Generation game: Two presiding officers on devolution at 25

Sir David Steel, the Scottish Parliament’s first presiding officer, is something of an expert in the parliament building. Although he never actually worked in it – his entire term in the speaker’s chair was spent in the General Assembly Hall on Edinburgh’s Mound – much of his time was taken up worrying about the construction of it.

“The opening years were fixated on this building,” he tells me as we sit down with current presiding officer Alison Johnstone. “We’re sitting in what was the most expensive part of the entire building – Queensberry House. We were told that it was in good shape for restoration, but it wasn’t. Per square foot this was the most expensive part [of the construction project]. It was well worth it though, because a historic house in Edinburgh was restored.”

Queensberry House was built for the master of the Scottish mint in the 17th century, was bought by the first Duke of Queensberry not long after and is said to be haunted by the ghost of a kitchen boy who was supposedly roasted and eaten by the second duke’s son the day the Acts of Union were signed. It is now where the offices of the presiding officer, deputy presiding officers and the parliament’s chief executive are situated. It is also home to the Donald Dewar Library, a light, bright room stacked with the political tomes, newspaper cuttings and lighter reading choices of the late first first minister.

I’ve come to the library on an early summer’s day to meet both Steel and Johnstone on the 25th anniversary of devolution. The role of presiding officer has changed significantly in the years since Steel – the former Liberal leader who led his party into an alliance with the Social Democratic Party that ultimately led to the creation of the Liberal Democrats – was appointed in 1999. He and Johnstone are here to tell me just how much, starting with how they each came to fill the speaker’s role.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” says Steel about his own appointment. “Jim Wallace [former Scottish Liberal Democrat leader and Scotland’s first deputy first minister] and Donald Dewar agreed that I should be presiding officer. They cooked it up between them.”

By the time the Scottish Parliament opened in July 1999, Steel had had a long career in the House of Commons, becoming the Baby of the House when he was first elected the MP for Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles in a 1965 by-election and going on to represent successor constituency Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale until 1997. Having campaigned for devolution alongside Wallace and Dewar, he entered the House of Lords after leaving the Commons in 1997 (he later stood down after admitting that he failed to investigate claims that the Liberal MP Cyril Smith was a child abuser) before joining Holyrood on the regional list in 1999. Appointing him speaker was, he jokes, a way for Wallace and Dewar to “get rid” of him.

Like Steel, Johnstone’s first brush with Holyrood was campaigning for a devolved Scottish parliament, in her case as part of the cross-party Scotland Forward group. Once the parliament was established, she worked as an assistant to Robin Harper of the Scottish Greens, before going on to stand for that party at the local level in 2003. She was not successful on her first attempt but won a seat on City of Edinburgh Council in 2007, the same year she became co-convener of the Greens alongside Harper. Then, in 2011, she entered parliament as an additional member on the Lothian list. Following the 2021 election she put herself forward to become Holyrood’s sixth presiding officer and was elected unopposed.

“It’s such a key role within parliament,” Johnstone says, explaining why she chose to stand and why she had been willing, like Steel and all the other POs who served between them, to resign her party membership to fulfil the role.

“There’s a real opportunity there to ensure that all members are able to optimally represent their constituents and do their best for people across Scotland. That really appealed to me. I had had the benefit of sitting in two previous sessions of parliament and, like Sir David, my first dealing with the parliament was through campaigning for it. I thought it was so important to have a parliament here that was accessible to people. It has made a difference to people’s day-to-day lives and here we are 25 years later reflecting on what’s been achieved.”

Between them they reel off numerous achievements, including getting the building completed in the face of an increasingly hostile press and public that had grown impatient after the timescale for moving in slipped from 2001 to 2004 and the cost spiralled from £40m to more than £400m.

That is all history now – Steel notes that “no one remembers the hassle” and Johnstone agrees that “the building is so well regarded now” – but Steel tells Johnstone he had a much easier time as presiding offer than she does now precisely because the trouble with the building, which was designed by Spanish architect Enric Miralles, was pretty much the hardest thing he had to contend with.

“This part we’re sitting in was designed to be the walk-through part from Enric Miralles’s part to the parliament building,” he recalls. “I remember that we decided it wasn’t big enough. I had dinner with him and he made a drawing on a paper napkin. Those were the bits that are now the roof in the foyer. It added to the cost – I don’t know how they ever arrived at the £40m estimate – but I wish I still had that napkin.”

Yet while the building’s design was supposed to represent the openness and accessibility of Scotland’s democracy, Steel suggests it is that openness and accessibility that have created the biggest headaches for Johnstone. Indeed, following a series of disruptions to First Minister’s Questions at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 she was forced to introduce a ticketing system and mobile phone ban to try to prevent protestors from holding up parliamentary business on a weekly basis.

“Has that worked?” Steel asks her.

“Yes,” Johnstone affirms. “A lot of parliaments had this in place before we did. We’ve been very open but when you’re having disruptions that affect members’ ability to represent their constituents’ interests you have to do something. We want every minute of First Minister’s Questions being used to put forward the questions of members.”

“It’s interesting that you’ve had that problem, which I never had,” Steel says. “I don’t remember any protests – there must have been some but I don’t remember any, which is in itself significant.”

