Fergus Ewing: energy source

Fergus Ewing was just ten years old when, on the night of 2 November 1967, his mother, Winnie Ewing, changed political history by winning the safe Labour seat of Hamilton for the SNP in a by-election which even she said she didn’t have a “snowball’s chance in hell” of taking.

In fact, Ewing had initially declined the offer to stand on the basis that as a mother of three young children – Fergus, Annabelle and Terry – it just wouldn’t be possible.

But after her husband, Stewart, inadvertently goaded her into action by telling her that with three men on the shortlist she probably wouldn’t be picked anyway, she characteristically rose to the challenge and went for it.

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However, nothing had prepared her for the bruising by-election battle ahead. She told the Daily Record in an interview to mark the 44th anniversary of that win that the Labour Party had thought they were “born to rule” and defeat “had never occurred to them as a possibility”.

“Even on the eve of poll there were people chasing us in cars and driving us off the road,” she said. “There was a definite fury and rage.”
But before the vote took place, some “cheeky” branch members from Larkhall had booked a victory dance which was packed with supporters.

“I well remember the singing of nationalist songs ringing out that night,” she said. “I thought then ‘I’m going to win, I will have to go to London.'”

For her young son, it was a realisation that life was set to change.

 “At ten, it was all a bit confusing,” says Fergus Ewing, the now MSP for Inverness and Nairn and Minister for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism. “It was tremendously exciting – particularly the party and getting the sleeper to London – and very rapidly I began to realise that my mother was somebody important for reasons other than just being my mother.

“She was pretty superhuman then and has remained so and wherever I go in Scotland very often people come up to me and say, ‘oh I remember Winnie at Hamilton’ or ‘I was there when your mum won’ and so on.  She did make an impact on people, far more so than most politicians that you know now. 

“She really got through to people by the way she communicated and the way she moved them in her speeches but also in her general style of being a politician; it was all about people. She wasn’t particularly interested in poring over strategy documents – to put it mildly or at least to understate it. What she was really interested in was trying to help people and advance things and to communicate with people.  

“People remember her hospitality and they also remember her courage. One of the truly courageous things in life is when you just act on the moment and you either act on that moment or it’s gone forever. And the example I’m thinking of is when she stood in ’79 for the European Parliament. She attended a final of the Camanachd Cup in Fort William and I wouldn’t say my mother was an aficionado of shinty but there were lots of people there so, of course, she was there.

"This was a big occasion, Russell Johnston [then Liberal MP for Inverness, leader of the Scottish Liberal Party and her political opponent in the election] was there, and Russell obviously did know the Camanachd Association members pretty well. He was all kitted out in his kilt and so were they and he was part of the formal procession party that went out from the stand which was thronged with several hundred people to the centre of the pitch and Russell was going to shake hands with the assembled two shinty teams.

"My mother, who had on some high heels and some tremendously trendy and colourful outfit, looked at this and thought ‘I should be there’, so you just saw this party of kilted, middle-aged and above gents meandering across to the centre line, then suddenly, out of the stands, my mother sort of sprints onto the pitch with her high heels on and basically with an attitude of ‘I’m not being cut out of this’. And actually what happened then was gradually people started laughing, not at her but kind of with her, because they saw she had the courage of the moment where either you do it or you flunk it, and she did it.

“Interestingly, at that point, the BBC actually had Russell Johnston winning the election – they declared the election the night before it was actually called, how silly of them.
“That win was also tremendously important for the SNP. As a party, we had just come out of the worst general election we’d ever had – we lost nine out of the 11 seats that we held – and so her winning that victory in the European elections just weeks after gave the party an enormous boost.

"That was also first past the post, it wasn’t PR then, and the result was 39,000 to 36,000, so it was actually very close and she won it by campaigning in a way that a lot of her opponents, people like Brian Wilson [former Labour politician] and some of her other opponents, said was down to there being no campaigning force like her ever in Scotland. That was quite a graceful thing to say.”

For many Scots, Winnie Ewing is simply the Mother of the SNP – Madame Ecosse, as she became known – but I wonder what it’s like to have a parent who is also a political icon. I’ve questioned Hilary Benn on the same. What do you rebel against when your mother or father is seen as more radical than you? Fergus Ewing talks with such genuine pride of his mother it seems untainted by any feeling of being pushed to one side by a political personality that had the danger of overshadowing his own. 

