It is the Monday before the election, and as I walk back from the Stornoway woods with my little dog, we encounter a small group of canvassers wearing teal rosettes. Malcolm McTaggart, the Reform candidate for the Western Isles, greets me with a calm demeanor and a broad grin. He hands me a leaflet. 'If elected,' it states, 'he would prioritise family, community and country, backed by the old Stornoway Town Council motto, "God's Providence is our Inheritance."' We exchange vague murmurs about the campaign, and I quietly recall a dreadful tragedy.
McTaggart, one of eleven children, was raised in Aberfeldy. In 1994, the family—devout Pentecostals—moved to Lewis. On 4 June 2007, his father Joseph, 60, and baby brother Daniel, 12, drowned off the west side of Lewis. Joseph's body was recovered within hours. For weeks, like most of my neighbours, I daily scoured the shore for Daniel. He was found after a month by a shaken local crofter, just yards from the grave where the child soon joined his father. 'I've never forgotten the support we had,' says Malcolm McTaggart quietly, 'the support of all the community.' Nor have we forgotten his mother's matchless dignity and faith at the time.
The Unique Seat of the Western Isles
The Western Isles is a striking seat in many ways. The boundaries of both its Holyrood and Westminster iterations are coterminous, guaranteed by statute—though the electorate is barely 21,000—and unchanged since the constituency's birth in 1918. Officially, it has been called Na h-Eileanan An Iar since 2005, though no one uses that guttural moniker in real life lest some panicked soul attempt the Heimlich Manoeuvre.
Alone in the Highlands, we have never elected a Tory nor, since 1931, a Liberal. It was the first constituency anywhere, in 1970, to return a Scottish National Party candidate at a general election—the fondly remembered Donald Stewart—and has been a Nat/Lab tussle ever since. Candidates we Outer Hebrideans have loftily spurned include big names: W S Morrison, later Speaker of the House of Commons; and Iain Macleod, who died as Edward Heath's Chancellor of the Exchequer and was once memorably damned by Lord 'Bobbity' Salisbury as 'too clever by half.' Twice, too, in the Liberal interest, Donny MacLeod, subsequently of Pebble Mill At One fame—and, in 1983, Brian Wilson, not the mellow figure he cuts these days. Once, at hustings in Harris, a little old man stood up and asked if he were a Communist. Wilson exploded in a tomato-faced word-salad of some duration. 'Well,' said the pensioner, in halting English, 'if you are not a Communist, you certainly sound like one.'
Stewart apart, in 1987, no Parliamentary representative has ever been allowed to retire undefeated: only in 2024 we dispensed with the services of Angus MacNeil, who had fallen out with the SNP, ran rather desperately as an Independent and limped in third.
An Evening with the Nationalists
It is the Wednesday evening after Easter, and some sixty of us gather in the suite of a Stornoway hotel for an open-to-all-comers 'town hall' thrown by the Nationalists. Given the fuss over ferries and the like, you might expect pickets at the door, if not a mob gesticulating with scythes, but no—there is neither protest nor disruption. Alasdair Allan, our defending MSP, and John Swinney are both slyly smart in Harris Tweed jackets. They deftly field a lot of questions: wind turbines, fuel poverty (some 80% of all local households are in its grip), the guga hunt, and, inevitably, ferries, on which the First Minister puts his apologetic hands up. There is surprising audience concern about the abuse professional politicians endure on social media. Swinney and Allan say quietly that it is far worse for women. Telling a story against himself, the First Minister ruefully recalls one shaken female colleague's thoughts about some thug's online tirade—at which he thoughtlessly flared, 'Goodness, you don't read the comments, do you?' Finally, they are asked who were their personal political mentors. Allan is studiously vague. Swinney invokes the Litany of Saints—Stewart, Winnie, Gordon Wilson and Margaret Ewing. It is only afterwards you realise neither mentioned Alex Salmond.
Earlier that day, Swinney was accosted on the Stornoway streets by a woman from Oban—who, in extraordinary discourtesy, crashed him in the middle of a TV interview, railed about Palestine, and seemed to think Scotland was already independent. On brighter notes, the Nationalist buddies will enjoy flat whites at An Taigh Cèilidh—Stornoway's dedicated Gaelic café; thoughtfully, phonetic instructions in how to order your brew in the language of Eden are posted in the window—and, on the morrow, hit the Isle of Harris Distillery.
Why No Pitchforks?
There is a good reason why the First Minister's visit has not brought out the pitchforks. Swinney is well known and widely liked in the Outer Hebrides. He has enjoyed cycling holidays here for many years and rather impresses me, recalling his last visit some months ago, by not just detailing the ferry routes he took but, quite correctly, the name of every vessel. The complexity of the archipelago—there are fifteen inhabited islands, sweeping in an arc off western Scotland like a kite—is a big reason why the powers-that-be have always balked from expanding it: it is over forty years since it was last seriously suggested Skye might be added. An MP or MSP has to be able to 'service' his seat, and it is difficult enough to cover the Outer Hebrides as it is: Alasdair Allan spends two-thirds of his life on a plane, aboard a ferry or in a hotel. (For recreation, the Borderer bashfully allows, he enjoys cutting his own peats.)
The Labour Opposition
For months, in the glove compartment of my car, I have been carrying a little history of Caledonian MacBrayne (in the good old days) I keep meaning to drop off for our Labour MP, Torcuil Crichton. On a recent Saturday I all but handbrake-turn when I pass him on Stornoway's Westview Terrace (which used to be Ropework Road, until residents protested it was far too common). The lofty Tribune of the People accompanies what seems to be a 14-year-old boy in tweed and jeans, who turns out to be our diminutive Labour candidate, Donald MacKinnon.
As late as last autumn, the soft-spoken crofter would have been a shoo-in and Alasdair Allan resigned to getting his jotters. But that was before the dumpster-fire now unfolding in Whitehall, under a Prime Minister simply not up to the job and without the self-awareness to quit. These days, it is Allan who bounds perkily around town, as wee MacKinnon is reduced to a trudge.
Campaigning Traditions
Campaigning here will never be easy. The traditional village meetings—a Hebridean candidate of yore could do three or four in the same night, often followed by the same carload of cheerful hecklers—ceased from 1999; hardly anyone was now turning up. There is a good, 1945 tale—'A Vote for Macleod is a Vote for Churchill!'—when, after a night of being slagged off rotten at meetings from Barvas to Galson, Iain Macleod was returning to town over the moor when he happened on his tormentors' broken-down motor. And gave them a genial lift to Stornoway.
