Angus MacNeil
| Angus MacNeil | |
|---|---|
|
| |
| Name | Angus Brendan MacNeil/Aonghas Brianan MacNèill (born 21 July, 1970) |
| Nicknames | Angus, Brendan, Angus Brendan (various people) |
| Politics | |
| Party | SNP |
| Constituency | Na h-Eileanan an Iar / Western Isles |
| Positions | • Shadow Spokesperson on Constitutional Reform (June 2010 - March 2015) • Shadow Spokesperson on Transport (June 2010 - March 2015) • Shadow Spokesperson on Scotland (July 2008 - March 2015) |
| Likes | Scottish independence, crofting, fishing, football, trolling, being a statesman |
| Dislikes | The Labour Party, abortion |
| Friends | Jacob Rees-Mogg, sort of |
| Enemies | ? |
| Relationships | |
| Partners | Jane MacNeil |
| Children | Claire Frances (2000), Marsaili (2002), and Annie (2005) |
| Personal Attributes | |
| Nationality | Scottish |
| Religion | Catholic |
| Sexuality | Straight |
| Height | 5' 11" |
| Eye Colour | Brown |
| Handedness | Right |
| Accent | Scottish |
| Languages | Scottish Gaelic |
Before the honourable Gentleman intervenes, let me remind him that he embarked on an apprenticeship to become a statesman. That apprenticeship still has a considerable distance to travel.~ John Bercow
Angus Brendan MacNeil first came to the attention of fandom when Jacob Rees-Mogg managed to correctly pronounce the Gaelic name of his constituency and the pair exchanged some shippy banter, but loliticians quickly realised that Angus was interesting in his own right. He is the only MP who is always called by his full name, apparently because he goes equally by "Angus" and "Brendan" and couldn't choose between them when telling the Commons clerks how to address him. Perhaps fittingly, his parliamentary behaviour exhibits a similar duality, undergoing a Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde transformation from debate to debate. On some days he is a irreproachable statesman, on others an insufferable troll. There is no way of knowing whether it's the good Angus or the evil Brendan who will show up in any given debate, and his sheer unpredictability makes him one of the most entertaining MPs to watch.
Life and Career[edit | edit source]
Early Life and Pre-political Career[edit | edit source]
Angus was born to Clare and Iain MacNeil, crofters in Tangasdale on the Hebreidean island of Barra. He has two younger sisters, Maggie and Mary Rose. He grew up speaking Scottish Gaelic, a language in which he's still fluent. He attended Castlebay Secondary School on Barra and the Nicolson Institute on Stornoway.
He went to Strathclyde University, where he played shinty and graduated with a degree in civil engineering. He worked as an engineer and as a reporter for BBC Radio Scotland for four years before he got his teaching degree from Jordanhill College in 1996. Then he returned to the Hebrides, taking a post at the primary school in Salen on the Isle of Mull and founding the Gaelic Medium Unit there. Two years later he moved back to the mainland, teaching in Fort William and standing there as the SNP candidate for Inverness East, Nairn and Lochaber in 2001. He lost the election quite badly, but in 2004 an opening arose at Eoligarry Primary School on his native Barra. Angus moved his young family back to his ancestral croft and stood again for Parliament for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, which he took from Labour in 2005 on a 9% swing.
Parliamentary Career[edit | edit source]
The line between good and evil runs through every human heart.~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
John Bercow is fond of telling his unruly charges that they aspire to be statesmen when he is trying to shame them into better behaviour, but 99% of the time this is absolute rubbish. For the most part statesmen are statesmen from the day they make their maiden speech and trolls remain trolls no matter how high their office. Even Bercow's own journey from backbench nuisance to the Speaker's chair was characterised less by the cultivation of statesmanship than by the desire to troll his enemies from a position of authority.
Angus is that rare exception, a politician who seems genuinely torn between the two strategies. His debating style tends more towards interventions than towards making his own speeches, and on his good days there is no one more incisive or more helpful. He is always ready to come to the aid of his allies with the exact right statistic to illustrate their argument or a precisely honed question to demolish an opponent's. Frankly he is a bigger asset to the Labour frontbench than most of their researchers.
On his bad days he is the worst sort of parliamentary troll, popping up like an idiot jack-in-the-box every three seconds to make some puerile, partisan intervention that embarrasses his party and his profession and wastes everyone's time. He persists in trying to intervene even when it's obvious the speaker has no intention of giving way, and if they do finally relent and give in to his pestering everyone in the room will be heartily sorry they did. No MP is more wanky and annoying than Angus when he wants to be a brat.
Which Angus will show up for any given debate is an unpredictable matter determined by the alignment of the stars and his own conscience. Even on topics like the constitutional settlement which are long-running nationalist bugbears he has been known to engage constructively.
As a member of a party that for decades had fewer than ten MPs, Angus has also held a number of frontbench positions. He was the SNP spokesman for CMS, DEFRA and Work and Pensions in the 2005-2010 Parliament and Scotland, Transport and Constitutional Reform in the 2010-2015 Parliament.
He frequently shows off to other members of Parliament by taking part in the annual Commons vs Lords Tug of War.
Cash for Honours Scandal[edit | edit source]
Angus has the distinction of being one of the very few SNP MPs to accomplish something concrete after they brought down the Labour Government in 1979. In 2005, shortly after he was elected, his researcher uncovered a 1925 law which banned the sale of honours. Along with Plaid Cymru's Elfyn Llwyd, he wrote a letter to the Metropolitan police accusing Prime Minister Tony Blair of handing out peerages to several people in exchange for large loans to the Labour Party.
