Fergus Ewing

Akash Paun (AP): You first entered government in May 2007, when you were appointed as minister for community safety as part of the very first SNP government. What do you remember of the conversation you had with Alex Salmond, the new first minister, when he asked you to take on that post?

Fergus Ewing (FE): It was fairly short, amicable, and he said, “you're going to be the minister for community safety.” It wasn't posed as a question or an invitation, but a statement of fact and I was very happy to accept. I can't really remember much of the detail, but I was working effectively as the junior justice minister with Kenny MacAskill, who was the cabinet secretary for justice. We were both about the same age. We were both practising lawyers in the private sector for about 20/25 years, well a bit longer than that actually. The portfolio wasn't senior / junior. The portfolio topics were divided between us - he did police, he did crime, I did the fire service, I did antisocial behaviour. So there was a clear demarcation of who was doing what and both Alex and Kenny mostly left me to get on with it. It was really only occasional issues like decisions to make changes to the firefighters’ pension scheme, which obviously involved a major financial cost, that that were the subject of debate. I was mostly getting on with it myself and that was my role for four years. 

Also, drugs was included in the justice portfolio at that time. When I say drugs I mean how to deal with the problems of misuse of drugs and help people who had a drugs issue. So that was fascinating because I had absolutely no direct experience of that at all. I was writing on a blank canvas, as many ministers are when they take on a new portfolio, and I don't necessarily think that that's a barrier or obstacle provided one is able and willing, as most ministers really should be, to learn on the job and to learn very quickly.

AP: How did you go about deciding what your personal priorities and policy objectives would be within that section of the portfolio? Were you given clear expectations by the first minister or indeed Kenny MacAskill, or did you have space to define it in your own way?

FE: We had a broad approach on policy and so on, but that really wasn't much help at all and was mostly irrelevant, because most parties’ policies are very theoretical. The approach I took, Akash, and this was the approach I took to all ministerial jobs, was that I used the civil servants as a source of information and private, impartial advice, but equally, if not more, important was working with people out in the real world. For example, I spent a lot of time speaking to the FBU - the firefighters union - so much so that I was asked to speak at the UK conference. It was an old-fashioned, union-type conference, a quite rumbustious affair. I remember in the speech there I said, “I've worked hard with you guys up in Scotland…” - this was the UK – “It's been great fun. We've been out for a pint together and the past year I've met them about sixteen times.” And somebody shouted out from the audience, “we don't even know who the blankety blank the UK fire minister is!” Well, that was quite funny.

The serious point is that to be an effective minister you need to spend a lot of time listening to people that have the experience of working in the areas for which you have responsibility. So, in the drugs field, I spent a massive amount of time actually going to visit programmes, rehabilitation centres, treatment centres, speaking to GPs who were involved in the practice of substitute prescription of methadone to understand how it worked (or didn't work) and if it did work the answer was very, very, very slowly, tiny steps forward. A transformation overnight is a ridiculous prospect. It's just doesn't happen. So I also spoke to those academics that were involved in each of the processes. I tended to find that academics weren't really the best people from whom to get advice. 
But, people that actually worked in the field… In the drugs field, for example, the most harrowing, moving tales that I've probably ever heard about human suffering and misery came from the mothers of those who had lost their lives to drugs. 

In some cases, you know, boys who had stolen their mother's wedding ring and sold the wedding ring off, sold the TV and the suite from their house and still the mother cared for the son. That was really quite harrowing, but if you do things like that, then people respect it, people like it. You've often got a choice as a minister whether you do something which any human being would prefer not to do, like to go to visit the family of somebody who's died for some reason, or not. My view is you always should do it and you never, as I would say, funk out of it because you don't want to do it. The civil service will give you excuses for not doing things. They're very, very, very good at telling you why you can't do anything. That's the speciality of the civil service and I didn't like that very much because I thought, “I'm not here to do nothing.” A cynic would say that sometimes they would prefer you to do nothing because a few of them - a few, not many, but a few - have their own agenda. The key thing for me as a minister was get out and deal with the public. This became very, very relevant in the various other portfolios that I had.

