A hack waiting to join the elite

corridors of putative power. Ajay Close investigates

THE shadow spokeswoman for Scottish education sank back into her velvet-upholstered armchair and looked around the foyer of the opulent riverside hotel. Classical music soothed away the cares of her demanding 13 portfolios. Brass stags disported amid the indoor shrubbery. She smoothed out a crease in her discreetly expensive Frank Usher suit. The bus driver's daughter had come a long way - but had still further to go.

The journalist leaned forward, lips parted to show a predatory glint of tooth. ''And what would you say to rumours that you have deliberately distanced yourself from George Robertson, because it is your intention, after the anticipated Labour victory, that you and not he will be Secretary of State for Scotland?''

Instantly the MP's elegant features became a mask of impenetrability. Her old dad used to say that a politician's greatest asset was a poker-face. Then out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a familiar figure and, lifting her head, she smiled.

''Hello George.''

The journalist turned, confused. Behind her stood George Robertson, Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland.

Were this a scene from Helen Liddell's political thriller-cum-shoulderpad-ripper Elite, there would have been pleasant, even domestic, chit-chat for the benefit of the journalist, but later, in private, our ruthlessly ambitious heroine would have left her former mentor in no doubt that his superiority in the political pecking order was purely temporary. Alas, this is real life, so while your reporter witnessed the cheery banter about Helen's son getting a haircut and George sitting next to Jarvis Cocker on the shuttle, what happened when the Shadow Scottish Secretary and his education spokeswoman were next alone is not a matter of record.

Liddell does not have the covergirl height, the everlasting legs, the loose-limbed athletic stride, and the long fall of auburn tresses enjoyed by her anti-heroine Ann Clarke. She has not risen to power through the shady manipulations of a cell-based Trotskyite revolutionary movement bankrolled by an American presidential candidate bent on making Britain the 51st state. So far as we know. She became secretary of the Scottish Labour Party at 26, a member of the board of the Daily Record and Sunday Mail at 38, and a Shadow front-bench spokesperson little more than a year after being elected MP, all without benefit of international conspiracy. Which is less sensational but, ultimately, rather more interesting.

We meet in Glasgow's Moat House Hotel, deep in expense-account-land, the sort of habitat front benchers-in-waiting are expected to be seen in these days. And Liddell is not out of place. Nothing to do with the power dressing and assertive jewellery. There's an anonymity here which suits her style. She's been a player in Labour politics for 30 years, and yet no-one seems to know what lies behind the executive femininity. Don't be misled by that foray into fiction: Liddell is no parliamentary exhibitionist in the Edwina Currie mould.

We could inquire into the private Helen Liddell. Wife of Alastair the Polaroid executive. Mother of two. Keeper of a beautiful home in Langbank. Socially it seems she has an unworldly streak: friends cherish the list of her inadvertent double-entendres, she once famously asked Kenny Dalglish if he was interested in football . . . But let's not waste our time. She's currently working 18 or 19 hours a day, seven days a week, she's a politician frontwards, backwards, and sideways. And whatever shade of the political spectrum you ask there is a remarkable uniformity to the terms used to describe her. Canny, capable, calculating, a networker par excellence. Some will append the adjective ''cold''. Can apparatchik status be an identity? In Liddell's case, apparently yes.

Except that she's a woman.

Looking over the formidable CV, a pattern emerges. A tendency for her to present her life as chaotic accident (''how did I get myself into this?'') while onlookers credit her with Machiavellian cunning. Both these versions are filtered through the prism of her femininity. Liddell is not just a woman who's got above herself, she's a woman who doesn't mind being disliked - so long as she keeps the right people on her side. She is not judged by quite the same criteria as her male peers. Her sex shouldn't count, but it does. And to no-one more than to Liddell herself. Just read her novel with its pages of detail about her heroine's grooming, the painstaking chronicling of outfits and accessories,

jewellery and high heels, the use of feminine mystique as political tool. ''Balls of steel'' is how the Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell described her, missing the point entirely.

