Donald Trump's actions in US won't serve him – or others – well
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Jamie's Journal by Jamie Stone
It’s not easy when you lose an election. I should know.
Having voluntarily stood down as an MSP in 2011, I tried to make a comeback in 2016, but I got beat.
And never having lost an election (both local and national) during the previous 30 years, it wasn’t the best day of my life.
The SNP’s Gail Ross got a whopping 13,937 votes to my 10,024 – and I had to stand on the stage as one of the vanquished, put on a smile and lose gracefully. It wasn’t easy.
But that is how things must be done. I was a bit battered and hurt; but later I offered Gail a private and sincere word of congratulation. More of this anon.
I went home and explained that I wouldn’t after all be returning to the bright lights of Edinburgh.
The next week I went to a meeting of the Highland Council (I was still a councillor) and sat quietly at the back wondering what my fellow councillors were thinking.
Were they laughing at me? Were they pleased that I had got my comeuppance? But their faces gave nothing away.
But time holds so much – and weeks later there was my daughter’s wedding, and then the swirl of politics engulfed me again with something called the Brexit referendum. Surprisingly quickly, my broodings were consigned to a forgotten bottom drawer. Life goes on.
Of course, all this came to mind as I watched the appalling scenes in Washington DC last week.
Donald Trump a good loser?
He wanted his place in history, he wanted his statue in the Capitol, he wanted his face carved on Mount Rushmore – now all he will be remembered for is his incitement to riot, to try to overturn democracy. He will be in the history books all right.
Democracy is about elections – and whoever gets the most votes being the winner, and whoever gets the lesser being the graceful loser.
“The people have spoken, the bastards,” said US would-be politician Dick Tuck when he lost an election in 1966. Did he realise then just what a famous quote it would become? Probably not – but it does encapsulate the crucial importance of accepting the result. Something that ‘The Donald’ is entirely incapable of.
There are two codas to my tale.
Firstly, that just over a year ago I thought that I had lost my seat in the General Election. So did most other people at the count in Inverness – so I quietly conceded victory to the SNP candidate Karl Rosie and reached for the speech in my inside left pocket, the gracious loser one (I have always taken two speeches when the votes are being counted).
Then fate intervened again (just as it had in 2017, one year after Gail Ross beat me) and once again I was elected as an MP. This time by the gut-wrenchingly tight margin of 204 votes. I had thought that I was a loser, but I wasn’t. So it was the speech in the inside right pocket after all.
But my second coda is the important one.
In 2016 Gail and I kept it civil. My recognition that the lady had beaten me fair and square did ultimately pay dividends.
Despite being on opposing sides, we did maintain the friendship. This means that today – yes, through the hand of fate – as the jointly elected MP and MSP for the far north, we have been able to act together on a number of issues, the proposed Sutherland space launch being one of them.
However, by behaving so appallingly badly, Donald Trump has utterly ruined any future political prospects that he might have ever had. The chances are he has also wrecked the careers of a number of other politicians in the US.
We live in astonishing times – and thank God it does now seem that democracy is prevailing on the other side of the Atlantic.
