Ian Murray, the Secretary of State for Scotland, is the man who swapped running pubs for politics. I caught up with him at Mackays on the Royal Mile – a pub just a stone’s throw from Holyrood to find out more about the man who is the voice for Scotland within the UK Government.
When I met Ian Murray I wasn’t looking for a political story; I really wanted to find out more about the man who, as the UK Government’s Cabinet Minister representing Scotland, is one of the key politicians driving political change. He also knows the pressures the industry is under, having spent ten years running pubs and a number of years running big events.
Ian first became a Labour Councillor for Liberton in 2003 and went on to become an MP for Edinburgh South in 2010 – a post he has now held for 15 years. He was the only Labour MP in Scotland to retain his seat in the 2015 and 2019 General Elections, and served as Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland from 2015 to 2016 and again from 2020 to 2024. He has also had various other shadow ministerial roles.
Before then, it was in hospitality and events where he found his passion. His first hotel was the Gordon Arms Hotel in West Linton in 2005, then he took on a Belhaven lease with The Steamie and a bar called Aspen followed which were both located in Edinburgh.
He is not the only UK politician to have an interest in hospitality. David Cameron co-owned a pub called The Old Bull Inn in Oxfordshire, before going into politics and Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley Johnson, owned a pub called “The Fox” in Surrey. But none of them have had the hands on experience of Ian Murray.
He only stepped back from running pubs when he suspected political opponents were sending underage drinkers into his establishments. “My staff were terrified they would put a foot wrong; it wasn’t fair putting them under that pressure,” he explains.
The final straw came when photographers from a Sunday newspaper hid in wheelie bins outside his pub. “We were always going to sell up, but that was the catalyst,” he says.
His first venture was the restoration of the Gordon Arms. He referenced it recently during his speech at the Labour Party Conference, to demonstrate how the current government is tackling the issues it has encountered since taking office, and how it aims to restore the economy. He said of the refurbishment of the hotel, “Imagine I’d just turned the heating on and opened the doors. Papered over every crack or bit of damp? Would it have been successful?
“Maybe there would have been an initial boost from curious customers or a honeymoon period, but it would have faded fast. So what did we do? We fixed the foundations by investing. We sorted the fundamentals first and went full steam ahead with our plan.”
I asked him what first brought him to politics. He told me, “There were three conditions of being a member of the Murray family. You had to be passionately and patriotically Scottish, whether you were watching the rugby, the national team, or tiddlywinks on the telly. You had to be a passionate and completely committed Hearts fan. And you had to be a supporter of the Labour Party. My family and my parents were never members, but they were Labour people.
“I grew up steeped in that. Travelling on the supporters’ buses and going to working men’s clubs, as they would have been called at the time. I learned to play pool there in the Longstone Hearts Supporters Club. It was all Labour people, except for the fact we had a Tory MP— Malcolm Rifkind.”
Unfortunately Ian’s dad died when he was only nine, and his mum had to work several jobs to keep her young family going. She was a cleaner, a cashier, and also had a job in hospitality as a cook at The Busy Bee bar. She obviously instilled her own work ethic into him, because by the time Ian was 13, he was earning his own money delivering newspapers in his local Longstone area.
He says, “It was the most horrendous job I’ve ever had because I’m not a morning person. My mum still lives in a house right at the heart of my route, and I could still walk it. I say walk because although I had bought a bike by saving up my first three pay cheques, it got stolen in the fourth week!”
He also got a job in a chip shop peeling potatoes and graduated to working behind the counter. His first steps into entrepreneurship saw him start what he believes to have been Scotland’s first fish and chip shop delivery service.
He tells me, “Everyone was delivering Chinese and Indian food, and myself and Gino Andreucci decided to set up a fish and chip delivery service called The Codfather. This was when I was just about to leave school.”
At 16, he went to Edinburgh University, initially to study Maths and Physics, but once there, he took up Social Policy and Law and got more involved with politics, forming a friendship with Alex Foulkes, Lord George Foulkes’ son and another Labour enthusiast.
He laughs, “During that time, it was 5% politics, 95% drinking—not necessarily in that order.” While at university, his association with the Labour Club saw him get involved with campaigning in 1997 for the Edinburgh Pentland seat which Labour took.
He says, “It was where I was born and brought up, and Malcolm Rifkind was still the Tory MP there. It was karma really, because in the early ‘80s, my mum had been to see Rifkind, who was her MP, and had asked him if he could help her move to a house that was not damp, but although he promised to help her, he didn’t. It was good karma to be involved in this campaign which saw Labour oust him.”