But that's enough from third parties. Time to ask the lady herself for a thumbnail sketch. No great intellect she says, but streetwise, logical, ''I've got a lot of common sense''. A bit of an overpreparer, which maybe you have to be when you're mistress of 13 portfolios. Politically, she opts for ''pragmatist'', sidestepping the right-wing tag. ''I suppose I was New Labour before New Labour existed.'' An enthusiast for the Scottish parliament. But would she take a seat there? That would be a matter for discussion with her constituency, she says primly. ''I'm old-style party hack. I do what the party says is the right thing to do.''

And just look how far it's got her.

For a new Labourite she has a very old Labour background. Her bus driver father was an active trades unionist, there was even an MP in the family. Her early years were dominated by her mother's chronic ill-health. As the only child in a household of adults - her grandfather and uncle lived just around the corner - she had huge responsibilities. While the other girls were out playing, little speccy Helen was doing the ironing, or making the three-hour round-trip to visit her mother in hospital. Not a clever child, she says, but a hard-worker, terrified of failure. She became the first of her family to get to university, gaining a place at Strathclyde to read economics, and while her fellow students were out on the razzle she was shuttling back to Coatdyke to help out with the housework. Even today, peeking into her fantasies via the pages of Elite, you would never describe her as playful.

Her schoolgirl ambition was to become an MP. She joined the party at 15 by lying about her age, she recalls dimly. In 1974, while working as a 23-year-old researcher for the STUC, she became the youngest parliamentary candidate in the country, standing in the solid Tory seat of East Fife. Determined to learn more about a medium that was becoming increasingly influential in politics, she took a job with the BBC.

''Oh Helen - may I have a word?''

The young, fresh-complexioned television reporter smiled up at the grizzled figure who had stopped her in the corridor, a journalist of immense stature, but with political sympathies not so different from her own. Now she, too, had taken a significant step up the ladder: at the tender age of 26, she was to be appointed a network correspondent reporting on Scottish economics.

''Um,'' her boss shuffled awkwardly, ''there's a slight hitch over your appointment.''

Helen felt a creeping unease.

''It's your accent. London say . . .'' He coughed. ''They say they can't understand it.''

Furtively he glanced up from his gleamingly-polished brogues to discover that the girl's eyes were bright with tears.

''It's just a technicality,'' he said hastily. ''Nothing we can't fix. There are people who can eliminate all traces of . . .'' unconsciously his nose wrinkled with distaste ''. . . Lanarkshire from your voice. By the time they're finished, your own mother wouldn't know you.''

''I went to a drama teacher for three weeks and thought 'to hell with this','' she recalls. Helen Liddell kept her local accent, which did her no harm at all when the voters of Monklands East were deciding whom they wanted as their MP. Not that she had any interest in a parliamentary career back in 1977: seeing the grim reality as a Westminster correspondent had thoroughly put her off. Instead she became Secretary of the Scottish Labour Party. At the age of 26, the old-style party hack was running the show.

The appointment raised more than one eyebrow in Scotland. Liddell offers the somewhat perverse explanation that she was given the job so there would be someone to blame when it all went wrong. Others say it suited Labour to have a frontwoman who would counter their image as a party of ageing male councillors and trades unionists - though even in her twenties she looked middle-aged, with a gravitas that has always worked in her favour. And there was another reason Liddell got the job: Alex Kitson, the Transport and General Workers Union representative on Labour's National Executive, wanted her to get it.

Liddell has a habit of collecting influential friends. Bernard Donoughue introduced her to the heady circles around 10 Downing Street in the early seventies. Joe Haines, another member of Wilson's kitchen cabinet, was later to put her in touch with Robert Maxwell. Tom McNally, Jim Callaghan's PPS at No 10, was another pal. Donald Dewar, John Smith, the writer and broadcaster Frank Delaney, the journalist Charlie Wilson . . . it's a long and impressive list. Those outwith the fan club say she also knows how to drop people who have outlived their usefulness.

At Keir Hardie House she was known by the nickname Little Nell (and occasionally, when safely out of earshot, Stalin's Granny). She was not known for her policy papers or her gladhanding out in the constituencies, but she was a skilled operator with the top people and a great frontwoman on the television news. By 1988 the party had 50 seats and its biggest lead in the polls until Blair but, given the problems south of the border, hers was a job going nowhere. She left to write a book and consider her options.