But nonetheless, I think we achieved quite a lot in the community safety brief, particularly on antisocial behaviour. We inherited these things… You're probably too young to remember but they're called ASBOs [antisocial behaviour orders]. Do you know about ASBOs?

AP: I remember ASBOs. I wrote my university undergraduate dissertation on them actually.

FE: Well, I can tell you in practice they're the most absolutely useless thing that was ever brought forward. They were regarded as a joke by the young people whose behaviour one was trying to turn around. They were absolutely useless. The idea that a wee bit of paper was going to make them change, it's good for the birds. It's a middle class idea. Somebody sitting in a university somewhere thought “Oh, great idea. We'll give them an ASBO.” And what happens once you've got the ASBO? Well, they tear it up, don't they? Set fire to it. It was absurd, so we turned it around. You know, you'll never rid any country of behaviour of that sort. There's reasons for it.

AP: I wanted to ask about that period of time when the SNP was a minority administration – that obviously affected some of the things that the government might have wanted to make progress with at the time. Did it affect you in your role as a minister?

FE: It did affect me, but it didn't inhibit me. It affected me in the sense that we were told to, and we had to, involve, engage, and work with those in other parties all the time. And therefore, if I wanted to do anything… I would make up my mind fairly quickly after having spoken to people and taken advice, as I've said, about what we would do. But once I'd decided this is what we're going to do, whether it was a policy, an approach, a programme, a scheme, a spending commitment, whatever it was, I would always speak to my counterparts in other parties, give them their place, get them in the office, offer to discuss something. I would actually offer, “Look, if you want to speak to the civil servants about this, be my guest.” If I trusted them, I would let them do it themselves. If I wasn't quite sure, I would sit in. I’m not going to tell you in which category people fell. 

But this is really a major point as far as the SNP’s history is concerned, because it showed that with the majority of one – with 47 seats and Labour at 46, a small minority of the total of 129 – we could still get the job done. We lost a few votes, but mostly we didn't because we negotiated. Bruce Crawford was an excellent negotiator. He was the chief whip or the manager at the time. Bryan Adam was his assistant. They were both people that knew how to work with others and that's hard. It sounds a nice soft, gooey thing to do, you know, California and all “let's all talk about it and sing”. But it's not. It's very hard because people are trying to, you know, get one over you, get things from you that you don't necessarily want. So it involves compromise and - this is the most important thing - it involves having a clear understanding of exactly what you want to do and what the consequences are, how much it's going to cost, whether it will be capable of being implemented, all these things.

And it worked well. The interesting thing was that we lost votes but it didn't really matter. There are only two votes that matter - a budget vote and a confidence vote - and everything else is almost irrelevant. The public didn't know we lost votes, and they didn't really care, frankly, because it's of no consequence beyond the parliament. But we avoided losing votes by the process of negotiating the wording of the motions. Bruce would come to me and say, “Here's the Labour amendment. I think we can accept it.” and I’d look at it and say, “We can't accept that!” But then if you look at it again, you can interpret it in a way and I would say in the Chamber, “Well, we didn't agree with all of this, but in the spirit of compromise…” So you’ve covered yourself on the record, right? Say, “well, we don't agree with all of this,” but that makes you sound reasonable. 

So that's a very interesting point and frankly we did better then than we did in the last few years when we had the Greens supposedly as our allies. It was a complete and utter disaster, an utter disaster in every single way, because sadly the Greens in Scotland, unlike the Greens elsewhere in the world, are a difficult bunch. I’d better just leave it there.

Millie Mitchell (MM): Let’s move on then to 2011, when you became the minister for energy, enterprise and tourism. What were your priorities in that post and what progress were you able to make against them?

FE: If I may, can I just make one point before I answer that?

MM: Go ahead.

FE: When you become a minister, you get no training whatsoever. The only thing I can remember about the talk given by the permanent secretary who summoned us into one of the posh offices in St Andrew's House for a chat, was that he said in his speech, “Remember that everything you say, you say as a minister.” He said it in a sort of chilling, Boris Karloff-type way. You felt that you would go out of the room and say something stupid and that would be the end of your career. Well, that's quite often how it works. It was very good advice, but that was it. 
This is just my view, but there's one book that I would recommend that any minister should read before they become a minister and that is The Blunders of Our Governments by Professors Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. 