Ian’s first proper job was with the WM Company. But he had another passion, aside from work and politics, and that was festivals. While at university, he had volunteered at the Edinburgh Festival, and by 1998, he was spending his entire annual leave helping out at a new venture at the Edinburgh Festival which involved a live television broadcast from a Glastonbury stage, screened under Edinburgh Castle.
He called it, “Thirty days of sheer enjoyment.” Later the same year, he took a full-time job at Scottish Equitable (Aegon), but he returned to work at the festival the following summer. It was through these activities, he came to the notice of a new arts-based internet TV station. Ian says, “They called me up in 1999 and offered me a permanent job as Operations Director. I decided to take it despite the fact it was low paid. We built the TV station and started broadcasting, but it was a constant battle for funding. Unfortunately, when the dot-com bubble subsequently went bust, we went with it.”
But he was undeterred. “I was determined to not let all that hard work go to waste, and I decided to set up my own business, 100 MPH Events—the name was nothing to do with the speed at which we set it up; it was just the initials of our names: Murray, Palmer, Hamer.
“It was the best thing ever, but it was hard. First of all, you had responsibility for other people, and you didn’t quite know where the next pay cheque was coming from. A theme which I also experienced when I worked in hospitality. Having an employer that can pay you a pay cheque certainly feels more secure.”
Then Unique Events approached Ian to help put on a landmine concert, which had been set up by an American veteran who had been badly injured by a mine. The event toured the world, and they wanted to do something in Edinburgh. Ian says, “I worked at a business centre where I had the tiniest of offices as a receptionist so that I could earn a bit of extra cash and ran the business at the same time. So, in between patching calls through, writing dictating letters, and making sure the toilets were clean, I organised the concert for the festival in August. We had Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, and Chrissie Hynd performing in Princes Street Gardens, and we sold 6,600 tickets.”
He laughs, “About 4pm, I realised that the temporary seating needed numbering. I started putting the numbers on the seats when a woman turned up and said she had just arrived; could she help? The next thing one of my co-directors came to me and said, ‘Do you know who that is?’ It was Joan Baez—I hadn’t recognised her. I was very proud of that event. We raised a lot of money for charity.”
Running the event company was the reason, Ian tells me, that he eventually went into pubs. “At events, it seemed like the only people making money were the concessions that attracted funding from the beer and spirits companies. This money subsidised the festival.”
Although running his own business he still managed time to run the membership for his local Labour branch and in 2003 he was persuaded to run to be a Councillor for Liberton. He won, and went on to be elected MP for Edinburgh South in 2010, which ultimately led to him having to give up on his Edinburgh festival work. Some people felt it would have been a conflict of interest. However, that didn’t stop Ian from continuing with events elsewhere, particularly in Bath.
He explains, “I had been hiring the Spiegeltent since 1994 and had been taking it to Bath for a 10-day event every year. That wasn’t a conflict, so I continued doing that until 2014.”
One of his most successful events there was an evening with Jamie Cullum. He explains, “We used to get calls from agents who were trying to promote their clients. One day we got a call from an agent who asked us if we would put on a young jazz pianist called Jamie Cullum on a Saturday night (which was one of our prime slots). I asked how many tickets the agent thought we could sell, and what his cost was. He was only £600—that swung it for me. Three weeks later, Jamie won the BBC Young Musician of the Year. We sold out and had a waiting list of 1,000.”
Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, he was also running a hospitality business, although it was serendipity rather than a deliberate plan that got him there. He smiles, “In 2005, for some reason, I was coming back from Moffat with a very good friend whom I had met when I was at Scottish Equitable. He worked for Citibank and had just been made redundant. We were driving past the Gordon Arms Hotel in West Linton, which had a big sheet hanging out the back saying ‘Save us from the developers,’ and I stupidly said to him, ‘What are you going to do with your big redundancy cheque?’ Four weeks later, we signed the lease on the hotel.”
Over the next nine months, Ian and his business partners totally refurbished the hotel and re-established it in the village. “I enjoyed starting from scratch and getting involved with every area of the redevelopment. It really was an iconic hotel.” However, they didn’t run it for too long – after nine months Ian and his friend exited the business by selling it to their other business partners.
He says, “We used the money we raised by selling out to get our first pub.” That pub was a Belhaven pub on the Southside of Edinburgh called The Steamie, which was on Newington Road.
