Donald Dewar was the least likely of national heroes — a shy, stooped, rumpled Glasgow solicitor with a dry tongue and a famous indifference to appearances — and he became the architect of the most important change in Scotland’s government in three hundred years. As the first First Minister of the reconvened Scottish Parliament he held office for barely sixteen months before his sudden death; but the Parliament itself was, more than any other person’s, his achievement, the end of an argument he had carried, often alone, for most of his adult life.
A Glasgow Lawyer
He was born in Glasgow on 21 August 1937, the only child of a consultant dermatologist, and had a solitary childhood shadowed by both parents’ serious ill health. Educated at Glasgow Academy and then, like so many of this chapter’s figures, at the University of Glasgow, he read history and then law, threw himself into student debating and politics, became President of the Glasgow University Union, and struck up a lifelong friendship with a fellow student named John Smith — the future Labour leader. Dewar qualified as a solicitor and practised in the city; when he lost an early parliamentary seat he returned to Glasgow law and, characteristically, hosted a Friday-evening talk show on Radio Clyde. Glasgow was his ground in every sense: he would represent its Garscadden and Anniesland constituencies in Parliament from 1978 until his death.
The Long Argument for Devolution
Dewar became an advocate of Scottish devolution in the 1960s, when the cause was decidedly unfashionable within a Labour Party suspicious that a Scottish Parliament would merely feed the nationalism it was meant to contain. He held to it for three decades. His return to Parliament at the 1978 Garscadden by-election was itself read as a check on the rising SNP; he was a leading figure in the cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention that from 1989 hammered out the shape of a future Parliament; and when Labour swept to power in 1997 and made him Secretary of State for Scotland, he was at last in a position to build the thing he had argued for. He led the winning ‘Yes’ campaign in the 1997 referendum, and then wrote and drove through Westminster the Scotland Act 1998 — the law that created the Parliament.
Reconvening the Parliament
On 1 July 1999, elected the first First Minister of a Labour–Liberal Democrat administration, Dewar opened the new Parliament with a line that deliberately reached back over the centuries: ‘The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on the 18th day of March 1707, is hereby reconvened.’ He was not a nationalist — he was a convinced unionist who saw devolution as a settlement, ‘a means not an end’ — and he would have been wryly amused, and perhaps alarmed, to see where the journey led. Colleagues knew him as ‘Donald Dour’ for his matter-of-fact manner and ‘the Gannet’ for a famously large appetite; the public knew him as a rare thing in politics, a manifestly honest man who cared nothing for money or show.
The Sudden Loss
It ended abruptly. Recovering from heart surgery, Dewar suffered a fall and then a brain haemorrhage, and died on 11 October 2000, aged sixty-three, still in office. The shock was national: ‘Donald was devolution,’ said his successor Henry McLeish, and the phrase stuck. His funeral was held at Glasgow Cathedral and his ashes scattered at Lochgilphead in Argyll. That the Parliament carried on without its founder was, in a sense, the final proof of his work — he had built an institution that no longer depended on him. Glasgow, which had known him longest, keeps him at the head of its greatest street.
His page belongs in this chapter as the modern counterpart to its older statesmen: the quiet Glasgow lawyer who gave Scotland back its Parliament, and who proved that the driest of men can move a nation.
The Glasgow connection
Dewar’s Glasgow stands at the very top of Buchanan Street: Kenny Mackay’s nine-foot bronze of the stooping First Minister, papers under his arm, outside the Royal Concert Hall — funded by public subscription through a Glasgow newspaper, its spectacles so often stolen by souvenir-hunters that the statue became a folk fixture — with a second likeness, Archie Forrest’s bust, kept in Kelvingrove.
People also ask
Who was Donald Dewar?
A Glasgow lawyer and Labour politician who became the first First Minister of Scotland in 1999, and the chief architect of Scottish devolution — the man, more than any other, behind the reconvened Scottish Parliament.
What did Donald Dewar do?
He argued for a Scottish Parliament for some thirty years, when the idea was unfashionable even within his own party; then, as Secretary of State for Scotland, he wrote and drove through the Scotland Act 1998 that created it, led the winning referendum campaign, and became its first head of government.
Why is Donald Dewar called ‘Father of the Nation’?
Because of his singular role in delivering the Parliament. When he died suddenly in office, his successor summed up the feeling in a phrase that stuck: ‘Donald was devolution.’ He was the public face and driving will of Scotland’s new self-government.
Where is the Donald Dewar statue?
At the very top of Buchanan Street in Glasgow, outside the Royal Concert Hall — a nine-foot bronze of the stooping First Minister, papers under his arm. It has become such a fixture that Glaswegians give directions by it.
How did Donald Dewar die?
He died on 11 October 2000, aged 63, still in office. Recovering from heart surgery, he suffered a fall and then a brain haemorrhage — a sudden loss that shocked the whole country.
Was Donald Dewar from Glasgow?
Yes — he was born in Glasgow in 1937, studied at the University of Glasgow, practised law in the city, and represented its Garscadden and Anniesland seats in Parliament for over twenty years.