AP: Oh yes, I have read that.

FE: The reason I suggest that this should be the sort of Bible of ministers, is that it is the most lucid, well-researched account that I've ever come across of where governments have gone wrong. All the mistakes that are identified in the various chapters are mistakes that are commonly made by ministers. If I had read that book before I was a minister… and bear in mind I had been a lawyer for over two decades, I'd been an MSP for eight years, I'd been in a mountain rescue team, I'd done all sorts of things in life. I wasn't, you know, someone that had just come up as a researcher or a councillor or something, but I was completely unprepared to be a minister. And if I was unprepared, what about those that didn't have a legal training and aren’t familiar with dealing with acts of parliament and statutory instruments and so on? What about those that are starting from scratch? There was absolutely no training at all. There was no attempt to give us any training. It was pretty pathetic, actually, come to think of it. So I just wanted to make that point.

I'm very impressed you read the book because very few have. I told one of the Green MSPs that it was a good book and he came up to me three months later and he said, “I bought the book.” I said, “Have you read it?” “No.” I said, “Well, the thing is, Ross, the thing about books is you read them.” So that was that.

Anyway, to answer your question, I'd always wanted to be a minister with responsibility for an economic portfolio, because, although I'm interested in lots of things, I think my particular take in the SNP is that unless we can prove to people that Scotland will be successful, and arguably more successful, as an independent country than as part of the UK, we will never win. Now, that was and remains my view. I always had been in business on my own account albeit in a small way. I’d employed several people. And so I had some understanding about business at a modest level, but I'd always read the papers quite closely, the journals, Economist, Spectator and the heavy papers. So I'd always followed it and I was really thrilled to be given this portfolio. I really threw my all into it. I was in charge of energy, enterprise and tourism. It later was changed to business, energy and tourism, but it was much the same job really. 

In energy, we framed an oil and gas strategy. We didn't have a formal consultation, but the way that I did this was using advice from civil servants whilst largely speaking to people at the very top of industry, people like Sir Ian Wood - who you'll have heard of, of the Wood Group - people at the top of BP, Shell, but also people that were working in the supply chain. I think I visited nearly two hundred oil and gas companies in my time. And a backhanded compliment to the policy that we produced, which had as it’s central aim the maximisation of economic recovery of oil and gas, was that it became the UK policy. I know that because the civil servants involved told me that they told the energy ministers down south, “Oh, they're doing something quite good in Scotland.” “Oh, what is it?” “Here it is.” “Oh, that sounds good.” 

On tourism, it was a time of immense positivity and hope. We had the Commonwealth Games coming along. We had great success in attracting conferences. We set up a conference fund. Everybody that works in tourism tends to be quite extroverted and quite happy people. You know, dour people become accountants, happy people go into tourism and give a nice warm welcome. It was fascinating working with people in tourism.

On business, I would spend a lot of time going to speak to businesses and find out what they wanted to do, because what I thought was the key to economic success is to help those who've already succeeded do even more. Yes, it's also to help create new businesses. Yes, it's also to help people improve their ability to run businesses well. But there's a sort of kernel of businesses in Scotland, which is not a huge economy, that you can meet, speak to, and find out what they want. Often it's not cash. They want a simpler regulatory system that’s easier to navigate and doesn't take so much of their time, so that they can go out and speak to customers and win more business. They don't want to be sitting, filling in some sort of health and safety forms or whatever it happens to be. Though, I'm not anti-regulation, don't get me wrong. I mean, if we didn't have regulation, children would still be going up chimneys and people would be dying of horrible lung disease. So, there's a balance to be struck, but Britain has got the balance sadly, sadly wrong. It's desperately sad to see what a bloody mess all governments are making of it, quite frankly.

