 | 'In his memoir, published in 2000 under the title Lazarus Only Done It Once, Lally explicity accused Jack McConnell, then General Secretary of the Scottish Labour Party, of conspiring to besmirch him, with the tacit endorsement of the late Donald Dewar. Stephen Phelan in the Sunday Herald, 18 th September 2005. |  |
Despite 'retiring' from public life six years ago Pat Lally is back again and has old foes in his sights as he seeks election to Holyrood.
THEY call him Mister Glasgow. Also known as Lazarus. Today, as Patrick James Lally announces his latest and surely his last resurrection into public life, I also hear him referred to as an 'a***hole', a 'chancer', and a 'madman, surrounded by madmen'. Six years after Lally finished his term as lord provost of Glasgow and retired from a long, eventful career in local politics, he has returned, at the age of 79, to stand as an independent contender for the constituency of Cathcart Ð the seat recently vacated by disgraced Labour MSP and convicted firestarter Mike Watson.
Declaring his candidacy at a press conference in Edinburgh, Lally won't comment on Watson's crime and punishment, except to say that he was 'a foolish man, who behaved irresponsibly and has been punished'. He does, however, answer direct questions with the glinting spirit of repartee that always gave him a touch of class and a hint of arrogance as a city boss. Is he not now too old to bear the responsibilities of an MSP? 'Winston Churchill was 78 when he became Prime Minister [for the second time],' says Lally. 'So I've got him beat already.' But how can he possibly run an effective campaign with barely two weeks to go until the by-election on September 29? 'The Lord made the world in seven days,' he says. 'I've got twice as long.
And then he launches the campaign with a song. Ally's Tartan Army Ð the marching song that cheered Scotland to a swift, oafish and total failure in the Argentina World Cup of 1978 Ð has been rewritten as Lally's Cathcart Army. Played through a small boom-box to the malicious delight of assembled Holyrood reporters, the new lyrics attest to the intentions of this veteran public servant. 'When we win the by-election/We're really gonna show/The Scots a better class of politics than they have ever known ...' No, that last line doesn't scan, so it must be sung with a chipmunk-style acceleration of syllables. Which sounds even more excruciating when, after repeated requests, Lally and his support team of independent MSPs Ð former SNP member Margo Macdonald, John Swinburne of the senior citizens' party, and Glasgow hospital campaigner Dr Jean Turner, all wearing smiley campaign rosettes Ð sing it themselves, very badly, a capella.
'You've got to make these things a bit light-hearted,' says Lally later the same day, when we meet at his ordinary house on an ordinary street in Glasgow's Simshill Ð the same house he has lived in for 35 years, where he and his wife Peggy raised their sons. 'You don't want to bore people,' he continues. 'You want to make your campaign lively and interesting. As long as you're deadly serious about what you're actually doing.'
Red-cheeked, watery-eyed and a little raspy, but still sporting the broad civil grin he always wore as a badge of office, Lally is clear about the reasons for this comeback. There are troubles now approaching Cathcart from different directions Ð the planned closure of the Victoria Infirmary, the rumoured takeover of major local employer Scottish Power Ð and as far as he can see, none of the other candidates is likely, or even able, to act against them. 'They are machine-controlled politicians,' he says, referring in particular to Labour's Charles Gordon, whose criticism of Lally's old enemy Jack McConnell doesn't necessarily make him a friend. 'They can't genuinely represent the people of an area if they're dictated to by the party leadership.'
So he will stand alone. He has never really been known as a team player, but now, late in life, and two years after he finally resigned from the Labour Party because it 'stopped listening to its members and its electorate', it seems that Lally has discovered the joy of independence. 'I spent 32 years in local government trying to make people's lives better and create a city that was going places. Now I'm coming back into it as an individual, but my objectives are still the same. Obviously, you wonder what impact you can have on your own. But as an independent you have the freedom to serve people without being bullied or intimidated by your own party whips. You have the freedom to disagree. On reflection, that's a great thing, and not many politicians have it.'
Even if Pat Lally has been relatively inactive since the turn of the millennium Ð although he has remained an agitator for better local health care on Glasgow's southside, and stood as an independent in Cathcart on that basis in 2003 Ð his legacy remains an ongoing element of life in Glasgow. His influence still has physical presence, in the form of the Royal Concert Hall and the Gallery Of Modern Art, neither of which would exist without his forceful leadership of Glasgow Council in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And it has a psychological dimension, because of Lally's association with the Garden Festival of 1988, and Glasgow's appointment as Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990 and City of Architecture and Design in 1999. 'Well,' he says, 'those things happened because I took the lead in making them happen.'
