Oor Willie, your Willie, a'body's favourite Lib Dem Willie
Rennie resigns as leader after a decade in the post.
They say politicians nowadays have never had a real job but there’s one who’s been a sheep-wrangler, a racing car driver, a falconer and a pie-maker.
What’s more, he’s clocked in time as a martial artist and a water-skier, a microlight pilot and a grass-cutter, a barista and a shinty player.
This eclectic resume belongs to Willie Rennie, whose cheery, attention-grabbing style of campaigning has peppered recent elections with a slew of photo-ops in which he learns the ropes of a new job, or sport or some other hijinks. For a decade, however, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader stuck to the day job, though dressing up as Marty McFly and getting behind the wheel of the famed 1982 De Lorean from Back to the Future must have tempted him to swap Holyrood for Hollywood.
As befits a politician who marches to the beat of his own drummer, even Rennie’s resignation was conducted in his own mercurial fashion. The enthusiastic hillwalker shot a video of himself perched on Benarty Hill, overlooking Loch Leven, and explained that, ‘after 11 elections and referendums over ten years, and a global pandemic’, he was hanging up his sandals as Lib Dem leader.
His departure will bring to an end a leadership that even his sharpest critics will admit, albeit privately, has been a model of good humour, integrity and bloody-minded insistence on doing what he believes to be right rather than what polls might tell him is popular. Of course, principles only carry you so far in politics and no one could say the Rennie years have brought much electoral progress. The Scottish Lib Dems remain where the fallout from Nick Clegg's coalition with the Tories and the divisions of the independence referendum left them: a well-intentioned rump on Holyrood's farthest backbenches.
The native Fifer’s background is as rural Middle Scotland as can be. Raised in Strathmiglo, near Auchtermuchty, his father owned the village shop and was a Session Clerk of the local Kirk for three decades while his mother served as secretary of the community organisation, by all accounts a powerhouse of public-spiritedness who helped run Meals on Wheels in between producing the village newsletter. If Rennie learned his appetite for public service from mum and dad, the origins of his eccentricity might lie with his grandfather, a Church of Scotland minister who built his own television set — the first TV in Strathmiglo — using door handles for the dials.
Rennie once credited the shop, above which the family lived, as the political foundry in which his worldview was forged. He would, however, learn very different lessons — and come to very different conclusions — to another famous product of a grocer father. Rennie's liberalism is much more social than economic and he has described it in homely, jargon-free terms: 'Helping people to get up and get on in the world, irrespective of their background... Local people know best, not remote officials and bureaucrats... Prepared to help our neighbours and fellow man, if they are round the corner or across the world'.
Rennie became involved in Liberal politics as a student at Paisley Tech in the 1980s and would go on to hold various party posts until his upset victory over Labour in the 2006 Dunfermline and West Fife by-election, which landed him in the Commons just as the Lib Dems were engaged in their occasional hobby of knocking lumps out of one other.
A leadership election was under way to replace the ousted Charles Kennedy and big-name frontbenchers were the subject of tabloid revelations. Rennie kept his head down and set about turning himself into a campaigning local MP, but come the 2010 election Gordon Brown's party reclaimed what was then one of its heartland redoubts.
After a brief spell as a UK Government special adviser, he took up a seat at Holyrood following the 2011 election that ushered in the SNP's landslide and saw the Lib Dems lose all but five of their seats, punished for Nick Clegg's deal with what many traditional Liberal voters saw as the devil: David Cameron's Tories. The result forced out Tavish Scott and Rennie was chosen to succeed him.
Although not outwardly intellectual, Rennie has a canny grasp of politics and saw an opportunity in the SNP majority that others missed. He would make their strength the centrepiece of his leadership, shining a light on policy and implementation failings prompted by the ruling party's hubris, its leader's arrogance and his backbenchers' unwillingness to voice neither a peep of dissent nor a whisper of scepticism.
And so it was Rennie who saw before anyone else the dysfunction that police centralisation would bring, and Rennie who chipped away at the government's talking points until the other parties and the Press realised he was onto something. A similar pattern would follow on education, mental health and Covid testing. Rennie may never have seen ministerial office but he has wielded his slot at FMQs and his doggedness with FOIs to force many a tweak and retreat in government policy.
As he exits the leader’s office, he leaves the party with one MSP and seven Commons seats fewer than he found it, but Rennie has shown that small parties can still have an influence, provided they work hard, are willing to say things that are unpopular but right, and grit their teeth through all the flack. In truth, though, they probably need Willie Rennie as leader, too.
The Lib Dems are notorious, in by-elections and the rest of the year round, for being a politically Janus-faced lot, and Rennie was unusual in sticking to his guns even when it would have profited him at the ballot box to do otherwise. This was notably the case with the Coalition, which, even as its legacy caused him to be battered in poll after poll, Rennie continued to defend as a necessary Lib Dem sacrifice in the national interest.
The same was true of the Union. Many Scottish Lib Dems say they are as passionate about the Union as they are the EU, but Rennie actually means it. For a decade, he has not only been a doughty advocate for liberalism but the proud, authentic, unrewarded voice of liberal Unionism. Several times he came under pressure from within his own ranks to shift away from this stance — including efforts that never made it into the newspapers — but each time he fought back and subdued any attempt to make the Lib Dems more sympathetic to nationalism. For that, he deserves the thanks of everyone who believes in Scotland's place in the UK.
I have interviewed Rennie several times and he is a thoughtful and sincere champion of liberal values. But if you want a sense of the man, consider an interview he gave me during the 2015 general election campaign. We met in the Meadows in Edinburgh, where the North East Fife MSP was being swarmed by dogs of all shapes and sizes for a charity photo-op with ‘therapets’ — animals trained to support people with mental health problems. Half a dozen excitable canines circled his ankles, leapt on his lap and yapped for his attention, while a particularly keen boxer slobbered over his face like an ice cream cone.
We soon repaired to a nearby cafe where I tried to quiz him on his manifesto but became distracted by his constant clawing at his hands. They were violently red and raw with blotches. I asked if he was okay.
‘Oh fine,’ he replied. ‘I’m just allergic to dogs.’
Why had he agreed to do the photo-op?
‘Och, it’s a good cause.’
He spent the next hour miserably scratching, coughing and dabbing at his eyes with a napkin while I grilled him on the Coalition and welfare reform.
Rennie may never have attained high office and the Lib Dems may appear to be a spent force in Scottish politics, but for ten years he carried his party's banner with pride and pluck and a puckish sense of humour. Whoever follows him, even as they aim to exceed his electoral performance, would do well to learn from his political and personal character.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on July 13, 2021.