New Statesman Scotland - The choice to sail a lonely course
"Perfect day for a trip round Noss," sighed the bearded, piratical figure in seaboots and Breton fisherman's cap. "But there are no passengers." And so Dr Jonathan Wills, the tour-boat operator, was faced with sailing home to the island of Bressay with only the thoughts of Dr Jonathan Wills ex-chairman of the Shetland Labour Party, for company.
Thoughts he had just put on tape for Shetland's evening news programme. Thoughts that had just led him not only to resign as the local party's chair, but which had almost certainly buried for good the political career he has teetered on the edge of for three decades.
Because Wills was a virtual certainty as Labour candidate for the Orkney and Shetland Westminster seat, a battle he was expected to do well in. The Lib Dem mooted to replace Jim Wallace, who is to concentrate on Holyrood, has been parachuted in from the south, and even knee-jerk Liberals of both island groups may change their vote this time around.
Now, while remaining a member of the party, he has declared that, on principal, he is unable to defend Labour policies on a number of crucial local issues, and therefore will neither continue as Shetland chairman nor run for parliament.
So what? Well, Jonathan Wills has an interesting history. English-accented, but reared in Shetland, he was the first student rector of Edinburgh University in the 1960s, before acting as agent for the pal who succeeded him. That buddy was one Gordon Brown, with whom Wills remains on friendly terms. Since then, he has worked for the Workers' Educational Institute and pursued a career in journalism, which took in stints as the Times's man in Scotland, the setting up of BBC Radio Shetland, editing the Shetland Times and writing acclaimed books on the oil industry, as well as children's fiction.
Always a political animal, his battle to be the candidate for Holyrood was a bitterly fought affair, during which he was nominated by the local party, rejected by the Scottish Labour Party in Edinburgh, and then finally allowed to run. He was beaten in the actual poll by the Lib Dem Tavish Scott.
But none of this gives the flavour of the man. You will find contemporaries from the heady days of 1968 Edinburgh who always saw him as more likely to succeed in national politics than his friend Brown. More talented, faster on his feet, a better debater, they say. More colourful. But in politics as in journalism, Wills has always tended to immerse himself in single issues, taking the moral high ground with a verve, passion and sometimes raging bloody-mindedness that can leave him alienated from enemies and supporters alike. The battles over the years have left too many bruised and bleeding casualties: over changes at BBC Radio Shetland with the Beeb hierarchy; with the Times; with the Shetland Islands Council, on behalf of the Shetland Times, all the way to the Court of Session; with the management of the Shetland Times when it sacked him; and again over internet copyright; with the Labour Party, BP, P&O Scottish Ferries, various local businesses and, most recently, with the Coastguard and the North of Scotland Water Authority. Campaigns all waged with the rhetoric control on full, and Wills always, always right.
Many of his friends have forgiven him the foibles and the furies, for the sake of his charm, wit and enormous good humour. And wished, time and again, that he would learn to assimilate local, personal issues into the bigger picture. No one can, after all, live on the moral high ground all the time. It gets hard to breathe up there.
"I cannot," he thundered last week, "in all conscience, defend the Labour government on a number of concerns affecting our islands, despite my continuing support for it on most national issues." Specifically, he could not stand as an official Labour candidate nor hold office in the party when the government was planning to close the Pentland Coastguard station ("wilfully ignorant, penny-pinching and foolhardy . . . it will end in disaster"). He also opposes, vehemently, the taking of housing association houses into private control.
All fair enough. Good points - and he will make them well, if at considerable and probably infuriating length. But, Jonathan, don't you realise you could have been a contender? That you could have helped crew a great big huge political ship, instead of captaining a wee tiny tour-boat, going round in circles, wondering where your passengers have gone?
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