AT THE CRUCIBLE SCOTLAND: A POLITICAL ROADMAP

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 8, 2007 | by Torcuil Crichton

Torcuil Crichton hits the road and the miles on a journey to sense the mood of the country as a crucially important Holyrood election rolls around. This week he starts his journey in Gordon, the seat Alex Salmond has to win if he is to realise his dreams of power

CLOSE your sunsoaked eyes and listen to a description of the Gordon constituency, with its rolling meadows, its industrial mixture of textiles, distilling, beef rearing and quality food processing and you are transported abroad. You imagine these market towns and the networks of family farms along winding country lanes are not in Scotland's northeast, but some pastoral region of Italy where the tomatoes ripen on the vine instead of under plastic.

Then blink again, and you're sharing a microwave lasagne with Nora Radcliffe MSP at a garden centre cafe in Inverurie and realise, hey ho, we're back on the campaign trail.

Reviewing my cycling notes of the 2003 election, Gordon was marked down as a place where silage bales were the tumbleweed of an unpopulated landscape. It was a place on the way to somewhere more exciting, like the outdoor swimming pool at Portsoy. The last election was so humdrum that cycling was an option: this time I'd need a Tardis to get round all the marginal seats.

But there are good arguments for not moving out of Gordon. This time the huge constituency, stretching from the coast north of Aberdeen to the banks of the Spey, will be the crucible of the Scottish election campaign.

The reason: Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP, needs a Holyrood seat and has decided to risk all and stand for the constituency. Salmond may be king of the Picts, but he faces a huge task just to become MSP for Gordon.

The SNP are in third place in Gordon behind the Tories and sitting LibDem Nora Radcliffe. Even with boundary changes taking in some of Salmond's Banff and Buchan Westminster seat, it will take a 7.75-per cent swing to get Salmond elected, and the LibDems are not going to roll over that easily.

Gordon is the SNP's 19th most winnable seat. If they win here, the party is a hairsbreadth from power and Salmond will be first minister. If they don't win here - well, if they don't win here, it's game over for Alex Salmond.

SNP gains in neighbouring constituencies might deny him a list seat. He could have gone for a safer seat, could have marched into Aberdeen Central like the Jacobite army into Edinburgh, virtually unopposed. He could have gone to Dundee, or tried to elbow his SNP replacement Stewart Stevenson out of the old berth in Banff and Buchan.

Maybe he did try. When I ask why that didn't happen, Stewart Pratt, Salmond's election agent, gives me a tiger's smile.

"The simple reason is that he wants to be first minister, " says Pratt in a rolling Doric dialect. "He's not taking an easy option when he's asking other candidates to go out there and win hard seats.

An easy seat is not a serious option in this election. We're going to lead by example and win in Gordon."

Pratt has nursed Salmond in every election since 1987, and for two nights a week and every Saturday for a year he's spoken to more people in Gordon than he's ever done before. If the SNP get their support out they will win, he says.

That's what you expect a campaign manager to say.

Salmond has a reputation as a gambler, but this is a leadership risk akin to Napoleon's march on Moscow.

It's Gordon or bust.

"Then it's got to be Gordon, " says Salmond in an ebullient phone call in response to my ships-in-the-night request. He is heading north to the seat just as I am heading south out of it.

"Everyone who stands in this election is putting themselves on the line and I'm no different, " says Salmond. "But I've been in politics long enough to know that people don't make up their minds in the last few weeks." Although the LibDems in Gordon are anticipating an SNP explosion on the ground in the next few weeks, they and the nationalists have been bashing phones and knocking doors for months across the constituency. Really it's a super-by- election campaign, with rival party workers poised to flood in as the vote approaches.

Salmond can't be everywhere at once, and leading a national campaign limits his local availability. Radcliffe, on the other hand, is chapping on the doors every day of the week, and she's offended nobody in her two terms as MSP. Charles Kennedy has committed himself to helping her twice a week, Nicol Stephen is dropping in and Simon Hughes will be here sans yellow taxi this week.

Salmond's national profile helps, but all politics in the end are local. He may be a divisive figure, but he runs a slick constituency operation. He owes all his political success to the people of the northeast, and prides himself on being, if not the best politician, then the best constituency politician in Scotland.

He loves telling the story of two wee towns, Old Meldrum and New Deer.

Each faced the loss of its Clydesdale Bank, but in New Deer, in Salmond's Westminster constituency, he helped organise a community buy-out and a sale to the Royal Bank of Scotland. The rebranded bank remains at the thriving centre of the town. Some 12 miles south in Old Meldrum, in Gordon, the closed doors lend the place a derelict tinge.