Why Scottish politicians lose the plot over petty misdemeanours

Matheson must go for lying about his iPad use, but the whole affair demeans Scottish democracy

Michael Matheson ‘fesses up to a sceptical parliament

The hapless Scottish health secretary, Michael Matheson, may have garnered some sympathy with his tearful apology to the Scottish Parliament last week for misleading MSPs about the use of his iPad on holiday in Morocco last year. It was his kids wot done it. Watching the footie and running up an £11,000 bill for roaming charges.  

Yes, we’ve all been there.  The phone companies have only recently restored roaming charges - a nice little earner since most of us haven’t a clue how much it now costs to watch TV abroad.  He was using an out of date SIM card, so it became a bill for the Scottish taxpayer. And unfortunately he asked parliament initially to pay it claiming falsely that the gigabytes had been incurred doing important constituency work even when it was manifestly used for other more data-hungry purposes.  

Human error perhaps. Even politicians make mistakes. However most of us don’t use a government issued iPad and most of us don’t run up the equivalent of more than one year’s state pension misusing it.  Nor do we expect the tax payer to foot the bill. Above all we don’t mislead parliament and the media or, to use the vernacular, fib about it afterwards. Mr Matheson admitted not telling the truth in his personal statement to Holyrood and said that he lied to protect his children from the scandal. Well that worked out well didn’t it? They’re now miscreant celebrities.

Martheson’s political position is untenable because of his lack of candour. He wasn’t just economical with truth he was flat broke with it. Unlike Margaret Ferrier, the former SNP MP for Rutherglen who resigned after breaking lockdown rules, Matheson has not broken any obvious laws. But he stands accused of claiming expenses under a false pretext and telling porkies to parliament and his boss Humza Yousaf. He should be gone before the week is out.   

But awkward questions remain in the wake of this tawdry affair, which somehow  demean Scottish democracy as much as Mr Matheson.  Just why do so many competent Scottish politicians fall from grace over petty issues?  The Newsnight presenter, Victoria Derbyshire, actually apologised to viewers last week for having to cover this bonsai scandal in a programme otherwise devoted to the dead and dying in Gaza.  Is this the best that Scottish politics can come up with, she seemed to be saying, how parochial.

One conservative-leaning commentator, Andy Maciver, writing in the Herald newspaper, expressed his dismay that the affair had used up so much political bandwidth. Scottish democracy needs to set its sights higher than a “witch-hunt” over a scandal to which the Scottish Parliament’s IT department was arguably an accessory for leaving Matheson with an out of date SIM card. I’d add that it was irresponsible for EE to allow anyone run up such a huge bill for using only 6 gigabites of data. My old EE contract had 100 gigabytes, half of which was usable abroad charge-free. There is supposed to be a stop loss on most accounts for this very reason.

But enough of iPad-gate. I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to write about it at all, but was impossible to ignore once it morphed into a political crisis for Humza Yousaf and the SNP. Last week’s news agenda should have been dominated, not by a lachrymose Matheson, but the SNP’s political coup in humiliating Keir Starmer over Gaza.  The Labour leader suffered his first serious parliamentary rebellion as 56 Labour MPs and ministers backed the SNP’s ceasefire motion in the Commons.  Instead the front pages were dominated by yet another accident prone stumbling and mumbling his way out into political knackers yard.

And it has to be said that, looking back at the 20 years of the Scottish Parliament,  the landscape is littered with the wreckage of political careers wrecked by obscure  infringements of parliamentary protocol. I find it faintly embarrassing to recall how the second First Minister of the Scottish Parliament, Henry McLeish, had to resign 20 years ago over what he called “a muddle not a fiddle”.  The Labour leader was discovered to have sublet his parliamentary constituency offices when he was an MP in Westminster. He didn’t gain anything from this personally,  as the House of Commons Fee Office accepted when it exonerated him for this technical breach of the rules. But he still did ended up resigning from the most senior post in the Scottish government. To this day I’m at a loss to understand why. 

Then there was the resignation in 2005 of McLeish’s opposite number, the respected leader of the Scottish Conservatives, David McLetchie.  He at least went over an actual fiddle: claiming as parliamentary expenses taxi fares to his legal offices where he did his private lawyering.  It was clearly wrong but still small beer as parliamentary scandals go. McLetchie tried to weather the storm but the most intelligent Scottish Conservative leader ended up disappearing into the dustbin of history along with Henry McLeish.

And it wasn’t long until Wendy Alexander, the formidable former leader of the Scottish Labour Party, joined them over another obscure misdemeanour in 2008.  She had the distinction of resigning over a donation to a leadership election that never actually took place place. It turned out that, unbeknownst to Alexander, her putative leadership campaign (she was elected unopposed) had accepted a £900 donation from a businessman based in Jersey.  Since the channel island isn’t formally a part of the UK, this broke the rules on party fundraising. After being suspended for a week by the Holyrood standards committee Wendy Alexander departed politics in disgust and headed for academia.

It often seems as if it is the better Scottish politicians who end up on the casualty list rather than the many time-servers who do little more than pocket their £67,000 a year plus expenses. The most recent example is the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon who remains under her shadow of a criminal investigation into irregularities in party fundraising even though no charges have been brought since her arrest nearly six months ago.  Her reputation is in ruins. No one will forget that police forensics tent outside her home, yet no one seriously believes she has been guilty of corruption.  

Of course, the police have to do their job no one can condone possible law breaking or fiddling of expenses - though journalists might declare an interest in that regard.  MPs must always tell the truth to parliament and just as importantly to their leader (even if Humza Yousaf unaccountably insists he was not mislead by Matheson’s white lie). But we have to ask just why do so many able politicians appear trip themselves over essentially trivial matters when the really big issues pass them by.

Indeed, it might have been more appropriate for Mr Matheson to shed tears last week over Scotland’s appalling hospital waiting lists, for which he has ministerial responsibility.  Politicians don’t seem to consider resigning over really important issues only the trivial ones.  The NHS lost £12 billion over a useless IT system a decade ago and no one resigned over that. Then there was the often fatal decanting of the elderly from hospitals during Covid. 

Perhaps it is our media culture. It easier to understand stories about trivia than it is to understand complex issues like the viability of herd immunity in a pandemic.  It is easier too for opposition parties to point a wagging finger at a politician caught out by some trivial affair than it is to address big issues like immigration. That is until it happens to them as it surely will, as night follows day. In the meantime it no secret why fewer and fewer able people choose a political career. It looks like a one way ticket to ignominy and public disgrace.