Loose Canavan: Expelled by Labour after standing as an Independent

'SO," I ask Dennis Canavan, the maverick MP and MSP, by way of small talk, "why do you think that Donald Dewar, father of the nation, hates you so much?" It is late on Thursday afternoon and Canavan has hurried over from First Minister's questions at the parliament to his office on Edinburgh's George IV Bridge.

"I'm not sure," he says, as he takes off his jacket and slackens his tie to a soundtrack of police sirens. "It may date back to a long time ago when I first became a Labour candidate in West Stirlingshire in 1974. Donald was the favourite son of the Labour establishment at that time and he was also the favourite to get the Labour nomination. If headquarters could have parachuted Donald in they would have done so. But I had local roots, local connections, and I had done a lot of work locally for the party and for the community, and I won it."

In the Labour Party, such feuds fester. Dewar, in those days, says Canavan, had a reputation as "something of a carpetbagger", desperately seeking a safe seat "here, there and everywhere" after he lost his own seat in Aberdeen at the 1970 general election. When the vacancy occurred in West Stirlingshire, Canavan and Dewar were the main contenders. "To cut a long story short," says Canavan, "I beat him. I don't know if that's got anything to do with it."

Whether it has or not, there is no doubt now that the two men are as near to each other's throats as it's possible to get without inflicting physical injury. It was Dewar, famously, who said that Canavan, a member of the Westminster parliament for quarter of a century, was "just not good enough" to be selected by Labour as a candidate for Holyrood. Canavan's riposte was to stand as an Independent, subsequently winning Falkirk West by over 12,000 votes, the highest margin in the election for the Scottish parliament.

Adding insult to injury, Canavan announced last week that he is to stand down as an MP for the same constituency, where his majority is over 13,000, thus presenting Labour with the headache of a by- election just when it needs it least. Party insiders say Canavan, whom Labour has expelled, is bitter and twisted. The man himself - Dennis the Menace as he is unaffectionately known by his former colleagues - says that is nonsense. It was always his intention to go sooner rather than later. He was only persuaded to stay on, he says, by an "emissary", who hinted at a rapprochement between the man who has been dubbed "a spin-doctor's nightmare" and the party hierarchy. But when no olive branch was forthcoming, he decided it was time to leave Westminster and concentrate his energies nearer to home.

So no chance of repairing the rift? Canavan offers a look which could wither a field of Dutch tulips. Forget Lennon leaving the Beatles or Ginger abandoning the Spice Girls for the United Nations, this is a really serious business. He insists, not entirely convincingly, that he harbours no animus towards the First Minister. "I just don't understand why Donald feels so bitter towards me. I mean even neutral observers say his whole body language is hostile towards me when I ask him a question in the chamber. You know, he pretends half the time as if I didn't exist and the other half of the time he looks at me as if I had crawled out from under a stone."

Once, he recalls, he encountered Dewar in the Royal Mile. "Donald was just two paces in front of me. He was actually on his own, he had no minders around him. I remember saying to him, 'Donald you're looking awful glum', or something like that. 'Just pensive, Dennis,' he said, and made a bolt across the road just to get rid of me. He was almost hit by a double-decker bus. At one stage he looked as if he was going to run into Deacon Brodie's pub just in case he was seen walking up the road with me."

Canavan speaks more in mystification than anger. His rupture with the Labour Party is clearly painful, his whole adult life having been devoted to it. His disenchantment, however, is palpable. He is undoubtedly an awkward customer, a loner like that other left- leaning menacing Dennis - Skinner, the obstreporous member for Bolsover. His voice could drill through a wall of anthracite. He has the deportment of a boxer, the bruised face of a tattie howker. He is 57 years old, but he still plays football and goes on five-mile cross- country runs, having in the past completed 15 marathons. A senior Labour figure recalls how he once saw Canavan running and wanted to call out to him, to tell him he was going in the wrong direction. "But he wouldn't have listened," he said, "so I didn't bother."

The image, though, of the lonely long-distance runner seems apposite. Like Widmerpool, the rather ludicrous character in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, who when we first meet him is running alone, as he will metaphorically for the rest of his life, Canavan has the air of a man not quite comfortable in his own skin. Being the only MSP without a party behind him, he says, is difficult. "Politics," he says, without a trace of irony, "is essentially a team game." But his non-selection as a potential MSP was incontrovertible proof that he did not figure in the team's plans for the future. He had no other choice but to go it alone.