Jim Murphy said his political awakening came from growing up poor in Glasgow and white in apartheid South Africa, where he moved as a child. He spent just six years in Cape Town, leaving to escape conscription. However, that brief spell taught him a bit about dealing with bullies.
As his career as a politician came to an abrupt end over the weekend, he faced down the latest voice of the Left to obstruct him. Len McCluskey, head of the Unite union, had demanded Murphy’s resignation as Scottish Labour Party leader and on Saturday, he got it.
Despite narrowly winning a no-confidence motion, Murphy announced he would step aside but not before denouncing the “destructive power” of the union boss.
He said he knew he had been blamed for Labour’s defeat “by the London leadership of Unite someone who pays occasional fleeting visits to our great country”.
Murphy, a Blairite who won his Commons seat in the 1997 general election and lost it to the SNP two weeks ago, ran an, at times, ill-judged campaign to save his party from humiliation.
He lurched away from his natural middle ground in a last-ditch attempt to woo back voters from the Nationalists and was accused of lacking authenticity.
Among those doing the accusing were McCluskey, who had backed a left-wing rival (hands up if you can remember his name) to Murphy as Scottish leader last autumn.
McCluskey represents the out-of-touch dinosaur wing of the Labour movement, a throwback to the Red Flag and Clause Four days, pre-Blair, even pre-Brown.
Short memories
Murphy, he said, had been “at the epicentre of an ideology that alienated the Scottish working class for years and years and years”, forgetting perhaps that Labour won 56 seats in Scotland in Blair’s landslide and increased its share of the vote in 2001.
Also quick to blame Murphy for losing Labour the election was one Ian Davidson, the ex-MP for Glasgow South West and the former chairman of the Commons Scottish Affairs Committee.
All but invisible on the national stage, he had the gumption to attack Murphy for not being “stimulating” enough as a leader and urged Ed Miliband to take over the campaign in Scotland.
Davidson, who sparked a walkout by the Nats on his committee after alleged bullying, clearly didn’t spend long enough in his homeland to realise that Miliband was a far greater electoral liability than Murphy, even more unpopular here than David Cameron.
Also joining the chorus of disapproval against Murphy was Paul Sinclair, an adviser to Johann Lamont, a now-forgotten Scottish Labour leader who played no role in the election.
So much for the bullies inside his own camp. Outside, they came mainly from that extreme element of nationalism.
The likes of Yes agitator Sean Clerkin, practising tactics of intimidation familiar to the far left and far right, stalked Murphy in May and during the independence referendum last year.
Standing up for the Union literally in Murphy’s case and often from atop an Irn Bru crate was seen by some in Labour as a betrayal.
However, Labour is a Unionist party and can hardly pretend otherwise, despite haemorrhaging votes to the SNP on May 7.
Easy target
Murphy became an easy target for missile-hurling Nationalists and sniping Labour comrades, because he entered the fray which is more than can be said for those now queuing up to put the boot in.
His 100 towns in 100 days during the referendum probably did as much as anything in that campaign to secure a No vote. It didn’t do his profile any harm either and he was the obvious choice to rescue the party north of the border.
Although ambitious, or perhaps because he was ambitious, he cannot have relished such a task. He had five months to improve the fortunes of a party beaten by the SNP in two successive Holyrood elections and turn around a decade of decay.
He did not perform well in the televised debates in May and seemed to lose his way, seizing on peripheral issues, such as reintroducing alcohol at football matches, to reconnect with Labour’s traditional heartlands.
He will be forever associated with a disastrous period in Labour’s history, particularly in Scotland and no doubt he will accept his share of the blame. However, he does not deserve the opprobrium from his erstwhile colleagues.
He has graciously agreed to stay on for a month to help launch the fightback. He should be listened to carefully, since he has spoken to far more grassroots supporters and former supporters in the past year than anyone else in the party.
What happens to Scottish Labour next is anyone’s guess but in losing Murphy, it has lost its best hope of recovery.