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?’

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.