I mean, I could talk for hours and hours about this, but I was immensely grateful to Alex Salmond for giving me the role and to Nicola [Sturgeon] for continuing myself in that role when she took over the reins [as first minister] in 2014 after the unsuccessful referendum.

It was the busiest time of my life in terms of sheer travel. I went to America on several occasions to promote our oil and gas sector. Each time we came back with £50 million or £60 million worth of contracts. These weren't jaunts. These were full on days from nine o'clock to eight o'clock, six meetings a day, meeting the top executives of oil companies in Houston and selling Scotland with a great team. It was tremendously exciting. Frankly, the civil service role wasn't really so important as just direct engagement with people in business and often what people in business want is not money. They want to think and get the sense that they're valued. Now, I'm not saying everyone in business are saints. They're absolutely not. But nowadays there's a sense that businessmen are somehow odious, greedy bastards. This is complete nonsense. I mean, people in business just want to make a success of what they do. They throw everything into it. They care deeply for their family and their communities, just like everybody else, and they just want to get on with it, and they want the government to think they're doing a good thing. But now all this sort of miasma of wokeness, and everything’s got to be green all the time, it's just completely destroyed that positivity, so that people in business feel that they now are the sort of enemy of the people.
So, there we are. I'm moving into rant territory, so I’d better shut up.

MM: I wanted to pick up on something you said there - that you were able to stay in very much the same brief under Nicola Sturgeon. Did the change in party leadership affect the priorities that you were asked to focus on? And how would you compare the leadership styles of the two first ministers?

FE: Well, I don't think it did then. When Nicola won the 2016 election, she appointed me as rural secretary and I was very happy to accept because rural secretary is really business in the rural economy - farming, fishing, forestry, field sports. Increasingly, people in the countryside have got a business orientation. Many estates are businesses really, not landed estates at all. They're just big businesses. 

I was privileged to be asked to serve. Nicola and I weren't close friends, but we never fell out. She just let me get on with rural affairs. I don't mean this in any malign way, but she didn't really have a particular interest in it and therefore I could do more or less what I felt was right without interference. Unless there was bad publicity, in which case the SpAds [special advisors] would circle and you'd quickly find that you had to sort things out. My approach to this was to prevent problems from occurring in the first place and I spent a lot of time thinking about what might go wrong and either how to prevent it or predict how to deal with it. It’s a bit theoretical, but my view ultimately was that, a bit like in American football, there's the guy with the ball, the important guy. That's not me. But then, there's all the other guys whose job is to thrust the opposition out of the way so the guy with the ball can get to the to the score line. That was me. I was the sort of blocker, so I‘d anticipate and prevent the problems arising. I was quite happy in that role. As cabinet secretary – I won’t bore you – but I think I did achieve quite a lot. 

As time went on then COVID came along. I became tourism minister again just three weeks before COVID and that was a really full-on experience because suddenly I was dealing with people whose businesses had been worth £20 million and then the next week it was worth… One guy told me, “I would take half a million for my business now if somebody offered it.” It was worth £20 million three weeks before. Businesses were destroyed. People’s livelihoods were absolutely destroyed. And therefore I spent a year and a half of COVID sitting here in this kitchen, spending five or six hours a day on the phone to people who were really on their uppers. It was quite a gruelling experience, but they did appreciate it, I think by and large. I did help get compensation for many particular areas. I won't bore you with the details, but in Scotland we did a wee bit more for your sort of family businesses – your wee hotels – than they did in England, similarly for field sports as well. But that was a difficult time.

I would say that Nicola gradually took the party and the policies in a direction that I thought was really not going to work out, but that didn't really become an issue until 2021 when she dispatched me from government. There was no quarrel with that. We had a very amicable conversation and indeed I had a few asks that I'd prepared for her and she did actually agree to all of them, but they were very modest and I'm not going to tell you what they were. So we parted on amicable terms.