The tycoon puffed out his chest and the bespoke-tailored suit that held enough fabric to dress two ordinary men tightened under his arms. Robert Maxwell was no ordinary man. ''And now I'd like to introduce a new board member,'' he boomed. Around the great oak table, the directors exchanged sidelong glances. The old fox was up to something. At a nod from their chairman the double doors were flung open and in she walked, a petite blonde in her mid-thirties, yet with a presence that seemed older. With another woman, the 5ft 2inch frame might have suggested fragility, the hothouse shade of her designer dress and the striking gold jewellery might have promised flirtation, but one look at Helen Liddell and the hardened newspaper executives knew this woman meant business.

''Gentlemen: our director of personnel.''

One of the faces around the table turned a disturbing shade of puce. Tentatively he spoke. ''But, Mr Chairman, we already have a personnel director.''

The tycoon stared at him for a long moment before thundering: ''And who might that be?''

The director seemed to be experiencing some difficulty in breathing. ''Me,'' he squeaked.

Entirely unfazed by this glitch, Maxwell decreed that henceforth Liddell was to be known as director of personnel and public affairs. Three years later her title changed to director, corporate affairs, but the confusion remained over her role at Anderston Quay. ''Maxwell was making up the brief as he went along, I recognised the signs,'' a fellow-director recalls. ''We never knew what she did.''

Maxwell looms large in the Liddell legend. Even before the pensions fraud came to light there were those who felt that she had sacrificed her political credibility in accepting the job. She was known to many as ''Maxwell's spy'' and rumoured to be in constant contact with Haines. Then there was the glorious news footage of the corporate affairs director following her oversized boss through a door marked ''Gents''. OK, so it led to a cloakroom which fed into the Ladies too; there was a poetic truth in the image which transcended such pettifogging details. Everyone believed she was capable of it.

During the Monklands by-election Liddell displayed extreme touchiness at any mention of the Maxwell years. Surprising, then, to find her positively relaxed about the subject now. ''Hilarious'' is a word often on her lips. Her eclectic job-description included working on proposals to go into free-distribution newspapers; handling the notoriously litigious press baron's Scottish writs (''we always knew he was never actually going to go to court,'' she says - though many a journalist was not nearly so confident); flying to Bulgaria in Maxwell's private plane to sell the Record printing presses; and, after the big man went overboard, sorting out the Mirror Group mess as part of the crisis-management team.

If she was disappointed with the way her glittering appointment turned out she isn't saying. The line is that she had always admired the Record and wanted to guarantee its independence from the Mirror. And she learned a lot from those years. Like what? ''With hindsight, I learned not to trust anybody.''

Still, at least one project went according to plan. Elite was published in 1990. Joe Haines refuses to read it, she laughs. ''He thinks I besmirched my intellectual reputation by writing it.'' He's not alone. Publication was followed by frenzied photocopying of the steamier pages and much giggling in less reverent quarters of the Scottish Labour movement, along with the inevitable speculation as to who its characters ''really'' were.

Elite offers us two female protagonists, the puppet politician Ann Clarke and the prime minister's wife (and eminence grise) Sylvia Metcalf. So how much of Liddell is Ann and how much is Sylvia? ''I don't think I'm quite as ruthless as Ann and I don't think I'm as much of a doormat as Sylvia.''

It's a revealing choice of archetypes: the twin poles between which a female politician must operate. However improbable it might seem to those Scottish Labour activists who place her in the superbitch category, there is something of the doormat about Liddell, if only in the way she depicts herself. Maybe it's how she justifies the ruthlessness. These days the glasses have gold-rimmed designer frames, but underneath she's still little speccy Helen, the obedient party hack.

After quitting the Mirror when David Montgomery took over, she became head of a business start-up agency and claims she had no thought of standing for parliament. Few believe this. She was rumoured to be manoeuvring for Jeremy Bray's seat of Motherwell South (now being contested by her PA Frank Roy). There was also gossip that she was to be a Labour nominee to the Lords, which she doesn't deny, although ''I'm not sure I would necessarily have accepted it''. But John Smith's death changed everything.