“I always thought it was an immense plus having my mother as a politician because I got to go to places and see people I wouldn’t otherwise have done. I remember when she was MP for Hamilton she took me on a Highland tour and we went to Wick where she met the Provost. I remember him in all his chains and there was lots of councillors and other bigwigs and I was sort of sitting at the meeting getting a bit bored, quite frankly, but at the end the Provost said to me – I must have been about eleven – ‘Fergus, do you want to be a politician, an MP, when you grow up?’ and I said ‘oh no, that would be much too hard work’ and then I said ‘but I wouldn’t mind being a Provost though’. 

“Seriously, it was a tremendous advantage and I always thought of it that way. I honestly never thought of it at all as being anything other than tremendous fun and interesting, and I’d go and listen to her speeches and they were very, very powerful, in a way that very few people before or since can master. 

“She had the reason and the passion in her speeches and it’s not often that they are so closely allied. She had the capacity to communicate from the public platform in a way that really connected with others and I think actually what she did was first rekindle the sense that women are voters too in Scotland. It was an incredibly male chauvinist society at the time and she went round factories in Hamilton and she inspired the female workforce who previously had regarded politics as a male-dominated jungle, which it probably was.  

"In those days, it was just assumed that the Labour male would get elected – there was never really any sense that they were in a contest. That is, until the last couple of days of her campaign when I think suddenly they got a bit worried.”

Was she on a conscious journey to close the political gender gap?

“No, I think she just instinctively believed that women should get on. But she encountered the glass ceiling, as I’m sure all professional women did then, far too many times. So she did a lot to turn that around and if she hadn’t won in Hamilton, things may have been a lot different. She did sort of give confidence to a movement – the SNP – that hitherto had been regarded, perhaps not quite as eccentrics, but certainly I think as a fringe, not a kind of mainstream party with saleability. It didn’t really have that before. It always had a lot of very clever people but collectively, it wasn’t seen as much more than a very minor party that had a lot of interesting people but no real coherence.”

It seems the SNP was and is a family affair for Fergus Ewing. Both his parents were ardent nationalists and while Winnie Ewing is better known as an elected member as an MP, an MEP and latterly as an MSP, her husband also stood and was an SNP councillor for some time. Fergus Ewing entered the Scottish Parliament in 1999 at the same time as his mother and his late wife, Margaret Ewing, who had also served as an MP. His younger sister, Annabelle Ewing, followed when she was elected as an MP in 2001 and then as an MSP in 2011. Obviously, they all stood on an SNP ticket. 

“Dad used to say that he put me down for SNP membership from birth that was just the way of it. He was an accountant and he also became a councillor so we would be put out every other Sunday to put leaflets through letterboxes, we didn’t have much choice in the matter. I guess the SNP is just in the blood.

“However, I felt very strongly that it is better to go and do something in life and then go into politics, so I always thought I’d like to be a lawyer, run my own business and that’s what I did – after qualifying I spent about 20 years as a solicitor and as a small business person, employing people and dealing with things that small businesses have to do. 

“I never planned that I would go into politics at any point but it just gradually became something I wanted to do. I always supported independence, I’ve been a member of the SNP since I was old enough to join and I felt I wanted to do something else with my life. I stood in ’92 and ’97 for Westminster. None of us could expect to get elected really back then. You know, John Swinney made a similar journey which is that when we stood, we expected to lose, I mean, we didn’t go around saying 'we’re going to lose', we said 'we are going to win', but we had to really muster up that sincerity because it just wasn’t expected that we would win.

"None of us now at the top of the SNP in terms of ministerial roles, none, or very few, ever expected it would be a job or a career – it was basically a passionate pursuit. It was something you did as well as your job or being in business. I think that’s given us an advantage because we’ve had a wee bit more experience to draw on and I’m not belittling people who haven’t done anything other than politics – look at Charles Kennedy, he was a natural and some people have that gift and therefore that’s fine – but one of the problems with politics over the last two decades is, in British politics, too many of the leaders don’t seem to have done much other than politics.”

I tell him that he is often described as being on the right of the party, largely based on preconceptions about his views on things like fox hunting – he abstained – and on Section 28 – he abstained. And superficially, he also looks a tad buttoned up and a bit like a conservative bank manager. He describes himself as a moderate.