Most Glaswegians would agree that those events represented the fuse, the flash and the bang in the chain reaction that transformed the city from a blackened post-industrial shanty to a cultural boomtown with sparkle. Lally admits that was always the plan, and even, specifically, his plan. He uses the first person almost exclusively in telling me the origin stories of the concert hall ('I decided that something should be done ... '), the Gallery Of Modern Art ('I was sitting there thinking about how best to use the building, then it dawned on me ... '), and the modern economy of Glasgow (' I knew that if you made the city more attractive for citizens, it would be more attractive for tourists ... '). But he won't speculate on what the city might look like if he had never been born. He won't play It's A Wonderful Life. 'Well, you just don't know about things like that,' he says, smiling quite enigmatically. 'I do know that when I was young I wanted to change the world, which is why I joined the Labour Party. Then my aspirations became more modest, and I decided just to concentrate on my corner of the world, Glasgow. And to be honest, I was surprised by how much I was able to achieve. Because it is bloody difficult to get things done. In any bureaucracy, the system grinds very slowly.'
Long after Pat Lally 'decided to retire', there remain myths and suspicions about exactly how he got things done. In the course of taxi journeys to and from Lally's house my drivers both refer to old shadowy and unfounded stories about his years in the city chambers. Accusations were slung more than once throughout Lally's career and they were never proven, but they seem to have stuck in the public memory. In 1976, when he was serving as the city council's housing chief, his vice-chairman Catherine Cantley was caught fixing a favourable property let for her son. Lally himself was investigated, and cleared. In 1997, when it was suggested that Lally was using his powers as lord provost to effectively bribe council members with various trips and jaunts, he was suspended by the government for 18 months, then reinstated after a sparky legal fracas in which the court ruled that he had 'no case to answer'. In his memoir, published in 2000 under the title Lazarus Only Done It Once, Lally explicity accused Jack McConnell, then General Secretary of the Scottish Labour Party, of conspiring to besmirch him, with the tacit endorsement of the late Donald Dewar. Whoever started the rumours, the entire new Labour project was embarrassed by the judge's decision that the government should pay Lally's court costs.
'Yes, they were embarrassed,' he says. 'Publicly, and financially. Quite frankly, I lost a lot of respect for a lot of people involved in Holyrood over that. They just wanted an excuse, because I wasn't conforming to the new Labour model. My only concern was for the city and its people. I was shocked and disappointed by the whole thing.'
It would be remiss, given that Lally has sat out the last five years of Scottish political history, not to ask him what he thinks of the new parliament, and McConnell's job as First Minister. He hasn't yet set foot inside Donald Dewar's building itself Ð 'I think I'll wait until I've won the seat'. But figuratively, he thinks Holyrood is 'more a bureaucracy than a democracy'.
'It is better to have the money spent in Scotland controlled by the people of Scotland, but there was a lot of ignorance and inexperience among the people who first came into the parliament, which was the way Donald Dewar wanted it. And now, it's hard to believe, but Holyrood is much more rigidly controlled than Westminster is. Labour MPs step out of line. MSPs don't, because they won't put you on the party list unless you behave. So yes, I think it's been a disappointment, but maybe expectations were too high. As time goes on it will become a more important part of Scottish life.'
As for McConnell? 'Eh ... he's not been my favourite person since he tried to do me in, but he's done better than I thought. Which is still not as well as he should have done. He's one of those people who looks after number one. I'm not sure he has any specific purpose in life. I don't think he has a vision of how things should be, he's just playing it by ear from day to day.'
Lally's years of experience have taught him that there are only two kinds of politician: 'The ones who want to be, and the ones who actually want to do.' It's obvious which sort he thinks are stacked to the rafters in Holyrood. And it's difficult to imagine that, as a born doer, Lally has been at all comfortable in retirement. He tries to deny this, with talk of the gardening and golf and 'cultural activities' that have been occupying his time.
'Once I'd decided to retire, I switched off, I didn't suffer withdrawal symptoms, I just accepted that I didn't have a role any more. That's the kind of mind I've got.' Then, of course, he goes on to contradict himself. 'I don't spend my time looking back on things, or wishing things had been different. I'm more concerned about what's happening today, and whether I can do anything to make things better. Or help stop them from getting worse, which is easier to do.'
But there must surely be moments, I suggest, when he sees clearly that his time has passed, that politics has become more bland and lethal than Lally's old game of rough and tumble. There must be days when he feels his age. Mister Glasgow is ready with a big smile and an old-fashioned answer I should have expected.
'I feel 79,' he says, 'going on 17.'
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