She's not up to it

The Normandy Hotel in Renfrew, before the referendum. The Pakistan Welfare dinner. The Vale of Atholl pipe band have filed out, having smashed out renditions of the Flower of Scotland and the national anthem of Pakistan. The room is thronging with respectably dressed folk, the men abuzz with handshakes and gossip, the kids on their best behaviour, the tables piled high with iced lassi. The minutes tick by slowly.

Proceedings run long, and are punctuated by long breaks during which this conviviality boils over, chairs and tables abandoned. An officious major domo in a red coattee and medal, loosely - and with mounting irritation - structures proceedings with booming passive aggression. When the crowd are finally persuaded to sit, a visually-impaired young man recites a verse from the Koran from memory. We hear a touching remembrance speech from the son of a recently-departed stalwart of the organisation. The Pakistani ambassador reflects on the ties binding Scotland and his country. The room is ecumenical, but chock full of politicians and senior state functionaries of every political hue. 

The top table - indeed the whole room - is crammed with familiar faces. Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon, wee Willie Rennie, Tory Deputy Jackson Carlaw, the Lord Advocate, a deputy chief constable, a smattering of councillors and a wealth of parliamentarians, mainly Labour and SNP. Humza Yousaf glad-hands about wearing a splendid sequinned coat you imagine his mammy bought him. Anas Sarwar works the room like a greased octopus. Almost all of the other politicians - at least those with a sparkle of charisma - do likewise. Nicola moves assiduously from table to table, looking both elegant and appropriate in a pale salmon shalwar kameez. Although perhaps not gregarious by disposition, Sturgeon has diligently acquired the social and political skills. But for the odd flicker of self-consciousness, you'd never guess she felt at all out of place, operating against type.

But look. Up there. On stage. A small, still figure wearing a fixed rictus smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes. You might guess at a sort of loneliness alive in her as, immobile and with searching eyes, she looks out across the babbling mass of sociability. And she doesn't join in. As someone with a thick vein of inadequacy in my own temperament, I recognise the tension which comes from feeling that you ought to do things which don't come entirely naturally or comfortably, when you hesitate, and miss opportunities you know you should take. It is ghastly, paralysing. You feel useless, utterly useless in the pit of your belly.

Her speech is respectable, the delivery workmanlike, if not inspiring. Others catch the mood more deftly. Even Jackson Carlaw, who keeps things short, direct and self-effacing. The sense of the lady's overwhelming shyness is brought home even more powerfully in one of the dinner's many breaks - as enthusiasts waylay Alex Salmond for a blether, or a photograph. He looks in his element, holding court, seemingly inexhaustible. She, by contrast, creeps around the big hotel room ignored, quietly, awkward. As soon as possible, she disappears into the night under a floral umbrella, as the rain begins to fall. I doubt many - maybe any - hands were shaken. The set piece speech was fine, the script written; but pressing the flesh was a terrifying chore which she never really attempted.  

I have an inexplicable soft spot for Johann Lamont. Or maybe it's a misplaced sense of pity. It is easy to like people's harmless vulnerabilities, and she strikes me, first and foremost as a self-conscious sort of person, with a thin skin, and a brittle sense of self underneath it. It's never a pretty thing to see a human personality, pinned to the PR rack, being pulled into strange and unattractive shapes by the perceived demands of the political personality being constructed for them. But with the now-departed Paul Sinclair working the winch and tending to the ropes, the leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament has been transformed into a ferocious, non-nonsense, belligerent personality, punctuated by long, soothing spells as the invisible woman. 

You can imagine her pulling a cheeky child up short, telling them they'd never amount to anything in life. I'm not saying she did. I hope she didn't. But that is this kind of unlovely, discouraging teacher which Lamont has made her public persona, or been made into. It is difficult to imagine that Johann's teaching career left behind it a wealth of students who can say that she bulldozed through her classes like a knifegrinder – seeing "the dull minds scattering sparks of themselves, becoming razory, becoming useful", as Norman MacCaig once wrote In Praise of a Man. That's an opportunity missed. 

The disastrous thing is, there is no gravitas to any of this. Her latest relaunch speech - wittily described by one of my crueller followers on twitter as "cargo cult Obama" - is an ungrammatical mish-mash of rhetorical tropes and meaningless drivel. Whoever composed it - and part of me fancies this might be from the desk of Lamont herself - seems to think that the essence of uplifting rhetoric is combining the same words in as many different senses in a single sentence as possible. Hence the sub-Blairite payoff: "We can have any number of Scotland Acts - Scotland will improve when Scotland unites and all of Scotland acts and that is the challenge." It is a kind of pastiche of eloquence, to be uttered with feeling, in pert, verbless sentences, but it is emotionally and politically vacuous. 