Ian says, “I was a lessee of Belhaven. My view is that it is always better, if you are going to be a lessee, to be a lessee of a brewer whose sole aim in life is to make and sell beer, rather than a property company whose only role in life is to make money.
“Belhaven was great for us. If we hadn’t taken the lease, we couldn’t have afforded to get into pubs. It was our first venture, and although there was a real saturation of pubs in the area, once we had put the investment in, we became the newest pub in the area and we really fed off that. However, then Drouthy Neighbours got refurbished and then the Wine Glass, and we weren’t the new kids on the block any more.
“Our best night in there was when James McFadden scored the winning goal in Paris in 2007. George Foulkes jumped out the window. It’s true – not two floors out, he just jumped out the patio doors onto the street.”
However, he learned one thing: “I was wrong about the concession holders making all the money out of booze. I learned it was a tough industry; it certainly wasn’t nine to five. I used to compare it to having kids – but at least you can give kids to grandparents.
“There is a tipping point, and we were almost too small to have people running them for us. I don’t know what point you get to when you have enough of an operation to have the capacity to hire managers— maybe we would have had to have had four or five venues?”
Three years later, they took on another pub, the Aspen at South Bridge, which they had for three years until 2010. “We handed the keys to the new owner on 24th December 2010. I had just been elected an MP in the May General Election, and for some reason, my opponents felt that me being in the alcohol trade was an issue. It was never an issue for me. But, as I have already mentioned, it wasn’t fair to the staff.”
You can tell that Ian is passionate about politics and his former career in hospitality, but he is also a lifelong Hearts fan. In fact, he chaired its foundation – the bid by its fans’ group to buy out the club from administration. He stepped down in May 2015 and went on to write a book in 2020, “This Is Our Story: How the Fans Kept Their Hearts Beating,” about the saving of Hearts F.C.
But back to politics for a moment. I asked Ian what advice he had for the Scottish hospitality industry when it came to trying to get their voice heard and gave him some examples of the huge rates that hospitality businesses were paying compared to other businesses in similar premises.
Rates are obviously devolved in Scotland. Ian told me, “The hospitality trade in Scotland must be looking across the border and seeing hospitality operators that have had full rates relief. In terms of business rates, the money was there for Scottish hospitality operators. £147 million was given to the Scottish government for hospitality, but it wasn’t spent on rates. You have to ask: where did it go? We are also just about to legislate for 40% rates relief in England to be in law. It is a reduction, and it will be permanent now. We have also made a commitment to reforming the entire business rates system.”
With regard to the anomalies facing the industry when it comes to rates parity with other businesses, Ian said, “It seems unfair that in Scotland a big multinational bank would only pay £31,000 for rates, while a pub in the same location would pay £161,000. I can understand that they don’t feel they are being heard and feel let down. They need to find a way of making sure, in the run-up to Scottish Parliamentary elections, that all their customers know who is standing and what they are standing for.”
I also brought up the subject of the increased national insurance contributions which come into force next month. He said, “The issue around NI, I get. No one wants to pay any more tax. It is probably the cherry on the top for a lot of people. But the difficulty for us as a government, and we fully understand the hospitality trade’s concerns regarding this, but we believe the best thing we can do for the hospitality trade is to put more money in people’s pockets and stabilise the economy.
“I know people want to wish the £22 billion black hole away, and I want to challenge whether it was accurate, but ultimately the government still has to deal with it. We can’t wish it away, and we need to get public services back on their feet. We had to get the economy stabilised. If the economy was going to carry on the way it was going, taxation would be the least of their worries—survival would have been on the cards.
“We have stabilised the economy, and I understand that has taken a huge contribution from employers in terms of NI, but I hope people can see that now the economy is more stable, we will start to see more money in people’s pockets. Interest rate cuts, inflation down, and stabilised, bringing more investment in, looking at jobs and regional growth – all these types of issues are now at the top of the agenda, and we can move forward positively. Ultimately, we want to create more customers with more money in their pockets.”
I asked him whether he would ever go back into hospitality. He smiled, “I much prefer being on the other side of the bar now.” That’s not surprising considering he is also a father to two – including a new-born. And with that there was time for a quick picture and Ian was ushered off, clutching his red Secretary of State folder, by his efficient team. It’s just a pity we didn’t have time for a drink to wet his new baby’s head, but there is always next time.