A winner Tories feared

Almost alone among Labour's front-benchers during opposition years, Donald Dewar was feared by Tory Scottish Secretaries.

During those years, he recognised that winning Westminster debates was not enough. Winning in Scotland mattered too. Tactics had to be thought through carefully.

But what to do about a Scottish Assembly? The idea of a Scottish Constitutional Convention where opposition parties and civic institutions would meet and draw up a blueprint for devolution had been floated. Donald was deeply suspicious. He feared it could turn into calls for Scottish opposition MPs to withdraw from Westminster and set up a shadow Scottish Assembly in Edinburgh - gesture politics which he loathed.

But he reasoned it had many advantages. The Convention could draw up a plan that only a Labour government could implement. And it produced much more - a plan that was implemented pretty much intact by the Blair government. It built the basis of co-operation between Labour and the LibDems which made forming the coalition Scottish Executive in 1999 easier than it might have been.

Donald's insistence that the Scotland Act should prescribe the powers reserved to Westminster rather than those to be handed down to Holyrood made the scheme much easier to negotiate in Whitehall and much more robust.

If John Smith was the architect of devolution, Donald was the engineer who made it work.

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