouldn’t have signed up to it.”

I accept his point but say that what the critics of the Bill are saying is that it does not live up to the spirit or substance of Smith. Were people not promised devo max or home rule?

“I think every descriptor possible has been added to devo now,” he says. “We have devo more, devo less, devo light, devo everything. I think there’s lots of phrases and definitions out there and it is what people meant by that and what others understand from it. It is very interesting in the context of the debate around full fiscal autonomy, for instance, which is a phrase bandied around but what does it actually mean?

“I think there is confusion around definitions but what is clear is the chronology of events; each of the parties came up with proposals and it was clear ahead of the referendum that all three unionist parties were committed to further devolution.

"‘The Vow’ confirmed that for anyone that had any doubts and crucially confirmed it had the Barnett formula in it, and then the Smith Commission was the next stage in ‘The Vow’ in which those powers were articulated. And that is the package of powers that we are committed to deliver in the Scotland Bill.

“People are arguing things that they don’t even understand the definition of or even want. I was asked by a Labour MP during the Scotland Bill why don’t I call the Scottish Government’s bluff and give them FFA and then they’d have to get on with it. But my argument is that it would be bad for Scotland to have a £10billion black hole in spending and that can’t be taken lightly just to call someone’s bluff.

"We are not doing it and when I appeared in front of the committee I made that clear, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. And given the level of furore, if the SNP seriously believed they had a mandate for FFA then their approach would be quite different. Part of it is just window dressing from them and what was interesting… was the dynamic within the House of Commons when Stewart Hosie was proposing the motion on FFA – he almost entirely addressed the SNP group as if he was seeking to convince them rather than anyone else in the chamber.

"I think the sooner we can just move away from that and have a sensible discussion about what the powers can actually be used for, the better. That’s why I am keen to get the Bill through and then next March/April, we are having a debate about additional benefits and where the money is going to come from.

“I am no wiser now about what a Scottish Government welfare system would look like than I was at the start of this process. I know there are realms of criticism from the SNP about the UK Government’s system but no real idea what the SNP actually want to do themselves and the moment is coming when they will have to declare their hand.

“I think it’s very important for people in Scotland that the party manifestos will spell out how the powers are to be used. I am determined that the powers will be delivered in terms of implementation during the next Scottish Parliament and that’s one of my key objectives.

“Somebody asked me if I’ll have anything to do once the Bill gets through and I said I would have the bigger job of getting it actually implemented. I think a fair criticism of the Calman process is to say it was too long; report 2009, tax powers delivered in 2016 – too long.

"Although ironically, the legwork for the tax powers within the Scotland Bill was done by the Calman Commission in terms of identifying Scottish taxpayers and codes and so it should be more straightforward to do. My clear objective is to get the tax powers delivered so the Scottish Parliament can use them in the 2016 parliament.”

I repeat the SNP assertion that both the Westminster Library’s own research and the Scottish Parliament committee exploring further powers say Smith is not being delivered in full by the Bill.

“Well, the library at Westminster definitely doesn’t say that,” he says unequivocally. “It says there are some things not in the Bill but then they are not delivered… because there are some Smith things that require legislation and some… that do not. To say anything else is just froth. And most of the issues that the committee set out are issues around drafting, which are perfectly legitimate debates – but they don’t mean we are not delivering Smith.”

What about the Smith recommendation about the permanence of the Scottish Parliament?

“We have had a very full discussion about the setting of the permanence of the Scottish Parliament in statute. Now the committee believes that we should insert a provision that says that there would have to be a referendum before the Scottish Parliament could be abolished and my position is that it is inconceivable it could be abolished without the agreement of the people of Scotland and, therefore, I don’t want to set a whole load of preconditions on the abolition of the Scottish Parliament. That’s two different views but that is not a statement or evidence that the Smith Commission is not being delivered in full.

“We are spending four days on the floor of the House of Commons going through it line by line and I insisted on that because I did not want Scottish MPs feeling they didn’t get their say. So we are having a detailed discussion and I am committed to reflect on that and see whether there is scope for realigning or drafting.

"But most of the issues that are out there are drafting issues and are not issues about the substance. It is both the spirit and the substance we are delivering on. In some sense, we are bound by what is in the Smith report. We are also very clear that the core of the Smith proposals is the transfer of £11billion of income-tax revenues’ responsibility from the UK Parliament to the Scottish Parliament and £4 billion of VAT receipts.

"The Scottish Government sent a 63-page response to the committee with two lines related to those income tax provisions because we had agreed them so I am not diminishing any points that have been made and I am listening to them all, other than for full fiscal freedom or rather full fiscal autonomy because that’s off the agenda.

“We are listening but the core is agreed. I’m not diminishing any points but even in relation to welfare, there is no dispute over the transfer of £2.5billion of welfare responsibilities. The issues about how we are going to work together in what will be a shared space means we do have to have rules of engagement because the agreement is that the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] will operate the system but we will do what the Scottish Government wants to do in relation to the provisions for which they are responsible.

"There have to be rules but it is also very much about mindset and our mindset is we are not going to block this or we have found a sneaky way of blocking that or going behind the back of the Smith Commission. That is not the case.”

There’s a ballsyness about Mundell that wasn’t there last time I interviewed him. The SNP has even accused him of acting like a Governor General and treating Scotland like part of his empire. Having now won a majority at Westminster, I wonder if he sees the party’s star in ascendency at Holyrood.

“I am absolutely convinced that Ruth is making a real difference for the Conservatives in Scotland. She did a great job during the referendum in terms of being the passionate, pro-Union advocate and during the general election she once again demonstrated her very considerable abilities in the television debates and out in the streets, and that’s brought her to the attention of lots of people in Scotland who wouldn’t even consider voting Conservative.

"Now they have seen her and heard what she has to say, we have to do the final part of that and get them over the line and voting Conservative. But I am pretty confident we can do that.”