COLIN CAMPBELL: Inverness MP’s marathon campaign ended with a spectacular triumph
Over the past year and more I referred here periodically to the arrival on my doormat of election newsletters and posters from an aspiring candidate named Angus MacDonald. It was initially puzzling to receive them.
Who was this man who was aiming to win the still distant battle for the newly reshaped constituency of Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, and was so fiercely determined to get that message across long before an election was anywhere in sight? A check revealed that he was a Lochaber councillor with more than a few other strings to his bow, including a reputation as a successful entrepreneur. He was also a multi-milionaire.
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His ambitious long-term target was to defeat Drew Hendry, a solidly entrenched SNP parliamentarian who had clocked up a 10,000 majority in the 2019 election and after nine years as an MP had gained a sizeable personal following.
The mail drops kept coming. They were followed by the placement of large billboards at selected locations around Inverness and elsewhere, and extensive advertising. All this cost money, lots of it. A huge amount of effort was expended by Lib Dem volunteers involved in the weary process of making house to house deliveries time and again.
And along the way circumstances changed drastically as the SNP became mired in multiple problems and support for them appeared to be crumbling.
Even though Angus MacDonald succeeded in framing himself as the strongest challenger to Drew Hendry, when the poll was finally announced the odds were still against him winning. Only a month ago the bookies had him at 5-1. Having already written here that I believed by then he had a strong chance of taking the seat, I couldn’t fathom these odds. Even so, how often do the bookies get it wildly wrong?
But last Saturday, after a chaotically delayed election count which must have been an exhausting and hyper-tense experience for those most centrally involved, the entrepreneur stepped forward to accept the acclaim for a long-term investment and gamble which spectacularly and handsomely paid off. It was a resounding and remarkable triumph with the winner having calculated the outcome far in advance.
It was a victory he shared with his highly motivated campaign team who were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths on his behalf over an unprecedented period of time.
Now the hard work for him begins. There will be the prestige and political glamour of life in Westminster. But there will be a great deal of grind and graft in a constituency incorporating a major city, towns, villages and scattered communities, with a range of different problems.
And what of Drew Hendry? He was a conscientious and hard-working MP. But like so many of his colleagues in the mass SNP Westminster clear-out, he was a victim of a ferocious backlash through clear tactical voting against botched priorities, incompetence and scandal within the SNP government at Holyrood, and the feeling among many that arrogance and a sense of entitlement had spread among the leadership of a party which had basked in absolute power for far too long. They paid a heavy price for that last Thursday, and it will be a long road to recovery.
Angus MacDonald fought a marathon campaign which ultimately proved successful. At the same time, the era when any SNP election candidate across Scotland was virtually guaranteed a winning ticket finally and decisively reached the end of the road.