“Well, I’m not a socialist but I’m not a right-winger. I see myself as kind of in the centre. I’m very happy with the social democratic stance the SNP takes and I’ve full support for the idea that prosperity and fairness need to be allied. So, for instance, I find the level of bonuses that have been paid by companies that are making losses to be abhorrent and frankly, a kind of virus in the belief in the markets – if people see that the markets are abused by those at the top who award themselves huge rewards when they have nothing to reward themselves for, it’s hardly surprising that people get wholly disenchanted with the system.

"I think the FM’s approach of the living wage and the business pledge is entirely a fair approach. Also, I think it’s very important that we are not making this prescriptive, we’re doing it as an invitation and we’re going on a journey with business where we listen to them carefully as to how we get to the destination. 

“I don’t think it’s a particular revelation to say that I do get frustrated at how things which are desirable can either be thwarted or delayed by either a very large dose of rules, regulations, or what can be seen as normal bureaucracy, and the process can become the enemy of the good. Therefore, getting businesses going, getting investment going, can be a painstakingly slow business. And that makes me impatient.

“The SNP continues to be a party comprised of people who are, by and large, anti-establishment but now in a sense in Scotland, at least, we are the establishment and the skill is retaining that sense of questioning.

“I am anti-establishment in the sense that as a minister I constantly question; I very rarely just accept any proposal of a serious nature, especially if it involves spending taxpayers’ money. I will always try to give such a proposal thorough scrutiny, proper analysis and careful consideration and that in itself is challenging because very often paper submissions are put up to the minister with a short timescale and also, one has to have faith in the good work that civil servants do. 

“I’ve got tremendous admiration for the civil servants and, moreover, some of the big mistakes in politics in the UK over the past few decades has been a failure to listen properly to civil servants.

"One of the books I’ve most enjoyed reading recently is the book by Professors King and Crewe, called The Blunders of Our Governments. If there is one book I recommend to our new intake of 56 MPs it would be that because if politicians had listened to the civil servants and some of the people, businesses and community interests outwith government about the Millennium Dome, the Child Support Agency, the body that was set up to deal with confiscation of assets from criminals, various IT systems that were brought in for the health service, etc, then some of these enormous blunders would never have occurred. 

“I’m certainly a pragmatist and I very rarely swither. I usually know exactly what I want to do and have also fairly clear ideas about how we can try to do it. For example, this morning I was chairing the ninth meeting of the Scottish Coal Industry Taskforce and one of the good things about this work is that we have Murdo Fraser, Willie Rennie and Alex Rowley on the group and today we agreed by all parties that I would, with representatives of the taskforce, be part of a delegation to go and have a reasoned discussion with Damian Hinds [the UK treasury minister] and Amber Rudd [UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change]. That was agreed by a pragmatic approach allied with the sense that particularly now we [the SNP] are so overwhelmingly strong in Scotland that we have to listen to those who disagree with us.

“I also think that our task now, or one of our tasks now, is to reach out to the 55 [who voted ‘No’]. We need to think consciously about taking seriously and with respect the arguments, the main arguments that the 55 have.

“I feel this very strongly, that we have to show respect to our opponents, to give them a platform where they can make their voice heard and show that we are not, what I’ve seen one or two people very glibly refer to, as a one-party state. We have to demonstrate that we are willing to listen and sometimes that we get things wrong. I think if we were to adopt any other approach we would be storing up some trouble for ourselves, but what I’ve seen from the general approach of us all is we do seek to bring in other parties to discussions, to working groups, to taskforces where we can and that in a sense is a form of pragmatism but it’s also doing the right thing.

“It is often more important to get the critical voices, the people that are willing to speak out against the prevailing Scottish Government view. After all, what’s the point of getting people into a room just as a sort of Glee Club to agree with you?

“That way of working covers how we deal with, for example, our oil and gas strategy which was devised that way, and working in renewables, working in our heat plans which are getting a bit more prominence now, with geothermal energy, or with hydro power, or biomass. With each of these and a whole load of other issues, there’s little groupings that I normally chair or convene once a quarter or something like that which provide us with a huge amount of beneficial impact.”

Despite all the planning and liaison work, I wonder if the SNP Government dodged a bullet in Scotland voting ‘No’ to independence given the plummeting oil price.

“No… look, I can’t really understand why Scotland as a country shouldn’t be independent. That’s the way I look at it. I mean, most countries in the world are independent, that’s the norm. Also, I think the argument I hear most from people who don’t like nationalism is that it causes wars and conflict. Well, that’s not even nationalism in my view, it’s totalitarianism and fascism. If you look at the independent countries in the world, the Scandinavian and European countries, small countries don’t tend to create wars anyway, frankly, so my view has been that it would be absurd this country shouldn’t run its own affairs. And why? Because of the process I described.

