Tommy Sheridan with Alan McCombes, early 1990s
Downfall - The Tommy Sheridan story
Interview with Alan McCombes from Scottish Socialist Voice
The Defend Tommy Sheridan campaign hacks are throwing badly aimed mud, comments have had to be closed down on an English left website of ill-repute, and it’s still the day before anyone will read Alan McCombes’ book, Downfall.
The first book to be published looking at the Tommy Sheridan circus of disaster was bound to throw up a stour, so why has Alan chosen to step back in the mire as the author?
“Well, I didn’t write it for the money,” he says, laughing. The Defend Tommy Sheridan campaign have been in the press and online claiming Alan is “profiteering”. Getting 8 per cent of the cover price, compared to the retailers’ 50 per cent, authors need to be in JK Rowling’s league before they make money which would cause eyebrows to raise.
“I know there’s a lot of interest in this case, but that’s largely in Scotland and the market’s restricted. I’ve put a lot of time into this book, and at the end of it all, if I even end up recouping the equivalent of the minimum wage, I’ll be quite happy.
“But I could have made a more lucrative living writing for other outlets. Or delivering pizzas, to be honest.”
Downfall has been a long time coming, with numerous people suggesting Alan should write a book since 2006, and the outcome of Sheridan’s first court case.
“After I stopped working for the SSP in 2007, I began to take the idea of writing this book more seriously. I met with the publishers, Birlinn, who I was happy with because they didn’t want a sensationalist book, they wanted a serious analysis that would bring out the story but would also allow me to bring out the politics of the events.
“When I signed the contract with Birlinn there was a police inquiry underway but nobody had been charged. Myself and a whole range of people in the SSP, and others outside the party, had given evidence to the Court of Session and were at that point being maligned the length and breadth of Scotland.
“We had lost all of our seats in the Scottish Parliament, and were being blamed for stitching Tommy up, for plotting against him, and for committing perjury to scupper his court case. Tommy Sheridan was basking in the acclaim of having won his case, and had wholesale access to the media, which he used repeatedly to denounce honest men and women as liars and perjurers.
“We had come through a nightmare experience. We did the right thing, had refused to participate in a systematic cover up, yet we were being savaged and vilified.
“I was determined to bring out the full facts of the matter to the public because there is a public interest in this. The SSP during its peak years had thousands of people involved, giving up their time and money. It also, between one election and another, probably had up to 200,000 people voting for it. These people had a right to know the truth. They were being lied to.
“Now obviously things have moved on. I wrote most of the book in 2008-2009, and I think that the most recent court case did mark a big change in people’s attitudes. A lot of the facts were brought out at that case, and the verdict ensured that the media were finally prepared to acknowledge the case that we’d tried to make all along.
“But the book remains important because there’s still huge confusion, not least because we still have clowns like the Defend Tommy Sheridan Campaign, who portray this as a miscarriage of justice and do a grave disservice to genuine victims of miscarriage of justice. Portraying this individual who’s lied and cheated and perjured his way through the last five years, as an honest man who’s been framed up by his ex-colleagues and others is just nonsense, but it does cause confusion.
“This might be the first time that everyone gets an opportunity to have all the facts fully set out.”
There may be fears amongst some that publishing a book now only serves to draw out the period in which the Scottish left seems to be at war with itself. The timing of publication was in the hands of publishers, who had a fair few legal issues to contend with, but regardless, Alan says, with the book he aims “to rectify the damage rather than dragging it out.”
“I’d be more sympathetic to that argument if Tommy Sheridan had put his hands up, at any stage, and said, ‘I accept responsibility, I accept that I maligned all these people,’ and apologised. But Tommy hasn’t done that, he still protests his innocence, he’s taking this case to appeal. This individual has dragged out this calamitous series of events for more than six years, inflicted untold damage on the left in Scotland, from which it will take years to recover.
I hope the book will, if enough people read it, actually repair some of the damage, by making it absolutely clear that this wasn’t two warring tribes who were as much to blame as one another - I understand why people still think that. The boil needs to be lanced.”
Back to why Alan would return to the firing line, having already endured a fair whack of trauma throughout this ridiculous drama. Couldn’t he have left the book writing to others more detached?