It is not just certain visitors to the parliament that can cause problems for the presiding officer, but certain members too. When we meet, Johnstone has just had a series of run-ins with outgoing Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross who, despite repeatedly being told not to, has used FMQs to repeatedly goad First Minister John Swinney by using the nickname ‘Honest John’. Nicknames are not tolerated in the chamber, Johnstone kept telling him, but still he has persisted. 

Thinking back to his own time in the chair, Steel says there was only really one MSP whose behaviour he had to police. “They were all well behaved except for one and that was Tommy Sheridan,” he says. 

“The greatest things in the chamber were the microphones, though, because I could switch them off. I said to him ‘if you misspeak again, I’ll switch you off’ and he did and so I did.” 
Turning to Johnstone, he asks: “Have you ever used that?”

“I’ve not actually used the switch that would turn all the microphones off,” she says.

“It’s a much rougher job than it was in my day,” Steel tells her. “Social media has a lot to answer for. I didn’t have that problem. Members are a bit less well-behaved now.”

“People come into parliament because they’re passionate about an issue or have got involved in a campaign,” Johnstone responds. “They come in from all sorts of different backgrounds. I campaigned for the parliament, I found myself employed by an MSP, was elected to a local authority then was here for two sessions as an MSP. I feel like I’ve seen the parliament evolve and I’ve seen it from different perspectives. People are as passionate as they always were and social media has enabled us to engage with people in a different sense, but the news cycle has changed. When I worked for Robin something would happen and we’d wait until the next day to see it in the papers. Now it’s instantaneous. That might make things seem more frenetic.”

There have been other big changes since Steel’s time, most notably to the way parliament operates. Following the independence referendum in 2014 the Smith Commission, which was led by Lord Smith of Kelvin, extended the powers of devolution, bringing a raft of changes including the ability to amend the Scottish electoral system and the capacity to be more creative with income taxes – something the current SNP government has been embracing with gusto.

Given the pressures that brought, Ken Macintosh, who was presiding officer from 2016 until 2021, established the Commission on Parliamentary Reform specifically to assess whether parliament could cope with those extra powers. Chaired by former Scottish Electoral Commissioner John McCormick, the commission reported in 2017, laying out a series of changes it said were required to make parliament “stronger and more effective”. Those included ending the practice of publishing leaders’ questions ahead of FMQs, extending the legislative process from three stages to five, and changing the way committee conveners are appointed so it is not tied to how many MSPs a party has.

Though the recommendations have yet to be fully acted on, Johnstone says it is vital that parliamentary processes are reviewed again and again.

“I’m really keen, particularly with the 25th anniversary of the parliament, that we always need to be reviewing what we do to ensure that the way we work is as effective as it can be,” she says. “I want the parliament to be as responsive as it can be. Given the speed of the news cycle there are things we can do at the moment with urgent questions, but that can mean last-minute changes to the parliamentary timetable. That means shifting business but we also need to be as family friendly as we can be. I feel now that if we were drawing up a template for a parliament, it probably wouldn’t be the same as what we have.”

Steel says he agrees with the conclusion of Macintosh’s commission that there should be changes to the way committee conveners are elected and adds that, if he had his time again, he’d be pushing for a revamp to the way members themselves are elected.

“I’d like to see a fresh start for the committees,” he says. “The committee system is underdeveloped at the moment. There was a time when the government of the day controlled the committees and that was wrong. They ought to be independent and they ought to have the chair independently elected. That and the electoral system are two things I’d change.

“I was a list member but the electoral system was cobbled together when the parliament was established. The Labour Party didn’t want anything to do with the Lib Dems’ attitude to [proportional representation] electoral reforms, but I feel that the resulting division between full and regional members is always there. That’s a change I’d make but [turning to Johnstone] I don’t know if you’d share that view?”

Johnstone, who has represented the Lothian region since being elected via the list system in 2011, says she does not, but that she has embarked on a series of visits to the eight electoral regions to find out what the people living in them think. So far she has been to the South of Scotland, holding a series of meetings along with Borders Community Action, Development Trusts Association Scotland and Burnfoot Community Futures in May. Next on the agenda is a trip to Shetland in September. The point, she says, “is to enable local communities to learn more about the work of the Scottish Parliament and for the Scottish Parliament to learn more about what the people of Scotland want from it”.

“My experience has been very positive, having the opportunity to represent the people of Lothian in parliament,” she says. “The parliament has become an integral part of people’s lives, but while we’re closer to folk than Westminster is it’s still not possible for everyone to get here. I’m doing the visits to the eight parliamentary regions because I want to understand what people want from their parliament. I want to know what their experiences are, what they’d like to see changed.”

“I think that’s very good – I never did anything like that,” Steel says.

“But you obviously had your own challenges in the early days – it was quite an undertaking to bed-in a new initiative,” Johnstone responds.

Ultimately, while the job of the presiding officer might have changed in the years since Steel sat in the chair when parliament was still up on The Mound, for Johnstone it remains about serving the people of Scotland and ensuring their parliament is as accessible as it can possibly be.

“It’s quite a privilege to be only the sixth person in this job,” she says. “Each presiding officer has had their own focus and way of doing things and each session of parliament is so different, but it’s such a privilege.”

And in Steel, who tunes in to FMQs on Scottish Parliament TV on a weekly basis, she has found herself an avid fan.

“I’m full of admiration for the presiding officer,” he says. “I think she does a great job.”