Seven months after the Sunday Herald revealed her dodgy donation ... Wendy Alexander finally resignsBy journalist of the year, Paul Hutcheon
A conference call to her shadow cabinet colleagues yesterday morning confirmed what had until then been simply speculation: Wendy Alexander would stand down as Labour's Holyrood leader before noon.
Her exit had been planned for more than 24 hours, the spur being the Parliament Standards Committee's recommendation on Thursday that Alexander serve a one-day ban for breaching Holyrood rules on non-declaration of gifts.
Her two closest allies, Labour MSPs Jackie Baillie and David Whitton, spent Friday in a series of meetings at John Smith House, the Scottish Labour HQ in Glasgow, trying to talk her out of resigning. Prime minister Gordon Brown, not a man without his own troubles, also urged her to stay on.
Alexander, tearful and nearly mute from laryngitis, was said to have been "persuaded" by her colleagues to back down. By 9pm, Baillie was telling journalists and MSPs that Alexander was staying; the Labour leader was walking away from the cliff.
However, a good sleep and the counsel offered by her husband, economist Brian Ashcroft, was sufficient to pull her back to her original position.
Hours later she announced her decision live on camera. "It is with deep regret that I write today to tender my resignation following the decisions of the Standards Committee this week," she said, holding back the tears.
Alexander's resignation has brought to a close a nine-month reign as Labour leader that was dogged by an endless run of stories about donations to her leadership campaign last August.
These culminated in Holyrood's Standards Committee, which upholds the MSPs' code of conduct, recommending Alexander serve a one-day suspension from parliament for failing to declare around £8000 in donations on her register of interest.
The committee, which was accused of making a "politically motivated" decision by Alexander's allies, agreed the sanction last week after backing the conclusion of standards commissioner Jim Dyer, whose own investigation into the Labour MSP found she had broken the parliament's rules on disclosing gifts.
In another twist, Alexander was also aware, at the time she was considering resignation, that she was the subject of another Dyer probe into her conduct.
After the commissioner had informed her in January of his initial finding that she had broken the rules on declaring gifts, a press release was put out in her name revealing details of Dyer's live inquiry - something that is clearly against the rules. She was facing the damaging prospect of the donations saga rolling on for months.
Ironically, it was the very leadership campaign that propelled Alexander into office that contained the seeds of her own downfall.
Last August, at a time when the Paisley North MSP was widely expected to succeed Jack McConnell as leader of the Labour party, Team Alexander decided to raise a war chest on the off-chance that another Labour MSP might mount a challenge.
Her key lieutenants - campaign manager Tom McCabe, Whitton as treasurer, as well as Baillie and fellow Labour MSP Charlie Gordon - held regular meetings that dealt with fundraising and strategy, but made two fatal errors.
The first was wilfully seeking donations of between £995 and £999, sums that suspiciously fell just below the Electoral Commission's public declaration level of £1000.
The other decision was to create a body called the Wendy Alexander Campaign, effectively a bank account that stored the money raised from the secret donors.
By seeking donations to the campaign, rather than to the MSP herself, Team Alexander believed the contributions would not have to be declared on the parliament's own register of interest.
In other words, Alexander's leadership campaign was structured in such a way that public disclosure, at both commission and parliamentary level, was unnecessary.
Team Alexander's actions were subsequently exposed in a series of investigations by the Sunday Herald that were given wind in separate inquiries into her campaign fund.
Her decision to accept an illegal £950 from Jersey-based businessman Paul Green overshadowed the first three months of her leadership and led to an inquiry by the Electoral Commission.
Although the watchdog declined to report Alexander to the procurator fiscal, the body did conclude that she had broken the law, a damaging fact for any politician.
But running parallel to the commission's investigation, which had attracted the attention of the UK media, was a much less high-profile probe by Dyer.
In December last year, at the height of the Green controversy, an SNP researcher wrote to the commissioner and urged him to investigate whether Alexander had broken Holyrood's rules by not declaring the campaign donations as gifts.
Dyer looked at the matter and, within weeks, concluded that Alexander had broken the rules on disclosure, a report he referred to procurator fiscal.
Although the prosecutor decided it was "not appropriate" to press charges against the Labour leader - a decision that appeared to close down the donations row - Dyer resumed his investigation with a view to issuing a report to the Standards Committee.
A donations row that had lain dormant for four months then flared up two weeks ago when the Sunday Herald revealed the contents of Dyer's report to the committee: in his view, a clear breach of the law had taken place.
The seven MSPs on the committee were then tasked with deciding whether to accept his findings and, if it did so, agreeing a sanction for Alexander.
A 5-2 majority decision last week backed Dyer's conclusion, which was followed by a narrower 4-3 decision last Thursday recommending a one-day suspension.
More damagingly, the committee's extended deliberations meant the full parliamentary vote could not take place until September: the donations row would hang over her for another two months.
Alexander's final hours in charge were, according to one Labour insider, a "messy and horrible" affair.
She had opted on Thursday night to resign as party leader, a decision Whitton and Baillie tried to overturn in frantic meetings at Labour HQ the following day.
A manic 24 hours saw Alexander being pulled in both directions after the duo insisted she could continue as leader and fight the ban.
Baillie, in particular, was keen for her to stay, a desire some party sources believe was motivated by a desire to retain her own position within the party as the leader's eyes and ears.
However, perhaps influenced by her husband, Alexander tendered her resignation to Scottish Labour general secretary Colin Smyth yesterday morning, and read it out at a press conference before noon.
Her defiant statement, in keeping with her past defence, went to some lengths to pass on the blame for her problems.
Despite breaking the law on declaring donations to the commission, Alexander claimed at the time that she had been "exonerated", a bizarre and self-serving interpretation of the facts.
This time she blamed the SNP. The Nationalists, she claimed, were responsible for "vexatious complaints" to the standards commissioner, and had "sought the prize of political victory with little thought to the standing of the parliament".
Her defence against the verdicts of the commissioner and the Standards Committee - that she was told by the parliament's clerks that registration was not unnecessary - was as weak as it was irrelevant.
Alexander had asked for advice from the clerks in November last year on the status of her donations, 60 days after some of the campaign cheques had been banked, despite the law clearly stating that MSPs have 30 days to declare gifts.
Put simply, Alexander asked for advice on registration well after she had already broken the rules, a fact that rendered any feedback from the Standards Committee as worthless.
However, while the protracted donations scandal has forced Alexander's resignation, a number of other issues contributed to the perception that her leadership was in trouble.
A series of shambolic performances at First Minister's Questions, coupled with the botched handling of her policy rethink on Scottish independence, gave the impression of a limping leader whose hold on power was far from secure.
Her nine-month stint also alienated colleagues who were among her staunchest supporters in the early days of her leadership.
McCabe, her campaign manager, had distanced himself from Alexander months before the Standards Committee verdict.
Duncan McNeil, the chair of the Labour group at Holyrood, was said to have turned down a senior post in Alexander's shadow administration, for reasons unexplained.
Even her Westminster allies, namely the prime minister and her brother Douglas, the international development secretary, were furious with her over the referendum debacle.
By the end, her dwindling band of supporters could be found in a small room in John Smith House trying to give Alexander's leadership the kiss of life.
Yesterday she ignored their advice and turned off her own life support machine.
