This afternoon (Monday) a Memorial Service to celebrate the life of Lord Russell-Johnston of Minginish will be held at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Inverness.
As a Highland Liberal MP from 1964 until 1983, Russell Johnston represented communities across Inverness-shire, then including his native Skye, as well as Badenoch and Strathspey and Lochaber. From 1983 until 1997, following boundary changes, he represented the seat of Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber (including Badenoch & Strathspey). He was leader of the Scottish Liberal Party from 1974 until 1988.
The eulogy will be delivered by Lord (David) Steel, formerly leader of the Liberal Party and Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament.
Lord Steel will say:
“Russell would not have wanted this to be a sad or over-solemn occasion. Yet we are all left still with a sense of shock at his sudden departure. Judy and I had spent our last evening with him before setting off on a week’s holiday cruise. He spoke warmly of his own leaving two days later for a holiday in Paris. We had known him since student days in Edinburgh, so we spent the evening reminiscing over a bottle of wine – well maybe two bottles – actually to be honest it was three. Judy had in fact joined the Liberal Party after hearing one of his speeches, just as Jim Wallace and so many others later did.
“He said he was going to take three books with him: a trashy novel, John Stuart Mill on Liberty, and my autobiography. I told him I was not very flattered –“You mean you have never read it?” Crushingly he responded: “No, I had better things to do”. Yet I see his name 23 times in the index. He recalled the trio of young hopeful candidates for the 1964 election – himself, me, and John McKay in Argyll – of how our mentor George Mackie took us to spend a day on his farm to learn about agriculture, at the end of which he had pronounced Steel and Johnston as hopeless and that McKay was the only one who understood the complexities of the agricultural support system. McKay was the only one ever to become a minister, but Johnston was the only one successfully elected in 1964. We recalled how later we sat up nearly all night in John McKay’s conference hotel room trying unsuccessfully to dissuade him from joining the Conservative Party. Russell later described Conservatism with that engaging twinkle in his eye as “a collection of prejudices moderated by remorse”.
“He reminded me also with some glee that but for his own failure to be selected in 1962 as prospective candidate for Roxburgh Selkirk & Peebles I would never have become an MP. He had turned up for the selection interview in his kilt, which did not go down well with Border folk, and they chose instead a scion of the Tennant family of the Glen – a choice which did not last more than a year, following which disaster (Russell having been meantime selected for Inverness) I transferred from Edinburgh to fight that seat. He described the difference between us – that I was a Grimond Liberal while he was a Bannerman one.
“He was looking forward to celebrating his 76th birthday – he died the day before it – and was entertaining on the subject of his bone cancer. “I swallow 17 pills a day”, he said, “they don’t cure it but they do control it” and added with a chuckle “only I had to sign a piece of paper promising not to have unprotected sex with anybody.”
“I am glad that we had that last evening together, and guess what was waiting for us when we returned home after our cruise - a postcard from Russell – warm and generous as always. Shares in the companies which produce postcards must have taken a dive on news of his death, for he was such a prolific sender of those.
“I had heard of Russell Johnston before I ever met him. He had re-founded the Edinburgh University Liberal Club in 1955 – not exactly a golden year for the Party – it was down to 6 MP’s, and only one in Scotland. He then left after graduating in history to do his National Service in the Intelligence Corps mainly in Berlin, and returned to take his teacher training at Moray House College, which was how we happened to coincide at university. In his time he had won both the Scotsman and Observer trophies as the best student debater in Scotland and Britain successively.
“Russell had three great political passions in his life:
"The first was the Highlands. Born and schooled in Skye, this was always his first love. He was prominent in the fight to preserve the Gaelic language and to encourage the game of shinty. Early in 1964 he published a well argued carefully researched booklet advocating the establishment of a Development Board for the Highlands and Islands. It was hugely influential and formed the basis of the successful general election campaign which led the Liberals to victory not just in Inverness, but in Ross & Cromarty and Caithness & Sutherland as well.
“Harold Wilson’s Labour government was sympathetic and his Secretary of State Willie Ross especially impressed. He and Russell worked closely together on the legislation setting up the HIDB, and he later appointed Russell to the Royal Commission on local government under Lord Wheatley.
“It was said of the great London architect Sir Christopher Wren when he died “si monumentum requiris circumspice” – if you are looking for his memorial just look around you. The same can be said of Russell. But how many of today’s younger highlanders realise that the great economic transformation which has taken place here over the last half century is due to the existence of the Board and European structural funds – in both of whose creation Russell Johnston played an absolutely crucial role?
“He was devoted to his constituents – and they to him. The current MP Danny Alexander has spoken of how every week he still meets someone who was helped by Russell and remembers him fondly. Mind you, this constituency, whatever its changing name and boundaries, has a totally unique record in that over the last 50 years it has been represented between the two parliaments at one time or another by all of four of the political parties. It was always strongly contested, and his colleagues loved to tease Russell therefore about being the MP returned with the lowest percentage vote of any in the House of Commons – on the last occasion 26%. But he fended off the other three over nine election campaigns and was greatly respected by them all, as the presence of their representatives here today testifies.