Her friend, the journalist ruth Wishart, remembers the scene at the Smiths' Edinburgh home on that bleak morning in 1994. ''When I got to the house Helen was there and, being Helen, she was the only one who was dressed properly. She went out and fielded all the press inquiries and did all the interviews. She was distressed but she had the capability to set that aside and do the biz when it was needed and everybody else in the house was like chewed string. That makes her a bit different from the ordinary mortal.''

The candidate stood on the threshold of the hall where tonight the Boys Brigade and the yoga classes had been displaced by the media circus surrounding a key by-election. All eyes were on this seat. Surreptitiously she took out her powder compact and saw that her upper lip was dotted with beads of perspiration. She dabbed them away and drew herself up to her full height, the high heels pinched cruelly but the pain was worth it for the extra five inches they gave her. Siren red Jasper Conran jacket, sheer stockings, slim black skirt just skimming her knees: she knew she looked the part, but would she be able to carry off the next 90 minutes with dignity and courage in the face of the naked hostility she had seen in the eyes of those filing into the room? As she walked down the centre aisle towards the platform the stamping started, then the chanting: ''Fenian bastard, fenian bastard''. Watching

her progress, her campaign workers' expressions flickered from alarm to quiet confidence. It would take more than a few bigots to rattle the lady in red.

The Monklands East by-election was about as tough as by-elections get, a sectarian contest fought against a background of suspected municipal corruption. As the campaign progressed it became increasingly obvious that the allegations against Monklands District Council were an electoral liability, but not everyone on the campaign team agreed with her decision to call for an inquiry. In the words of one party member: ''She got selected on the basis of the support of the Monklands Mafia, then she just ditched them.''

Her courage - or ruthlessness - won the admiration of many at the opposite end of the political spectrum, and in rival parties too. Nevertheless, she stood on the threshold of the count on June 30, 1994, wondering how she would live with herself if she lost John Smith's seat. It's a dramatic image, and a novelist might have teased-out the suspense until the returning officer's announcement, but Liddell is too much the hack for that. ''As soon as I went into the count I knew I'd won, I'm an old hand: I knew how to check the boxes.''

Last year during Labour's Scottish parliament referendum debacle, there was a distinct possibility of Helen Liddell replacing George Robertson as shadow Scottish Secretary. Liddell insists that she was swift to show support for her old friend in his time of trouble, but the funny thing is, no-one seems to have noticed. She was described in a Sunday newspaper as ''running up and down the touchline waiting to come on to the pitch''. One group of left-inclined mischief makers photocopied her picture from the cover of Elite and talked of distributing lapel badges to be worn at the party's Scottish conference. There were also plans for an ''It's time for Helen'' sticker which could be slapped on toilet doors. It wasn't that they held Liddell in any great affection - she's a right-winger with a reputation for wearing out the carpet on her way in and out of Blair's office - but she seemed the best

available option.

In the end, Robertson weathered the storm and Liddell's was the star that fell. The word is that she has failed to shine on the Scottish front bench, though in fairness there is some doubt about how much light Labour wants cast on its education policy. The appointment of Henry McLeish as the Scottish general election campaign convener was a serious snub to her. There is now talk of McLeish as a possible Scottish Secretary. A discreet power-struggle is in progress.

Not that Liddell is about to admit it.

She parries the line of inquiry with a creditable impersonation of coconut matting. She still has a lot to learn. Henry is a very, very experienced politician. And as for George . . . ''George and I speak every day. We're very close, our families are close, I'd go from here to hell for George. In the post-Dunblane period I was the one who physically attached myself to him so he wasn't on his own.''

So do we believe her disclaimers of ambition? Almost. At the moment her chances of a cabinet post look slim. Few believe Blair is likely to add to the six Scots already around the table, and there are several names ahead of hers if Robertson is not destined to become Scottish Secretary. But then we turn to that killer CV, with only the luckless gamble of Maxwell to mar its dazzling achievements. As soon as she gets time there'll be a new item on the list: she's writing a second novel, a sequel to Elite in which fortunes are reversed, Ann is humbled, and Sylvia achieves power in her own right.

The ruthless doormat will have her day.