A baronet is standing against the Tories in next month’s council elections after claiming he has been expelled from the Scottish Conservative Party.
Sir James Angus Rhoderick Neil McGrigor, known to everyone as “Jamie”, is contesting the Oban South and Isles ward in Argyll and Bute as an independent, a council seat he had held for the Tories since 2017. Prior to that, he had been a Conservative MSP for the Highlands and Islands, serving in Holyrood from 1999 to 2016.
Eton-educated Sir Jamie is the 7th Baronet of Campden Hill in Middlesex. He suffers from acute emphysema and must carry an oxygen cylinder around with him at all times. His ancestor gained the first baronetcy after serving as Surgeon General to the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular campaign.
He had intended to defend his council seat – it is comprised of some of Scotland’s most picturesque landscapes, including the islands of Mull, Coll, Tiree, Iona and Ulva – at the May 5 local elections but was told he would have to go through “hustings” as he had competition for the Tory candidacy in his ward.
As he was undergoing treatment for his lung condition at a Spanish clinic, he had to take part in the hustings by video link and, after a secret ballot of Tory members in Argyll, he was told that he had lost to the rival candidate.
That, as he thought, was that. However, a short time later he said he was told by party officials that the other candidate had pulled out after attending the Scottish Conservative Party conference in Aberdeen, which had been addressed by Boris Johnson and the Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross.
Sir Jamie said he was phoned by a party official who said: “You’ll never believe this but the other chap has pulled out as he didn’t think much of either Johnson or Ross and didn’t want to stand as a Tory.”
As he had not been invited to stand as the replacement, Sir Jamie said he believed there would be no Conservative candidate in his old ward so he chose to stand as an independent. However, in what was emerging as one of the strangest episodes, even in Scotland’s chequered political history, Sir Jamie says unbeknown to him the Scottish Tories had, after all, decided on a new candidate for Oban South and the Isles, but didn’t inform him.
The next he knew was when a letter from Scottish Conservative Central Office in Edinburgh arrived at his home, signed by Matthew Edmonds, the party’s national campaign organiser, which said that because he intended to stand in opposition to an official Tory candidate, Sir Jamie was to be expelled from the party.
‘I would not have resigned’
“I was no longer a member – not through my own wishes. I wouldn’t have resigned. I’ve been a member for too bloody long. But it’s not my fault. I didn’t know they’d arranged for someone else to stand,” he claimed.
Sir Jamie was also the first member of the Holyrood parliament to get a Private Members’ Bill on to the statute book, when in 2008 the SNP government supported his measure to establish an official Register of Scottish Tartans.
He was deemed to have outlived his usefulness to the party when he was “encouraged” to stand down from the Scottish Parliament in 2016 but was almost immediately snapped up by the party at local level, fighting and winning his Argyll council seat in 2017.
He is fairly philosophical about his latest setback, saying: “I’m quite p—-d off with the Conservative Party but it’s not the end of the world if I don’t get in. And, anyway, I thought I had retired when I left Holyrood in 2016.”
All of that said, he is not taking his latest predicament lying down. He has taken out and paid for a front-page advertisement in his local paper, the Oban Times, and under a headline proclaiming “No Boats No Votes” he has pledged to fight the SNP over their failure to deliver the new ferries that had been promised to serve the islands he has represented for the past five years.
A Scottish Conservative spokesman said: “Jamie McGrigor has chosen to stand as an independent candidate and is therefore no longer a member of the Scottish Conservatives.”