"I mean, who else has got the interest to make sure that we do our best for people who live and work in Scotland? And that argument applies across the range. That argument came across quite well in the referendum – who can do better than the people who live and work here in terms of reaching collectively the right decisions for our future? Why should a government in London do as well for Scotland when their focus is not here?

“A good example, which I think only I can give and maybe no one else can about the difference on a principled level about who can run Scotland best, is illustrated in the Grangemouth crisis. I was involved, not as a main player, but I was involved in almost all the discussions with the former FM. I was on the phone for most of the Scottish Cabinet sub-committee discussions, so I was in all those discussions for the whole period, and I was also, however, the person that phoned into the UK sub-committee that dealt with it.

"And I tell you what the difference was, and it’s an observation that only I could make and it’s not meant with any malice, but the difference between the approach was that the UK Government participants felt as if they were spectators watching something, and we were participants, playing in it and ensuring that we tried to influence the outcome. That was my perspective and I don’t mean that in any malign way, that’s the way it was. We had to sort this out, it was our country, it’s our only refinery and we had to come up with the solution and that really did concentrate the minds of us all in that work. In London it was not their prime consideration, why should it be?”

How then is his relationship with the new Conservative UK Energy Secretary, Amber Rudd?

“It’s early days yet and we try to have constructive relations with the UK and I met Amber last October in Paris which may sound quite romantic but it wasn’t – we discussed anaerobic digestion, actually. But we struck up quite a pleasant initial rapport and now she is the Energy Secretary, I have made it plain that I want to get things done. 

“For example, I’m determined to get the islands of Scotland connected to the mainland on the grid. At the moment they are disconnected in a very real sense from the UK and assuming the UK Government are not separatists, which in this instance they are not, they will hold to the promises made by the previous Secretary, Ed Davey. I’m hoping that whatever our differences we can see specific concrete things delivered and one of them is to connect the islands. 

“Why is this so important? Because the unleashing of the renewable power in the western and northern isles will generate a tremendous windfall bonus for electricity from renewable sources, but at the same time, it will generate a substantial annual income – in the case of Shetland as much as £30 million – and that income generated can then be used to tackle things like fuel poverty, which is the worst in the UK if not Europe in these islands. So that would be a form of natural justice, that a searingly engrained and desperately difficult problem like tackling fuel poverty with the housing on the islands could actually be tackled by the windfall gains from money earned from the same wind that creates the fuel poverty.

"I did set this out with Amber Rudd the other week to ensure that she is aware of how strongly I feel about this but at the same time I said. ‘look, you’ve got a manifesto pledge [about getting rid of onshore wind subsidies] and therefore as we do, you have to set about implementing that,’ but I suggested not rushing into it and exposing herself to judicial review.”

That’s a typical iron fist in a velvet glove retort from Fergus Ewing. He has a dry and self-deprecating sense of humour along with a pragmatic and business-like approach which has held him in good stead with previous UK colleagues during difficult negotiations. Whether it works as well with Amber Rudd as it did with her predessecor, Ed Davey, remains to be seen. However, given that in the days following our interview she has confirmed her government’s intention to end onshore wind subsidies earlier than planned, Ewing might find that relationship a little less easy.

As one of the most enduring of the SNP ministers and as son of Winnie, husband of Margaret, sister of Annabelle and now partner of Fiona – a strong woman in her own field of medicine and father to seven-year-old Natasha – Fergus Ewing now has yet another strong woman, Nicola Sturgeon, in his life. Does he just naturally assume the women in his life are in control?

“Well, I have always thought women were in charge,” he laughs. “You see, my mother was in charge and my dad was at home. It’s absolutely no problem for me whatsoever because it is the norm for me. I’ve now got a seven-year-old daughter, Natasha, who is just a joy and happy with life and Fiona and I were enjoying an evening out with friends recently when Natasha was heard explaining that her daddy wasn’t the First Minister but he was the last minister which put me in my place. Very funny Natasha, thank you.”

So, will Natasha be the next politician in the Ewing dynasty?
“Well, I’ve actually told Nicola already just to make way in circa 2037 for Natasha. The FM seemed to be quite relaxed.”