Russell Findlay: I'm a Tory because it's the anti-establishment party

This month, two days before Christmas, it will be nine years to the day that Russell Findlay answered a knock at his front door in Glasgow to sign for a parcel. But instead of an early Christmas present, the ‘delivery man’ threw sulphuric acid in his face. With his right eye stinging and his skin “on fire”, Findlay jumped on his assailant, who had also lunged at him with a six-inch knife. Aware that his little girl was in the house and could also be in danger, Findlay fought back, pushing the attacker off the doorstep and onto the driveway. His 10-year-old daughter witnessed this terrifying scene but still had the wherewithal to rush past the grappling pair to alert neighbours who then called the police and Findlay’s assailant was taken away. But not before Findlay could characteristically scoff at his hitman’s ineptitude.

This life-changing event was basically a payback for Findlay doing his job of exposing Glasgow’s criminal underworld as a crime reporter with both The Sunday Mail and The Scottish Sun newspapers. It was an attack he had feared might one day come, which is why he didn’t have a picture byline, never agreed to do television interviews and wasn’t even registered on the voters’ roll for fear that his home address would be made public.

A year after the attack, Findlay’s assailant, William Burns, a member of one of Scotland’s most notorious criminal gangs and with a string of convictions behind him, was sentenced to a 10-year jail sentence with the addition of a five-year post-release supervision. 

Thanks to the quick thinking of his young daughter, neighbours, and the care of the NHS, Findlay’s sight was saved, and his face no longer shows the scars caused by the acid burns to his skin, but his evident hypervigilance reveals a deeper and longer-lasting consequence of the attack. He went on to publish what he describes as a “cathartic” book about the events. In it he relates how his then editor at The Scottish Sun failed to inform him of a threat that was made against him in a telephone call in the months that ran up to the acid attack in which the caller had boasted of knowing Findlay’s address, car registration number and other personal details. His editor only revealed this to Findlay in the days after he had left hospital. And although Findlay returned to work, things were not the same. He went on sick leave soon after and eventually reached an agreement to leave.

It’s fair to say Findlay is a man who does not give up easily or succumb to bullies. He’s a complex character with a complicated and interesting past that has helped shape the man he has become, but is also wrapped up in a need to maintain secrecy about where he lives, who he sees, and, crucially, how to protect his daughter from harm.

Findlay was brought up in Milngavie, one of four boys, in essentially a middle-class household that he struggles to describe until settling on “frequently volatile” and, without revealing too many of the details he has shared with me, he no longer has what he describes as a “meaningful relationship” with his parents or brothers. Indeed, he hasn’t seen them for years and says that the last time he spoke to his mother was in the immediate aftermath of the attack and by phone. His daughter now has no contact with her grandparents.

And while Findlay is understandably private about his personal life, for fear of any kind of reprisals from criminals, when it comes to his wider family, there are just too many rabbit holes that he doesn’t want to go down publicly. Suffice to say, he does not describe his childhood as a particularly happy one and says his fierce independence and need to leave home as soon as he practically could tells its own story. The death of his older brother when Findlay was in his early 20s, which was recorded as accidental, only acted as a catalyst for further tensions within an already fractured family and he clearly struggles with how he is meant to deal with that as his parents get older. 

Like many good investigative journalists, Findlay has his own personal backstory which affords him empathy and a drive to make change. He is good company and, with a colourful career behind him, he has also borne the emotional scars of a life operating on the edge. He has been married twice and says, “never again”. And as he wells up as he talks about her, the love of his life is clearly his now 19-year-old daughter, who he won full custody of from his first wife when she was just four. He is precious about keeping her out of the media spotlight and we even agree not to name her or say anything that could identify her or her whereabouts.

Findlay has every reason to fear for his own safety and that of his daughter. He has made powerful enemies through his investigative journalism. The obvious question now is that given how concerned he is about the dangers of being in the public eye, why on earth did he put himself forward, not just as an MSP in 2021, when he stood unsuccessfully in Paisley where William Burns, incidentally, came from, eventually being elected on the West of Scotland list, but to then go on to lead the Scottish Conservatives following the departure of Douglas Ross in that role earlier this year? 

In answer to that, he is typically bullish. Firstly, he emphasises that he would not have done any of this without the full backing of his daughter, but basically, he puts it down to a natural defiance and a refusal to be intimidated.

