Iain Gray - Political Career

Political Career

Iain Gray has stood as a candidate in Lothian Regional Council elections.

In 1999, immediately after his election to Holyrood he was made a deputy minister in the first Scottish Executive under Donald Dewar and following Jack McConnell becoming First Minister in 2001 he was promoted to Minister for Social Justice. After the sudden resignation of Wendy Alexander (following disagreements with McConnell) in 2002, Gray took over her role as Minister for Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning, where he was responsible for overseeing changes to Scottish higher education.

In the 2003 election, Gray was defeated by Scottish Conservative leader David McLetchie, whom he had beaten in 1999. Leaving Holyrood, he went to work as a special adviser under Secretary of State Alistair Darling MP at the Scotland Office in London and initially announced he would not be seeking re-election.

Having subsequently a change of mind, he was selected as the Labour candidate for East Lothian for the 2007 election and subsequently won. Gray was appointed Labour's shadow spokesman for enterprise, energy and tourism upon his return to Parliament.

Following the resignation of Wendy Alexander over a foreign donation scandal, Gray announced in July 2008 that he would stand in the contest to find the next leader of the Labour group in the Scottish Parliament, and was elected to this post in September 2008.

In December 2010, Iain Gray sparked a diplomatic row when he appeared to claim in parliament that Montenegro had been involved in ethnic cleansing and war crimes during the 1990s Balkans Conflict.

On 7 April 2011, while campaigning in Glasgow Central station for the Scottish Parliament Election, Gray was forced to cancel an event due to disruption by a group protesting against public service spending cuts. He quickly left the station and ran into a nearby Subway sandwich shop to escape the protestors, who followed him into the shop and continued to heckle him. Gray later stated that he had not been unsettled by the incident as "I spent two years working in the civil war in Mozambique, I've been to Rwanda two months after the genocide, I walked the killing fields in Cambodia and I was in Chile three days after Pinochet was demitted from office".

Gray held his seat of East Lothian in the 2011 Holyrood election; however his majority was the narrowest of his political career – just 151 over the SNP, making the Holyrood seat for the first time a Labour–SNP marginal. He announced on May 6 that he would stand down as leader in the autumn.