TOMMY SHERIDAN’S role in modern politics began, in his words, in “draughty village halls” across the country in the run-up to the historic first Scottish Parliament election just over 10 years ago.
But he had already made a mark on the public, rising to prominence by being jailed in 1992 for defying a court order to stop a poll tax warrant sale.
His determination took him from being locked up at Saughton Prison in Edinburgh to becoming an elected MSP and prompting a change in the law.
He described his success in his book, Imagine, published in 2000 with his then friend Alan McCombes – one of the many colleagues who testified against him in his perjury trial.
Sheridan wrote: “Just as I had been singled out for special punishment years before, I was now being singled out for special praise.” He described his struggle from jail to parliament “without compromising or diluting a single principle”.
Before entering frontline politics, Sheridan was educated at Lourdes Secondary in Glasgow and went on to study at Stirling University, where he joined the Labour Party, but he was expelled because of his allegiance to the Militant Tendency group. Elected a Glasgow councillor for the Pollok ward in 1992, he failed in several bids to oust Labour from that constituency.
After helping to form the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), he was elected to the first new parliament in 1999, representing Glasgow on the regional list.
He was re-elected in 2003 with five other successful candidates – promising that the six MSPs would launch a revolution that would “engulf” Scotland and put socialism back on the agenda across Europe. Sheridan gave half his parliamentary salary to the party and was even described as “Christ-like” by a bishop.
But the party, which was often portrayed as a one-man band, hit trouble a year later with Sheridan’s shock departure.
He first publicly said the decision was to devote more time to being a father, with his wife Gail then three months pregnant.
At the time he insisted there was no hidden reason for stepping down as party convener, describing publicity over the party’s finances and other “personal swipes” as “annoying but irrelevant to my decision”.