The return of Douglas Alexander

It’s a sunny Friday afternoon in Gullane, an affluent seaside town on the Firth of Forth. For political campaigners, golden hour is the perfect time to speak to middle-class locals working from home at the end of the week. A huddle of Labour campaigners go door to door, ticking off names on a clipboard and shouting numbers to one another. ‘Eight,’ says one canvasser, smiling. She’s reporting back an undecided voter’s answer to the question ‘From one to ten, how likely are you to vote Labour on July 4?’

‘We are getting a lot of
“I have always voted SNP but am now voting for you”’

The candidate is Douglas Alexander, a former cabinet minister and one of several veterans of the last Labour government who hopes to return to frontline politics next month. Alexander was MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South before he became a victim of the 2015 Scottish Labour wipeout which left Scotland with just one Labour MP: Ian Murray in Edinburgh South. Things were so dire that one year the depleted Scottish Labour party held its Christmas party in a corridor.

Scottish Labour is now on the brink of a resurgence that would help Keir Starmer reach No. 10 and potentially see its leader Anas Sarwar take power in the 2026 Scottish elections. One poll suggests Labour will win 34 Westminster seats, thereby once again becoming the largest party in Scotland. Top of the list of winnable seats is East Lothian, for which Douglas Alexander is now standing.

I grew up in this constituency, in the town of North Berwick, which recently topped a poll of the best places to live in Britain. It is – according to the Sunday Times – the kind of place where ‘you can feel grounded as well as upwardly mobile’, which suits Alexander well.