Still independent

“Now, I now I’m not going to be able to eat all of this, so I’m going to give you a piece of it, right?” insists Margo Macdonald, passing a fat slice of red meat across the table.

I’ve been easily persuaded by the MSP to order three courses off the menu in the Scottish parliament’s members’ restaurant. We’ve both plumped for venison, and MacDonald seems prepared to go on record that the combination of the fillet and suet dumpling is “delicious.” I agree, and then pursue the issue which looks set to take up the bulk of our conversation hereon in: the MSP’s spearheading of the assisted dying bill.

In truth, I’m unsure how to proceed, unused to discussing matters of life and death with someone...“so old and decrepit!” she interrupts, uproariously. “Don’t worry, you won’t be as insensitive as some of the ones who have talked to me about it.”

So, a little relieved, I ask tentatively ask what stage her illness is at. “That’s insensitive!” she snaps, before again laughing easily. It is, undoubtedly, an unorthodox introduction into how not to tiptoe around the issue of terminal illness.

Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease over a decade ago, the independent MSP has attracted broad attention as a spokesperson for the assisted dying bill, which seeks to give terminally ill individuals the right to choose the time of their death. Currently in what she terms a “concentration period,” the real possibility of a members’ bill arose somewhat unexpectedly during a debate last March when MacDonald gave an impassioned speech in the chamber. Despite having intended not to speak, the volume of letters she received convinced the former broadcaster to dust off her journalistic skills, resulting in a BBC Scotland documentary—My Right to Die—which charted her research into euthanasia.

“No two cases of Parkinson’s are the same, and no two people are the same,” she explains. “Walking down the street you wouldn’t say ‘what’s wrong with her,’ you’d probably say ‘oh, I wonder what age she is!’” But while her symptoms remain almost unnoticeable, MacDonald’s fun, easy manner perhaps downplays the degenerative effects of the condition – a condition which acts upon the central nervous system and for which there is no cure. “I’m tired at the moment, so the tremors are back a bit,” she admits.

Has she, then, considered the possibility of when she may have to step down from parliament? “No! I’ve got too much to do! The doctor yesterday said he thought I had another parliament in me. But I’m not sure there’s another husband who would put up with me!” she jokes.

This might well be an understatement: one needn’t spend too long in the company of the staunchly pro-independence MSP to develop a keen respect for the number of parliamentary tasks she currently juggles. “My diary’s always cluttered,” she says, without a hint of regret. There’s a sexual offences bill to cover prostitution (“the dingbats think it can be abolished”), progress to be made in youth sports (”community sport will suffer, unless someone pays it some attention now”), as well as consistently keeping her former party on their toes over independence (”[turning student loans to grants] was a laudable objective, but before that objective could be realised, this place had to have total economic and financial power”). In fact, it isn’t the assisted suicide bill ends up filling the majority of our conversation.

A easy interview would run something along the following lines here: Margo MacDonald is terminally ill. So, summoning the last of her strength, she sets herself the mammoth task of crossing off all unfinished business. This hack gets to write a nicely uplifting article with MacDonald depicted as a parliamentary legend – as far as devolved politics allows, that is. Frustratingly, though, that won’t fit here. One can’t shake the feeling that it’s just politics as usual for the Lothians MSP.

Indeed, this appears to be the case even regarding the bill to which she has been portrayed—sometimes in decidedly unfriendly terms—as being most personally attached: “Because of what I’m going through from the neck down, I’ve maybe got more of a perception of what life is really like [for more acute Parkinson’s sufferers]. But as regards to campaigning on the issue, I’m doing that as a politician.” Of course, that’s not to diminish the politician’s strong personal beliefs on the issue: “I know I do not want to get to the stage of double incontinence,” she says bluntly.

This rather practical desire to get things done crops up a number of times over the course of lunch, and it’s a sentiment which translates equally to more prosaic—but no less important—issues. On the issue of public housing, for instance, she turns to her husband, former SNP big-wig Jim Sillars, and the pair move straight into a familiar debating mode: “I got hold of Alex Salmond [at the end of a meeting] and I said to him...”

What ensues is a discussion on the odd discrepancy between the borrowing powers of local and national government in Scotland (the council can; the parliament can’t), and whether enough cross-party support can be garnered to take the matter to the Treasury (it's, apparently, possible). This simply isn’t suitable material for my dramatic fable.

Nor is her failure to provide theatrics via any juicy animosity towards her former party – a party which forced her off the regional list back in 2003 when she was elected, instead, as an independent. An old-school nationalist, she is undoubtedly critical of certain SNP policies, as this publication's front page demonstrates. But her approach remains, in the main, pragmatic. Speaking about the Scottish Homecoming, for instance—a Labour idea which the SNP stand to either pull off with aplomb, or bungle dreadfully this year—she reasons: "I don’t want to see the SNP punished for it. Nor want to see Labour punished for it, either, because it’s one of those cases where Scotland loses if it’s bad."

But, in reality, this isn't surprising. Far from being a parliamentary outsider in the vein of George Galloway or Martin Bell, Margo MacDonald maintains an especially privileged position within the Scottish government. In a parliament which, as one Holyrood worker tells me, is controlled by party whips to a far greater degree than its Westminster counterpart, the sole independent MSP maintains an enviable freedom to vote—or speak—in whichever way she sees fit.

Moreover, she’s able to navigate cross-party dealings unique way. Again on the subject of Homecoming 2009, for instance, she reveals: “I’ve been speaking to people across the parties and warning them within an inch of their lives not to use this as a political football.” Only the next few months will tell how effective this co-ordination will have been.

And so, it seems, it is a position which MacDonald looks set to use as vigourously as usual, at least for the rest of this parliament. Beyond that, “they still have to vote for you, you know!”

And it’s no mean task she has set herself. On the assisted dying bill, she observes sagely that “finding legislation which is right at the interface of morality and public policy is difficult enough. But when you then add in the multiplicity of equally valid points of view then it becomes extremely difficult.”

Fortunately, that hefty to-do list offers plenty of opportunity for success. And if Margo’s enigmatic ”hmmm, you’re making me think” over pudding and the EU of is anything to go by, there’s room on the list for a couple more of those to-do's.