But then she brought the Greens into government – not having mentioned this to the electorate beforehand – and I spoke out against it. I was the only person in my group to do so. I said that we would be tarnished by association and we would be damaged by supporting gender reform, the deposit return scheme, HPMAs [highly protected marine areas] and ridiculous heat pumps targets that were completely pie in the sky. A million by 2030, well they do 2,000 a year. Where'd you get the bloody engineers to go from 2,000 to 1,000,000? It was complete nonsense. It was the sort of thing that just went against everything I'd learned as a minister and in The Blunders of Our Governments. I mean, it's the sort of thing that, if you've ever seen that programme The Apprentice, where Claude looks at the business plan and he looks up at this poor unsuspecting victim and he says, “What is this? What is this?” “That's my plan.” “No, it's not! It's not a plan! It's rubbish! Take it away! Get out, mate!” It's actually worse than that because these young people have got an excuse. They're young and they don't know anything. It's quite incredible that they produce such rubbish on a business programme.

AP: It makes for good TV. It comes down to that.

FE: Well, that's it, but good TV is not good government! We’ve got no excuse in government for coming up with crap policies that are completely undeliverable. Now, why Nicola allowed all this to happen, I'm genuinely perplexed. But every time I sounded the alarm, there was a fire. Every time I said, “look, this is wrong,” they didn't pay a blind bit of notice and then I was suspended for a week for my sins.

But, things changed. I mean Nicola's view changed and it seemed to me at least that she became obsessed with ideology, equality, gender form. Now, you know, I'm not decrying any of this. I think I'm broadly representative of mainstream opinion in Scotland, which is to live and let live, respect other people, and treat other people as you would wish yourself to be treated. But government is there to run things. It's not there to tell people how to live their lives. It's not there to have a named person somehow in charge of your child, who you don't know. I mean, John Swinney brought that forward as policy. What was he thinking about? Which parent would ever be happy about some unknown third party being appointed by the state to have powers over your own child? I mean, this is completely absurd. How did we ever think that was going to take us anywhere? I'm not impartial. I accept that. But Salmond would never have gone anywhere near these policies.

AP: And that then got blocked in court anyway, didn't it?

FE: It did. Salmond brought in same sex marriage for example. I don't think he personally was in the vanguard of that movement, but he recognised that was something that had to come. Now, I voted against it at the time, but not because I felt it was wrong in principle. I just thought marriage was an institution for men and women and was one that has been venerated for centuries. But hey-ho, it’s the law now, so I've moved on from that. You have to move on in life otherwise you become bitter and that's the worst thing you can do I think. You must accept that things change and things don't always go your way, and there we are.

Just the last thing I would say is that, towards the end of my career, I did fall out with some of the very senior civil servants. What I would say about the civil service is that there are absolutely terrific people within the civil service. I'm not allowed to, but I could ream off a list of names of marvellous people. I'm still in touch with many of them - every other day with some of them - that I worked so closely with. I've got absolutely huge respect for them. They threw themselves into what I asked them to do. You’ve probably sensed that I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Once I'd made my mind up, I wasn't for changing. I didn't always make my mind up quickly, although usually reasonably speedily, but generally speaking I'm not somebody that is overcome by self-doubt. You have to be fairly clear as a minister otherwise you're ruled by your inbox. You just do what the civil servants want, which is nothing most of the time.

But, the problem is when something went wrong, and that's most of the time, it wouldn't always be publicly known. You had to deal with it. And that's when the senior civil servants suddenly weren’t there. When there was some crisis, you suddenly found that the very top civil servants that you were dealing with, either directors or director generals, wouldn't be there. I thought of the analogy that it was a bit like the First World War, where the generals were back there at the chateau quaffing the wine and poor old Rowan Atkinson and Baldrick were there at the front getting killed. I thought there was a bit of an element of that. 

Something went very badly wrong in one of the areas that I was dealing with and it was entirely the fault of a quango and the quango wasn't controlled by the civil service. I said, “Look, you have to do this. You have to sort it out.” They felt that I was being, I think, intimidating and that led to a big problem. It wasn't a happy time for me, or for them to be fair. I never shouted at them. I never swore. But I could be very determined to get my point across and some people didn't like that because they had their own agenda. And what I would say is, from your point of view something that really needs to be taken on is: how do you deal with these situations? There is no rule book. There is nothing. There is very little by way of help unless, just through happenstance, you have colleagues that are able to step in. That was generally how I think the SNP dealt with these kind of things and maybe that's the right way. Somebody would come in and try and cool things down a wee bit. This happened periodically throughout my time, particularly once I got confident in how to do the basics as a minister in parliament, outside parliament, speeches, press work.

