I know exactly what I was doing 10 years ago tonight – knocking up in Rosyth, getting people to the polls in the Dunfermline by-election. There was a really good feeling in the air. Earlier in the afternoon, I’d been out and about in Dunfermline and people were beeping at us as they drove by, or giving us thumbs up signs. It started to feel as though we might pull off an historic victory in Gordon Brown’s back yard. The BBC certainly didn’t. When they initially announced the result, their graphic said “Labour hold” around a live feed of Willie Rennie talking about the political earthquake that the voters of Dunfermline brought about.
Willie has put a video on Facebook showing some images of the night:
Ten years ago today I won the Dunfermline and West Fife By-election. A surprise but wonderful victory. Inspiration for the battles ahead. Here's a little trip down memory lane.
Posted by Willie Rennie on Tuesday, 9 February 2016
In Rosyth, not the best territory for us, people were turning out to vote for Willie Rennie. Well, most of them. There was one man who told me he couldn’t possibly vote for anyone from Kelty. And the other who told me he’d shoot the next person who asked him to vote.
Nobody expected us to beat Labour in Fife, especially when we had our own problems. With no leader and, it seemed, a new tabloid scandal breaking every half hour, the party did what it was best at – coming together and fighting one hell of a campaign. Hundreds of people flocked to help.
A surge in our vote in the 2005 election had put us about 500 votes ahead of the SNP. We were therefore able to position ourselves as the challenger. I just want to pay a quick tribute to the candidate in that General Election, Dave Herbert. He died, sadly, about 4 years ago. He was such a lovely guy, very clever and had had the good sense to marry Gladys that Summer. Gladys had never been involved in politics before, but she and Liz Barrett made the HQ in Inverkeithing run like clockwork. Willie singled her out for praise during his speech.
My job during the campaign was casework. I shared an office with Ed Maxfield, the often forgotten co-author of a certain book. . I always joke that Ed spent the entire campaign emptying the contents of his in-tray into mine, but between us, we got on very well and got through a phenomenal amount of letters, street letters, petitions and the like. I remember one particular letter from a little girl who was worried about what would happen to the rabbits on a roundabout in town when a new road was built. We wrote to the Council and they assured us that they would look after the little bunnies. About six months later, the little girl showed up at our office with her Dad to ask us if we had any more news.
I also have to mention the amazingly delicious rare roast beef cooked by agent Peter Barrett that we tucked in to on polling night. There was a definite advantage to there being so many vegetarians in HQ.
I know that we are in a much different situation today. It was devastating to lose the seat in 2010 not to mention what has happened since. I had continued my casework job from the campaign to the MP’s office and we’d helped more than 10,000 people in those 51 months. I’m still proud of what we did during those years, helping people with housing, tax credits, benefits problems, immigration nightmares and all sorts.
And as for Willie, look what’s happened to him. Scottish Leader and list MSP for a region which includes his former Westminster constituency.
Were you in Dunfermline? What are your memories of the campaign?
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Labour councillor missing in action
New NHS cash will be wasted if social care is left untouched
Prince William's billionaire pal dies after swallowing bee while playing polo
Transition Dundee Ceilidh #dundeewestend
The Trinity made comprehensible.
A remarkable woman and a park
Lib Dems in the King's birthday honours 2025
Andy Daer
Simon R
John Waller
Geoffrey Payne
12 Comments
I saw Willie’s message – I can’t believe it’s 10 years! Firstly, I just want to say how much Dave Herbert is missed. A really lovely, gentle man who did so much for the area.
Dalgety Bay was just outside the constituency, so I couldn’t vote for Willie, but being outside the campaign team and a native of Fife I didn’t share your optimism and went to bed fully expecting to lose – so when my alarm went off to the headlines on Radio Scotland the next morning it was a huge, but pleasant, shock!
Probably had it not been for the by-election, I wouldn’t be where I am just now in Cairo. It was on the back of this that, in 2007, I was elected as one of the councillors for Rosyth (the first, and so far only Lib Dem.) I joined the Education Committee, and it was through that that, while realising that I didn’t enjoy being a councillor, I did enjoy being in and around schools. That led me in to teacher training in my final year as a councillor, and now teaching in Cairo.
I wasn’t there for Polling Day, but had come up with my wife for a week a few days previously. There were a number of us there from the Westcountry who had worked a lot with Willie both when he was Agent / Organiser in North Cornwall (I was on the selection panel when he first came to Cornwall), and when he was Regional Campaigns Officer in the run up to the 1997 election, an immensely successful period.
Being from south of the border, I am not sure how far we were wanted for canvassing, but as I remember it I did one round of canvassing close to the centre of Dunfermline. Most of my time was either delivery rounds, and we went to a variety of places, in town, in North Queensferry etc. I remember stopping at a pub for a brief lunch right under the Forth Bridge, and looking up at the trains! One or two experiences – we went out into the town centre to act as a “crowd” when Charles Kennedy came to do a walkabout. In truth, we didn’t need a crowd, everyone wanted to talk to him! I was briefly on Crickwatch – the great Michael, who would still have been with Newsnight, had been sent out in his usual way to make Charles’s life a misery, and I set out to harass him!!