Much of the recent gossip around the parliament has focussed on Lamont's longevity. Will she survive till 2016? And who could take over from her anyway? She hasn't taken out Jim Murphy at the knees, but after the referendum result, she seems to have acquired a more resolute gleam in either eye. It is as if a small, flattering voice has stolen from somewhere in her skull, "I've seen off Alex Salmond. I can do this. I'll stay." My own sense has always been that it is the function of caretaker leaders to lose elections, (and perhaps to win them, if they get lucky) and Johann hasn't lost her's yet. She hasn't done the job, and cannot, with any credibility, throw in the towel now.

But there are also the bright flashes, and a permanent residual glow, of deep, deep insecurity about the Labour MSP, which I expect to be the focus of increasing attention has 2016 approaches.  Peter Ross's 2013 interview in the Scotland on Sunday with Lamont is required reading, and is - very gently, very intuitively - eviscerating. Peter captures that sense of self-consciousness which I observed in the Normandy Hotel in bright colours, and which goes a long way to explaining some of the other, awkward expressions of Lamont's public persona.  A key passage:

"Perhaps because her self-esteem is so rooted in that old image of herself as the clever girl from the tenements, this criticism seems to nag at her and she comes back to it later on. “The worst thing anybody could call me is stupid.” She understands, I think, how corrosive this sort of criticism can be; how, for people who are a little fragile it can eat away at your guts, your head." 

One expression of this, for me, is Johann's pretentiousness, in the very specific sense of "trying to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed." I know, I know, Lamont's favoured shtick is the plain-speaking, no-nonsense dominie. The suggestion seems improbable and even impertinent, particularly from someone as excessively florid as me, but bear with me. Watch the Labour leader talk about any topic, given room to run. She's a remarkably digressive, and frequently incoherent, speaker. Watch her trying and failing to explain her devolution plans to Gordon Brewer. Watch her performance on telly on referendum night, setting out the main , complex factors informing the vote.  Watch her in any setting, where she has time to develop a point, without a script clutched for grim death to read from. She tanks.

The obvious interpretation of this is simply that her mind is stumbling and unfocussed, her tongue tied and tripping her, but I think that diagnosis misses the more interesting point. Lamont doesn't have the confidence to be simple. Her digressive tendency derives from a generally unsuccessful effort to present herself as master of the brief, in command of the technicalities, able to spring from one topic to the next with elegance and fluency. It springs, in short, from inadequacy and a misplaced effort to make out her sense of self as, in Ross's phrase, "a clever girl from the tenements." It turns every considered answer into a dreary psychodrama. 

The only problem is, Lamont doesn't have the communication skills or the smarts to prosper in the role she's allotted to herself. She isn't the master of the brief, and doesn't have the prowess to pretend otherwise. Ensnared by her inadequacies, she conspires to make herself look considerably dumber and less eloquent than she undoubtedly can be. In trying and failing to be impressive, she leaves a mangled wreckage of loosely strung together words and concepts, exemplified by her statement, during the referendum campaign, that "Scots aren't genetically programmed to make political decisions." What she meant by that remark was that Scottish political inclinations are not inborn or inevitable - but instead served up an eminently quotable suggestion that ye and me are a chromosome or two short of the full governing set. This tendency is only likely to be aggravated as 2016 approaches, and the thin film of her self-esteem stews in the battery acid of a campaign.

Emotionally vulnerable leaders are, all too easily, eaten alive in politics. I say it with no relish whatever. This is an ugly thing to see. But if Johann stays on, and my reading of her is anywhere near right, that is the fate awaiting her as the next Scottish Parliamentary election approaches. If the subtext of the next SNP Holyrood campaign is She's Not Up To It, it is hard not to feel that Lamont's own self-confidence isn't rotted by that self-same, nagging doubt. As a human personality, with all of the vulnerability which comes from that, Johann is going to be crucified, not just politically, but in herself. Part of me feels for the the peeping face at the top table, shyly refusing to descend. The referendum may be won, the Labour leader may feel buoyed, but I wouldn't want a lend of Lamont's shoes for anything.