I was a team player. I never briefed against my colleagues. I hardly ever spoke to journalists other than in official briefings. I regarded it as a matter of honour that you did not bad mouth your colleagues. As a minister or a cabinet minister, I didn't do that.

I've been speaking quite freely since I ceased to be a minister, but that's my right as a backbencher, which I will continue to exercise quite vigorously.

But this is a real problem. What happens when something goes wrong? I'm afraid that the current system is completely broken, but then that’s not unique to politics. I think the whole process in Scotland - and I think in Britain as well – about what happens when (whether it's in the health service, education, any public body) you have a serious personnel issue at work. I mean serious in the sense that it could lead to somebody's dismissal or a serious rebuke. The system doesn't work because people are marking their own homework. The police deal with police complaints, the health service deal with complaints against the health board – everybody's making their own homework. That breaches the first law of natural justice – nemo judex in causa sua (no one should be judged in their own cause). Also, very, very few complaints ever listen to the other side, so that breaches the second principle of natural justice – audi alteram partem (listen to the other side). So on both of the two most basic rules in the world of natural justice, the British system of disciplining people absolutely sucks. 

You can see it in how almost every day there's stuff in the press about some woefully inadequate process. Look at what's happened in the Post Office [the Horizon IT Inquiry]. Those in power are believed. The whistleblowers or those that speak out - usually called the malcontents - are wrong and the bosses of the public service are always right. This is a British disease I think at the moment. On the Post Office, I don't know if you're watching the grilling of some of the witnesses at the Williams inquiry, but if they don't get prosecuted they're bloody lucky.
So anyway, that's it. I'll shut up now because I've kind of taken over this interview. I didn't really mean to, but you've given me the chance to say what I wanted so I've fully availed myself of it.

AP: That’s the idea – to give you the opportunity to speak. There is lots that we could follow up on.

FE: I don't like people that blow their own trumpet. I mentioned the oil and gas policy, but there was a whole load of things that I think we did achieve when I was minister. But hey-ho I don't think that's really what your exercise is about, so I haven't really gone into that. There were an awful lot of things - projects, policies, achievements - which were bloody hard work.

AP: What's the one that you're proudest of?

FE: The winning back of the convergence monies of £160 million [to rectify EU Common Agricultural Policy funding that failed to pass to Scotland] working with [Michael] Gove [then secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs in the UK government]. I have good relations with Michael and with every single UK government minister I dealt with. I dealt with about twenty or thirty. The one exception who is Matt Hancock [then secretary of state for health and social care in the UK government]. He was the most impossible man I ever met in my life as a minister and completely unsuited to being to being a cabinet secretary, as we now know.

But winning the convergence monies of £160 million, doubling the tree planting in Scotland from 5,000 or 6,000 to 11,000 hectares, sorting out the IT system for farmers, those were some achievements that come to mind. I think winning back the confidence of farmers and land managers in Scotland. We did do that to some extent. We've blown that completely now. Standing up for our fishermen – getting good negotiated results in Brussels and looking after the in-shore fishermen – was another achievement. And just generally trying to promote the work of everybody in the rural economy. That was an engrossing and extremely valuable area. 

The one area where, as I say, we didn't succeed was in salmon farming, and that's because of the tremendous inbuilt bias against salmon farming within government and within SEPA [Scottish Environment Protection Agency] It was the only thing that that actually went seriously wrong under my tenure. It was entirely the fault of the public sector - the senior civil servants and SEPA. It's documented. What I'm saying is incontrovertibly true and one day the story will be told but not this day.

AP: What would be the top piece of advice, given all your experience, that you would give to someone coming into ministerial office for the first time today?

FE: Get your facts right. Everything else follows from that. If you don't do your homework and don’t get your facts right, you’re finished.