Another occasion I remember clearly, and I am fairly sure this was in N Queensferry, was I was doing a delivery round, and bumped into a SNP group of canvassers. When I first saw them they were full of optimism and wanted to make fun of me being a Lib Dem. When I saw them an hour or so later, they didn’t want to know, and I could see they hadn’t had a good reception on the doorstep! I think it was this event which really set the seal on my putting money on Willie to win – and I had already said to many people that if anyone could win this it would be Willie. Anyway I made something over £200, which was a nice ending to a very heartwarming week.
We also got to stay in Auchtermuchty – Tannochbrae from Dr Finlay. The only bad thing about the week was landing a speeding fine on the motorway!
Hi Caron, as you know I was in Dunfermline for the by election and had a great time helping an outstanding candidate who I had first had contact with some years earlier when he worked in Campaigns. Charles Kennedys input and reception by the public was phenomenal too given the way he had just been deposed.
Willie was exceptionally well qualified to be the candidate. Tell me, do you think he should have been barred from standing so that a Diversity candidate could have been brought in?
Paul, Willie is fantastic. One of the best. Let’s get that out of the way.
Let’s not derail this thread by having a discussion about diversity on here. If you want to ask the question on Sal’s post, we can have that conversation there.
A week before polling day, Willie had his head in his hands in despair looking with me at the papers reporting the polls showing how far behind he was. But I told him that morning that things would turn round and they did – when the same papers that weekend reported the electrifying effect that bringing Charles Kennedy back to campaigning exactly two weeks after he had admitted to his “drink problem” leading ti his resignation as Leader. Many people in the party thought that I was mad to bring Charles into the campaign at this point, but he was willing to do as I thought fit and his appearance then helping to bring about Willie’s victory restored the party’s self-confidence after the most turbulent two months in our history. It was Labour’s first loss in a parliamentary by-election in Scotland since 1988, and the only one that they ever lost to us (or the Liberal Party or the SDP). Great thanks were owed to everyone who helped that campaign and backed the judgement to fight it to win, with a classic community campaigning approach, in spite of the very difficult background in the run up to it.
Another thing that has just come to mind. There was a bit of a stooshie between the campaigns staff and the local party about whether to include one particular part of the constituency. Thankfully, the local party were listened to because I think that village is where our majority came from.
I do remember coming back after one of my many trips around the doorsteps of Inverkeithing on one Sunday to run into the smokers outside HQ to be told I had been quoted in the Scotland on Sunday, which I thought was strange as nobody had interviewed me. Only to find they had taken half a quote out of one of my blog posts about the leadership election that was happening.
However, my enduring memory of the by election was being literally abandoned by my chauffeur across on an almost daily basis (sometimes before we even stopped off in HQ (she had supplies of leaflets with her on occasion) and often dumped in some of the most hard core Labour territory imaginable with a smile and a ring me when you’ve finished these 4/5 walks. Rumour has it that person is now the editor of some political website or other .
Amazing it’s been ten years. At the start of the campaign I wasn’t sure we had a chance. But we were out the traps first and every week something else happened to build the mood and make it seem more possible. Obviously Charles’s visit, but the reception on the doorsteps, the hospital issue, the magazine (“That’s Fife!”) and the reaction to Willie’s personal story (people liked and remembered that his folks had run the post office in Strathmiglo and he was a Kelty runner), and then polling day itself. It began with the famous picture on the front of the paper on polling day of Willie and Nicol at the top of the Forth Road Bridge. I too was knocking up in Rosyth before Kevin and I got a bit lost taking Nicol to the count (in the days before Google Maps). Everyone at the office was staring at Alex Cole-Hamilton every time his phone rang because everyone thought he was being tipped off from the count with the result. Then victory and the memorable speech – about shaking the foundations of Downing Street, both No 10 and No 11. Chris Huhne first trotted out his joke about Willie being able to help his constituent Gordon Brown with any tax credit problems he was having. And the triumphant return to the office, Willie being hoisted shoulder-high through the car park.
It took time to build, but as soon as it happened it seemed as if it had been somehow inevitable.
The one thing I still have mixed feelings about was the response some people had to the Labour candidate Catherine Stihler being heavily pregnant, thinking this disqualified her or made her a riskier choice. In practical terms it meant she struggled to match Willie’s energy on the trail, and she never quite shook off the impression that she hadn’t been too keen to stand in the first place and liked her current job too much (something that affected Margaret Curran in Glasgow East a few years later). But we’ve still got some way to go before women candidates don’t get judged wrongly and unfairly for the reality that they’re the only gender able to bear children.
I have never been so cold as I was one night at the beginning of February during that campaign, canvassing in Dunfermline. There were even drops of ice on the bushes.
Ed Maxfield? I wonder whatever happened to him…
I learned many important lessons in that campaign. The biggest one of all was that community by community you need to listen to voters about what matters to them – unpacking a box marked ‘standard template election messages’ wont work if they don’t resonate.
Ed, do you remember the “Mud on roads” special?:-)
🙂