“Look, I don’t think the personal stuff should have been a block, as messy as some of it is. For me, becoming an MSP or leader and the reasons I put myself forward are largely two-fold, but having been attacked and realising that taking meaningful daily precautions as I did, and not in even having a picture of me in the public domain, it didn’t stop what happened to me, so I knew that hiding away doesn’t help. So that slightly defiant response of ‘how dare you’ kicked in. And then, politically, yes, I’ve experienced the justice system as a journalist that did a lot of stuff around injustice, but I increasingly felt that it’s not just the justice system that needs work, it’s civic Scotland as a whole. It’s this blob. It’s a self-serving thing whereby ordinary people very often feel, whether it be the NHS, or the justice system, or policing, or whatever it might be, just feel completely powerless. You see that as a journalist frequently and you try and help people as best you can, but it became clear to me that being a politician might be more effective.

“And there’s also the whole political paralysis of the constitutional debate, that just fired me up. I would have never described myself as a unionist – we’re not Northern Ireland, right? But when 2014 happened, I was an ordinary punter, I didn’t express my political views, I listened to all the arguments and voted ‘no’. I assumed, naively, that that would be that for a generation. But of course, it wasn’t. And then I just thought to myself, and, well maybe it was a stage of life where those various factors all contributed to my thinking, but I wanted to do something about this, and I put my name forward for selection to the party. I’ve said before that it’s perhaps the worst middle-age crisis in history, I could have bought a sports car or whatever I fancied, but here we are.”

'The whole political paralysis of the constitutional debate...just fired me up.' | David Anderson

Findlay didn’t grow up in a political family, but neither were there any journalists. He says his love of journalism is rooted in growing up in a household that always got The Herald newspaper delivered, and he can remember spreading “this vast newspaper” out on the kitchen table and devouring every word. 

“It was a different era and while kids now are bombarded with stuff all over social media, this felt very real, tangible, you could pick it up and you could read all this fascinating stuff about what’s going on in the world. I would also watch Roger Cook on TV, remember him, The Cook Report, and World in Action, and other programmes like that, but Roger Cook in particular really inspired me. I mean, he would confront South African arms dealers and the like and he’d be right in their face with a camera, and you’d think, my God, that guy’s mad. But actually, I thought, I quite like the look of that. 

“There were no journalists in the family, so I don’t know where this came from, but I was just really drawn to newspapers, and I guess I had to then figure out how to do it. I left school at 17 having not applied myself but knowing I wanted to be a journalist. I tried various routes, but the best option was Napier’s HND, Napier Polytechnic as it was then. I went through the interview with a guy who happened to be a year above me at school, who was really quite confident that he would get his place, and I wasn’t at all confident. And then I got the letter offering me a place and started there in 1991. The course was two years, and I was the first to get a job in my year.

“I started on The Glaswegian in April 1993. It was a free paper distributed to hundreds of thousands of households then, so a big reach. It was all part of MGM and in the same building, the big red Clydeside building, as the Record and Sunday Mail. So, if you were a half decent young hack there, you could have a chance of getting onto one of those great papers and that’s what happened. It felt like I fitted and that’s all I wanted to do. I still remember that thrill of a first byline. That never goes. I honestly don’t know what truly inspired that career choice, but without diving too deep psychologically into it, I don’t like bullies, I don’t like injustice, I like standing up for people, and I’m quite forthright.”

Findlay is, of course, not the first journalist to become a leader of his party and he says the parallels between politics and journalism and a quest to make a difference are clear. But it was his job as a journalist that also gave him an insight into how politics worked.

“I wasn’t a political journalist but of course, I had views as a private person, and politics is kind of into everything, and when I started reporting on the drug war between the Lyons and Daniel families, little did I realise it would become a 20-plus-year drug war in which multiple murders would take place, in which countless shootings and other acts of violence took place, and it would also have its tentacles wrapped around politics.

“At the very outset of that, I realised that one of the gangs had highly questionable connections with local Labour politicians. This was the early 2000s and, essentially, a group of parents in Milton, in Glasgow, came to me with evidence of a drugs gang being given a Glasgow City Council-owned community centre. These parents were rightly concerned that their children were being expected to attend this community centre which they believed was a hub for organised crime, which indeed it was, an attempted murder took place there, and all kinds of other stuff. I attempted to report on that by pointing out that the organised crime group in question had demonstrable links with local politicians and highly questionable links with certain police officers. That’s all matter of fact, it’s in the book that I wrote, Caught in the Crossfire, and the book itself was born out of the fact that as I tried to tell that story fully as a journalist, and for reasons partly due to the limitation of space, but partly also due to the fact it was a Labour-supporting paper, quite often, one hand was tied and things were softened. And so, I decided that the best way of telling this properly would be through the book. It’s a social history. It was a drugs war that, as I said, caused untold damage with essentially two families forming alliances with gangs spanning the M8 corridor from Greenock to Edinburgh. And there’s now two prisons in Scotland where one prison is essentially where the Daniel gang are incarcerated, and the other one where Lyons’ associates are incarcerated. It’s almost North American in that dynamic. That’s how organised and structured organised crime became. So, stemming from that, I grew a fairly dim view of Labour in Glasgow. They were clearly, in the main, but not entirely – I’m sure there’s some good people – a lot of self-serving cronies, and I had been involved in enough stories over the years in respect of that stuff to see what it was all about. 

