GRAHAM GRANT: Good riddance to the wine bar revolutionary with reverse Midas touch
He was the achingly right-on ‘co-leader’ who took his party to the heart of government – only to see it ignominiously kicked out of office.
Patrick Harvie and his gaggle of Marxist Greens went from the political wilderness to the top table - and he fulfilled his unlikely dream of becoming a government minister.
But he made a spectacular hash of it by showing that he and his incompetent colleagues shared the SNP’s reverse Midas Touch when it came to policy-making and implementation.
Now the Glasgow MSP is standing down but will remain in place until a leadership contest takes place in the summer.
Sadly, we might not have seen the last of him - as he intends to seek re-election as an MSP next year.
During a long and undistinguished career, the 52-year-old ex-youth worker and gay rights campaigner espoused every fashionable, Left-wing cause he could find.
It’s no surprise he has watermelon seeds in a plant pot on the windowsill of his parliamentary office: a reference to an infamous quip by Tory MSP Murdo Fraser, who said the Greens were ‘lentil-munching, sandal-wearing watermelons’ (green on the outside, red on the inside).
There is little doubt that in previous generations, Mr Harvie and his comrades would have been rightly relegated to the fringes of the mainstream political world.
Patrick Harvie is stepping down as the co-convener of the Scottish Green Party
But they staked their claim to power by becoming sycophantic supporters of the SNP.
Mr Harvie, who was elected Glasgow’s first Green MSP on May 1, 2003, backed the Nationalists’ Named Person scheme, branded ‘Orwellian’ by critics – one of many misjudgments.
He also accepted an award commemorating a gay rights activist who fought to legalise paedophilia but was later forced into retreat - and ‘condemned any stance which could be seen to excuse acts of child abuse’.
Yet his slavish loyalty was rewarded in 2021 with the Bute House Agreement - which led to Mr Harvie and his co-leader Lorna Slater becoming ministers.
There was plenty of hypocrisy along the way as he continued his unlikely ascent to the upper echelons of government – and his humbling return to the backbenches.
Mr Harvie led a doomed crusade on the installation of costly heat pumps – one of many barmy, unworkable and usually very expensive initiatives – though he couldn’t have one installed himself, as he lives in a flat.
He is a cycling zealot - but was pictured riding his bicycle without a helmet.
Mr Harvie insisted that ‘they are not a matter of law, [they are] a matter of individual choice’ - sparking a furious backlash from road safety campaigners.
Mr Harvie with Scottish Green Party co-convener Lorna Slater
In 2021, he was forced to apologise after cutting up a motorist during a rule-flouting bike ride when he cycled down a one-way street in the wrong direction - before swooping in front of the driver at a junction.
At the time, Neil Greig of charity IAM Roadsmart said Mr Harvie ‘has to understand the harm this sort of behaviour does to the promotion of active travel, which is supposed to be his job’.
Then Mr Harvie was photographed with some of his cohorts after the May 2021 election on a visit to an Edinburgh pub near Bute House, the First Minister’s official residence - breaking the Covid lockdown cap on three households socialising together.
Only a few weeks before, he had stressed the importance of behaving ‘carefully’ and ‘cautiously’ as lockdown was eased - and urged people to ‘obey the rules’.
It was the Greens’ devotion to splitting apart the UK that would earn them a place in Nicola Sturgeon’s administration back in 2021.
Mr Harvie’s sidekick Ms Slater, a Canadian renewables engineer, campaigned for independence in 2014 – despite the fact that more than half of Green voters did not support separation.
She went on to oversee the disastrous bottle Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) – its administrator, Circularity Scotland, collapsed with debts and liabilities of more than £86million.
The Greens’ impact on energy policy has been just as pernicious, with 100,000 oil and gas jobs placed in jeopardy as the SNP government was accused of turning its back on a pivotal sector in the pursuit of a long-discredited ambition to turn Scotland into the ‘Saudi Arabia of renewables’.
In a furious outburst Nationalist MSP Fergus Ewing branded Harvie and the Greens a bunch of 'wine bar revolutionaries' during a row in the chamber over the future of North Sea energy. He later said those at the top of the party, then in government with the SNP, should be no where near power.
The veteran politician added: 'It’s like a student branch of the Socialist Workers Party.'
Progress on major infrastructure projects has been glacial - Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop has refused to guarantee that the A9 will be dualled by 2035.
The initial pledge was that the job would be done by this year.
The Greens have also helped to put the brakes on road construction - leaving large swathes of the network in a dangerously poor condition.
But the damage doesn’t stop there - in his former capacity as the minister for tenants’ rights, Mr Harvie’s attempt at controlling the lettings market failed in 2023 when rents rocketed - despite a government-imposed cap on increases.
Many landlords looked to get around the new rules by hiking rents between tenancies to cover their own soaring costs as interest rates on mortgages soared.
Under his co-leadership, the Greens also championed gender self-ID but the legislation was blocked by the UK Government - and the SNP eventually gave up the legal battle to salvage it.
Pressing ahead with the moves - which would have made it easier for people to change gender from the age of 16 - was a red line for the Greens, who played their ignoble part in the sidelining and demonising of anyone who dared to criticise it.
The fallout from the gender row was a contributory factor when Humza Yousaf - who once said the SNP/Green axis was ‘worth its weight in gold’ - ended it, destroying his own premiership in the process, in April last year.
If Mr Harvie is remembered at all, it won’t be as a trailblazing environmentalist – it will be as a shameless hypocrite who left carnage in his wake.