“His second great passion was Scotland:
“He took the oath in the Commons wearing his kilt complete with Skian Dhu in spite of the ban on the carrying of offensive weapons in the Chamber. In 1966 anticipating much later events he introduced a bill to provide Home Rule for Scotland, and in 1978/9 worked with John Smith as minister in charge on the Act to create an elected Scottish Assembly during the Lib-Lab parliamentary pact, which process failed in the referendum. He became chairman and then leader of the Scottish Liberal Party.
“One of his great attributes in the Commons was his humour. I remember one night – and it was night for in those pre-devolution days major Scottish business began after 10pm – we were debating the annual rate support grant – the key complex distribution of the year’s Scottish Office funding to local authorities throughout the land. The Secretary of State had introduced the debate explaining the dread allocations in a speech of mind-numbing obscurity. Many MP’s were anxious to argue why their local council deserved more. Russell rose to speak and accused the Minister of finally deploying the Achthine formula in deciding his disbursements. The poor man looked puzzled and gazed for help in the direction of his officials’ bench. “I will spell it out for him” said Russell, “a c h t h i n e. It stands for Ach tae hell it’s near enough”.
“By the time of the successful post 1997 Scotland Act he had moved on to his third great passion, Europe.
“He had been appointed as one of the British MEP’s when we first joined the European Community in the 1970’s, again taking his seat in the kilt, and was disappointed not to be elected to it in 1979. Thereafter he returned to Strasbourg as a nominated member of the Council of Europe to which he increasingly devoted all his time and attention, and was elected as their President from 1999 to 2002, a post he cherished and which he regarded as the pinnacle of his career – President of an assembly representing 830 million people, as he put it.
“He was especially interested in the bringing in of the countries which had been behind the iron curtain, and his booklets of Presidential speeches are peppered with photographs of him with politicians of unpronounceable names, as well as more familiar figures such as Kofi Annan and the Pope.
“In 1993 he sat up till 3am with Radovan Karadzic trying unsuccessfully no doubt over a slivervic or two to persuade him to accept the negotiated Bosnian peace plan, and warning him of the dire consequences if he refused. His role in these affairs was recognised in the honours he received from Austria, Romania and Albania.
“The familiar cry from his election opponents “Russell’s in Brussells” he turned to his advantage. At the last meeting of the Lords parliamentary party before we broke up for the summer recess, he used it to assail the new party leader Nick Clegg and lament his following his predecessors in being insufficiently robust on the European front.
“Of course all this activity so much appreciated internationally was at the expense of any normal domestic life, and he was the first to admit as he did that reminiscing evening to being a less than exemplary husband and father, devoted though he and his sons were to each other. He and Joan had latterly lived separate lives, but they had done so still as friends.
“In the 5th century BC the poet and philosopher Hereclitus was renowned for the elegance of his style, so much so that his works became known as his nightingales. The same should be said of Russell. His speeches were works of art. Not for him the cheap jibes, insults and sound bites which pass nowadays for political discourse. He slaved over his conference speeches, and they were never less than inspirational, and on occasion such as the 1987 conference at Harrogate when we decided on merger with the SDP, crucially influential. “You don’t change the taste of the whisky by changing the shape of the bottle” he told us. Russell had in fact urged us to merge after the 1983 election. With the benefit of hindsight I wish we had listened to him more carefully then.
“What are the words which come to mind when we think of him? Decency, humour, commitment, passion, friendship, tolerance, fairness, justice.
“Let me end with just one typical quote from his introduction in my copyof his volume of Scottish conference speeches which he affectionately and over-flatteringly inscribed to me after the 1979 election:
“Language can sometimes be inadequate to represent feeling, but for me Liberalism is a Positive Balance. It is centre in the sense that people of Liberal disposition are motivated always to seek to bridge the differences between people, rather than simply to pick and condemn one group outright for intransigence or stupidity or malice. How to reconcile free men and women with each other, without force, that is the aim of the Liberal. How to build a society which is law abiding and caring, thrustful yet protective, creative and respectful, tolerant yet responsible, just yet kind, dispassionate yet compassionate. In the translation of the Latin, Liber: free and generous. The perpetual search for ways of reconciling order with understanding, stricture with sympathy, hope with reality.
It is a profoundly radical approach – going to the root of all problems – in a society which regards kindness as boring, compassion as weak, fairness as foolish. And it is difficult, and it is complicated. And it does not appeal to the self-interested or the self-righteous or the simplistic or the militant. A credo with a valid claim to provide the basic rules for human society cannot be other than complex, and full of ifs and buts and perhaps-es.”
“Quintessential Russell.
“The poet and teacher William Johnson Cory who numbered three Prime Ministers amongst his pupils, Rosebery, Balfour and Asquith, wrote these lines:
They told me Heraclitus, they told me you were dead.
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to
shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest
A handful of grey ashes, now finally at rest,
Yet still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take.
“Russell’s pleasant voices, his nightingales, will remain forever in our memories.”