“In Scotland you forget, well, maybe you don’t forget, Mandy, but many people forget the grip that Labour had on Scotland, the hard grip around government, around local authorities, and the soft grip around civic Scotland and the media, where even  independent, good newspapers would often, as I experienced, pull their punches or give them the benefit of the doubt, to the detriment of getting the full story out there.

“I think when Labour’s support collapsed, almost overnight, people forget how dramatic that was and I think quite often the commentators in Scotland overlook that sleazy, corrupt stuff that was going on before that. If you look at the Red Rose Dinner [in 2002], for example, there was a murder that took place following that where you had had prominent Labour politicians breaking bread with high-level, organised crime, and they should have known better. 

“You can make excuses at ground level sometimes, but having seen Labour’s collapse, I think the SNP has reached the same levels of entitlement, taking the public for granted, looking after their cronies and trying to shut down scrutiny.

“I think from Alex Salmond, through to Nicola Sturgeon and continuing, there has been this fairly unpleasant hostility towards journalism and journalists and any scrutiny. And I know that journalism is not a popularity contest, and I’ve come across some bad faith media stuff in the short time I’ve been doing this, but I know better than to complain about it. I think that they [Salmond and Sturgeon] were particularly hostile. I mean, even taking some of Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid briefings, which were little more than political grandstanding half the time and seeking to build her brand while differentiating from the rest of the UK for no discernible benefit to the people of Scotland, that was often laced with a kind of arch antagonism towards particular journalists that I found to be quite inappropriate and quite disturbing. It’s about shutting journalists down, stopping scrutiny, and that is fundamentally wrong.

“I think journalists, in the main, are quite fortunate in that they develop a good sense of what’s right or wrong, and how things might look in the headline and I bring that sense into this role now. We have been in opposition at Holyrood, by the time of the next election, for 10 years as the second largest party. We’ve been hugely effective in that time. We have called out and stood up to the SNP, often the only party doing so, on a range of issues, not least Gender Recognition Reform. And I would hate to think that it’s only a matter of time before that kind of awareness and that judgement somehow collapses or becomes nullified by entitlement. I think the age [51] that I am coming into this is helpful, and while I don’t take myself too seriously, I take the job very seriously, and I like to think I’ll always know right from wrong.”

Findlay says that he and Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of the UK party, have spoken a number of times and that it is “well understood”, given the “significant devolved powers” to Holyrood, that the Scottish party will have its own identity and, on occasion, its own positioning.

The issue of immigration continues to dominate his UK party at a policy level and be a source of contention, where does he stand on that, and could he support a different kind of approach?

“I think there are two distinct things. I think the conflating of the tragedy of this industrial scale, organised people trafficking, in which children get killed in the Channel on a frequent basis, needs to be addressed, needs to be dealt with as effectively as possible. And what Scotland might need in terms of immigration, lawful immigration, that’s a different conversation. I do think the fundamental thing you cannot help is geography. We are one island, and any notion of Scotland-specific immigration policy, I’ve yet to see how that could be practical. And one of the problems we’ve got, of course, in Scotland, is from people coming to the UK legally or illegally, is that most are choosing not to come to Scotland.

“It’s all very well for the SNP to be grandstanding, with their superiority complex, talking about refugees welcome but they’re a) not choosing to come and b) it’s all very easy to say, isn’t it, when you don’t have to deal with the issue practically to claim some kind of Scottish exceptionalism around the issue of immigration. When they were putting people in hotels around Scotland a few years ago, there were just the same local concerns as you would have experienced in other parts of the UK. 

“Fundamentally though, Kemi and I are on the same page, we’re all Conservatives. We believe in opportunity for all. We believe in a strong economy. We believe in economic growth and good education and all these positive fundamental things. Honestly, I do feel sorry for some of my predecessors who have had to spend a lot of their time defending, or trying to explain certain issues the UK Government, a Conservative government, were responsible for.

“That’s not to say that I’m glad that we are out of government, but the timing is what it is and I can see why I’m actually quite blessed with the opportunity I have just now, where we don’t have that day-to-day comparison and that opposition parties [are] always seeking to link you in Scotland to the activities of your colleagues in London, if they’re doing things that are unpopular or ill-judged. We are seeing, of course, Anas Sarwar suddenly looking like a startled rabbit because suddenly he’s realising that sitting in the Holyrood chamber, with the sense of entitlement that natural order will soon be restored, is not necessarily as clean cut as all that, given the activities of Sir Keir Starmer’s government. 