It turned out to be one of those scandals where everyone knows there was widespread corruption but nothing can actually be proven, and no one was ever charged. But the media storm did result in Labour having to pay back the loans, giving them cashflow problems, and Tony Blair became the first Prime Minister ever to be questioned by the police. For his efforts Alex Salmond dubbed Angus the "Hebridean Hurricane" and the Spectator gave him the "Inquisitor of the Year" award.
| Full List of Appointments |
|---|
| • Shadow Spokesperson on Culture, Media and Sport (May 5, 2005 - 6 May, 2010) |
| • Shadow Spokesperson on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (May 10, 2005 - 6 May, 2010) |
| • Shadow Spokesperson on Work and Pensions (July 1, 2007 - 1 July, 2008) |
| • Shadow Spokesperson on Scotland (July 1, 2008 - 30 March, 2015) |
| • Shadow Spokesperson on Constitutional Reform (June 15, 2010 - 30 March, 2015) |
| • Shadow Spokesperson on Transport (June 15, 2010 - 30 March, 2015) |
Personal Life[edit | edit source]
Angus lives on a croft on the Isle of Barra which has been in his family for generations. He met and married his wife Jane while he was teaching in Fort William and she came back with him to Barra to live on the croft, which they are actively farming- they grow potatoes and have a flock of around thirty Cheviot sheep. They have three daughters. The family speaks Scottish Gaelic at home.
Embarrassing Incidents With Teenage Girls[edit | edit source]
A few months after he was elected in 2005, Angus got drunk at a post-ceilidh party in Orkney and picked up two seventeen-year-old girls. They all ended up on the bed in his hotel room together, kissing and heavy petting, but fortunately they were too drunk to take things any further.[2]
Since he was more than twice their age, this was not too classy. Even worse, his wife Jane was in hospital at the time, a few weeks away from giving birth to their third daughter. Angus is of course very sorry for the hurt and embarrassment he caused, regrets it bitterly, etc etc, but honestly who gets themselves into this situation in the first place?
Amazingly, this is not actually the worst Angus/teenaged girl incident. That came in the run-up to the 2015 general election, when an undecided teenage voter had the temerity to say that Jim Murphy had put forward the more convincing argument in one of the leadership debates. The post-referendum political climate in Scotland being what it is, this naturally brought down upon her head the wrath of a mob of cybernats. They decided she must be a Labour plant, brandished a photo of some random Labour activist who looked vaguely like her as proof, and hounded the poor girl on social media for days until she recanted her heresy and said Nicola Sturgeon won the debate. Far from telling the Twitter mob that people are entitled to form their own political opinions and they should leave the kid the hell alone, Angus egged them on, retweeting the photographic "evidence" of her perfidious Labour loyalties and her contact information.
Appearance[edit | edit source]
Angus has a baby face and a sort of boyish charm which complements his role as apprentice statesman. This occasionally leads fandom to call him "Wee Angus" and probably enables him to get away with more than he should.
Portrayal[edit | edit source]
In the Media[edit | edit source]
Newspapers are generally just amazed that Angus lives somewhere without mobile phone coverage. His work in the Cash for Honours scandal garnered a lot of national media attention and won him the 2006 "Inquisitor of the Year" Award from the Spectator. "Who do I pay?" he quipped when he went to collect it.
In Fanon[edit | edit source]
Angus has yet to feature on the meme, although the comm is always attentive to his contributions in Parliament.
Shipping[edit | edit source]
Although there aren't any fics for the pairing, Angus is generally shipped with Jacob Rees-Mogg on the strength of their epic tag-team trolling of a daylight savings bill that would have moved UK clocks forward by an hour. Despite wide cross-party and Government support, Angus and the CBCJS were able to talk out the bill thanks to exchanges like these:
Angus Brendan MacNeil: On the point about harmonisation with Europe, many people have mentioned the costs for businesses. Surely, however, that argument should apply in reverse. If the gains are so great, would not the Eurocrats want to change so as to be in the same time zone as the world financial centre that is London? Perhaps this reveals the lie in the argument: there is no gain. The gain would be greater for those on the other side of the English channel.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, as he so often does. Na h-Eileanan an Iar is enormously well represented in the House, and it is one of the great arguments for maintaining the Union that he should continue to have an audience here for his wise words... I should like to speak briefly to amendment 59 before I come to my own amendments. It is a wonderfully wise amendment, because it understands that in the winter there is a shortage of daylight and that Greenwich mean time has the great advantage—a somewhat old-fashioned one, perhaps—of the sun being at its highest point at noon. This gives us an even balance of sunlight during the course of the day.
Mr MacNeil: The hon. Gentleman is making an important point. Surely midday is not called midday by accident. It is called midday because it is in the middle of the day.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: As always, my hon. Friend makes a wise and pertinent intervention.
Jacob's "my honourable Friend" slip is telling, an early precursor to the tacit Tory/SNP alliance that shaped the 2015 general election.
Mr MacNeil: As the hon. Gentleman may know, Na h-Eileanan an Iar—which he pronounces so well—is 7.5 degrees, or a full half hour, west of the United Kingdom. We are penalised for that as well as being to the north of the UK. We have a problem of both latitude and longitude.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: That is an extremely important point. If one is a Unionist—if one believes that this is one great country consisting of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and that we should be united as a single people—one has to maintain that if the poorest crofter in Na h-Eileanan an Iar is inconvenienced for a ha’porth of extra business in Cornwall, that is most unreasonable, because it has a disproportionate effect on our friends and allies in Scotland.
There is no quicker path to Gaelic enthusiast Angus's heart than to pronounce "Na h-Eileanan an Iar" correctly.