“I’m not the only person who’d be placed to write this book, but I think I’ve got an advantage in that I worked very closely with Tommy for a period spanning more than 20 years. In some ways people might blame me for some of what’s happened and I think that’s fair enough, I accept responsibility, just as I accepted part of the credit when things were going well. I was involved from way back so I was able to put things in context, but I’m expressing my views and I make no bones about that.
“This is not a Scottish Socialist Party document, it’s not a manifesto, it’s not been collectively written. It is a personal account, and I don’t try to pretend that I’m some kind of detached observer. I was a participant in the events.
“I think it strives to be fair to Tommy Sheridan, by acknowledging the role that he played. I think it tries to be fair to other people as well by also at the same time illustrating that the successes on the left at that period were not purely down to the role of a single individual, but nonetheless it does give credit where credit is due.”
Is he really in a position to be fair to Tommy Sheridan?
“I said I’d ‘tried’! Hopefully it’s a warts and all account. Where I’ve made mistakes, or where people in the SSP made mistakes, individually or collectively, I have tried to deal with that as well.
“People who took the right side in 2006, everybody who stood by the SSP at a time of great peril in 2006, deserves praise for the role that they played, but we made mistakes along the way. But these mistakes had reasons and I’ve tried to explain them, to put them in context.”
So what will people who have followed the events learn from Alan’s account? He stresses that he has not written an exposé, and there will be little in the way of juicy new gossip for the tabloids to chew. He was certainly at pains not to drag other people’s personal lives into the Sheridan mud bath.
“What I have included is information which I was either personally involved in, so I know is true from first hand experience, or from interviewing people, which has been backed up and corroborated, or from documentation or from press archives. I have sourced carefully and I’ve tried to be scrupulous.”
Downfall provides analysis as well as a narrative of events, and one thing that Alan is keen to challenge is the widely held view that this is the story of the actions of one man hell bent on a disastrous course of action.
“In the same way that it wasn’t just one man that achieved the successes of the SSP, it wasn’t just one man that brought about the serious damage to the left in Scotland. If Tommy had been isolated, there is no way that he could have ruptured the left and inflicted the damage he did, or even have taken his case to court.
“But people backed him up people inside the SSP, people who were not active in the SSP but were on the peripheries, he had celebrity backers, he had people in the media who were effectively cheering him on. Maybe some because they didn’t understand, and he did manipulate people, certainly, but it required the active complicity of whole swathes of people and organisations, at different levels, all the way down the line, to allow Tommy to behave as he did.”
With regards to how Sheridan behaved, Alan says he attempts, though he admits he feels ill-qualified, to look at the misogyny displayed throughout events surrounding the court cases, and the psychology at work.
“I think we tend to treat politics as parties, ideals and principles, which is what politics should be about. But everyone is a product of their own psychological make up, and that can have a massive impact. Although I think this story is unique, the cocktail of personality traits in Tommy Sheridan, that lead to the actions he took, I don’t think they’re that unusual. Or rather they are unusual but commonplace in some of the most powerful institutions in society.
“They’re traits that are valued in the society we live in -individualism, egotism, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, being prepared to do anything without flinching. It’s a jungle that we live in under capitalism, and those type of traits, often combined with charisma and grandiosity, I believe that mixture is quite prevalent, actually.
“I’m a Marxist so I’m not going to say that was the cause of the banking crisis, but I do think that the way that individuals behaved magnified the damage that was done. Dictators are extreme examples, but in the boardrooms of big business I think you might find that Mr Murdoch and Mr Sheridan have a lot more in common than either of them would ever like to admit!
“It’s important, because you do take people at face value, you tend to look for their strengths. It can blind you to behaviours that, when things start to go wrong, can become quite catastrophic.”
Will the publication of Downfall mark the start of a new chapter for its author?
“I just hope the book might have an influence on those who even now have some illusions, who might read the book and question their own role, who might ask themselves if they would do the same thing again.
“You can work with people who you have political differences with, but you know where you stand with them. But how can you work with people who would argue that the sky is green and the grass is blue, and perpetrate a fantasy, and continue to buy into accusations against people which are not just unpleasant, they’re monstrous.”
As far as the bandied calls for unity, then, a line remains slashed in the sand.
“Obviously it’s our story, the story of the people who stood by the SSP and told the truth. Whether people judge the book to be fair or not, they can read it and decide. But what they would have to accept is, this is no fiction. My opinions can be discussed and debated, but the facts can’t. They’re indisputable.”
Downfall is out now. Published by Birlinn Ltd.