Findlay speaks at a farmers' protest outside Holyrood | Alamy

“I don’t ever want to sound like I’m positive about not being in government, because in the UK, we will be fighting to return to government as soon as possible. And in Scotland, I’ll be fighting too, to kick the SNP out of government and reclaim the word ‘Tory’ and speak proudly of the values that we have and to show people that actually the policies that we put forward are consistent with their own worldview. 

“I try to use the word ‘Tory’ quite often to reclaim it. But I think a lot of that’s to do with what I regard as the nastiness of the nationalist movement. They have really ramped that up. Senior politicians, and everyone all the way down to the prigs on Twitter, and I think maybe it’s going back to a sort of defiance, like, how dare you? We are as much Scottish as any of you, and we care about our society as much as any of you. We probably disagree as to how that is achieved.

“It’s also too easy for parties like the SNP to still be shouting about Margaret Thatcher as a way to deride the Tories and to deflect from their own failures. I was six years old when Margaret Thatcher came to power. I became an MSP in 2021 after what was 14 harmful years of SNP government, and we were in a permanent state of paralysis due to the constitutional argument. So, I’m more interested in the damage that was done in my lifetime, in my working lifetime, by the SNP and recognising that that’s where the issues lie. You know, John Swinney, and other politicians on the left, will probably be talking about Margaret Thatcher in 100 years’ time. But the point is that in the here and now, they’re responsible for Scottish education, Scottish justice, Scottish healthcare, Scottish transport. They’re responsible for all of that. And in my time, none of that has got any better, and that’s on them, not Margaret Thatcher. They need to start taking responsibility. 

“Nicola Sturgeon liked to style herself as the mother of the nation, which made me feel slightly sick, and obviously there are some live issues we can’t go into, but I think she was a hugely polarising figure. I look back on that video of her in George Square, where she spits and sneers the word ‘Tories’, and I think to myself, that’s not very tolerant. You’re preaching tolerance while saying things in a fairly intolerant, borderline menacing, way. I’d rather be inclusive. 

“But look, I’m under no illusions, we’re not suddenly going to persuade a whole load of SNP voters to vote Conservative, but let’s face it, there’s a good chunk of their MSPs who are conservatives, who, if it wasn’t for this constitutional paralysis, would be arguing for what we argue for, which is a burgeoning, healthy, vibrant economy and giving people the power to lead their own lives, [as] independently as possible. 

“I’ve come in as a new leader with a reasonably decent mandate from the membership. There was a long and healthy contest which everybody wanted, and that’s what we got. I think we’re in a good place. We’ve got 31 MSPs who I’m confident will want to put their shoulders to the wheel for 2026. I would love to grow that number, but the polling being what it is, for me to say, Jo Swinson-style, that I’m going to be first minister, you would just laugh at me. But who’s to say that Scotland couldn’t actually one day have a Conservative first minister or government, or some form of government that includes us. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable admission, but I know a lot of people would think that appalling to consider but that’s my job, to persuade them otherwise. I’m going to fight for every vote, show people that we actually have commonsense values and pragmatism and [an] understanding [of] what their issues are.

“And when I’m knocking on doors as a politician and being told to f**k off, I’m well used to it, it happened all the time as a journalist, but you just kept knocking to get your story. In life, it’s easy to be a passenger and I think a lot of journalists are motivated by a kind of zeal of campaigning. They see things that are wrong and they want to fix them. I looked at journalists who would be more pedestrian in their reporting and sort of following the diary for news, and I would feel slightly jealous of that lack of fire in the belly, because going after the hard stuff was thankless, you rarely made meaningful headway, you upset people, often some very serious people in my case, and it would be much easier to choose the easy path but it wouldn’t have been as rewarding. 

“It’s the same in politics in Scotland, if you want to take on the vested interests in Scotland, take on the blob, whether it be education, justice, healthcare, you need to have the fire in your belly, have the appetite to do it, and I believe you can only meaningfully do so as a Conservative politician. The SNP and Labour are completely beholden to the blob. They’ve built this client state and they’re reliant upon them for their mutual, self-congratulatory survival. And I think being a Conservative in Scotland is a golden opportunity to start calling this stuff out, saying, actually, you’ve had 25 years of devolution and Scotland has stagnated, and its public services have got worse, so it’s time for you to move on. I’m a Tory because it’s the anti-establishment party and I’m reminded of that graffiti that says, ‘All the punks are Tories now’ and I’m fine with that.”