'I thought: hang about, it's a crime'

The prime minister's headache over the 'cash for peerages' row has unlikely roots - a crofting MP from the Western Isles who alerted the police. Angus MacNeil tells Tania Branigan why he felt he had to pursue the truth
When the SS Politician ran aground on a sandbank off the Outer Hebrides, enterprising islanders made off with its alcoholic cargo - and were promptly immortalised in the Ealing comedy Whisky Galore! as well as by their descendants.

"There's Chrissie, my sailboat; she helped to unload the whisky from the ship," Angus MacNeil explains. "And there are my sheep - that's my old potato patch," he adds, pointing at the GoogleEarth image. Right now, he is stuck in a windowless Westminster office, surrounded by cuttings on scandal and corruption; the day before, he was shearing his flock on Barra.

Sixty-five years on, the Western Isles are threatening another politician with disaster. This time, Tony Blair is caught in choppy waters. And the culprit is not a treacherous current, but this 39-year-old crofter, the Scottish National Party's MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Western Isles). Barely a year after arriving in parliament, MacNeil has created a political storm that is expected to result in the extraordinary sight of police interviewing a serving prime minister.

The "loans for peerages" row has blown up seemingly from nowhere. Most MPs tacitly accepted that donations could ease one's way towards a gong or two, as long as no one was crass enough to mention cause and effect. Harold Wilson's retirement list of nominations raised eyebrows back in the 1970s, but the last time people took real offence was when David Lloyd-George overdid it by drawing up a price list.

"There was a whiff of corruption - I was aware of that before I got elected," MacNeil acknowledges. "But when I got here, it just hit me in the face. It was the brazenness of it. One Labour MP said to me: 'If you don't send people to the Lords, how do you get money?'

"Eighty pence in every pound given to Labour comes from people subsequently honoured. David Cameron either doesn't know what the figures are for the Conservatives, or won't tell us. In a small community like mine, it wouldn't be tolerated, but here it's a nod and a wink and a smug smile."

When the House of Lords appointments committee blocked four Labour nominees for working peerages, it emerged that the men were among a host of party funders who had loaned money to Labour and the Tories - ensuring that the parties did not have to declare the cash, as they must with donations. The government promised to tighten the rules on party funding in future.

Nobody, including MacNeil, expected further action. But when someone mentioned the 1925 Honours (Preventions of Abuses) Act - the fruit of the Lloyd-George scandal - a lightbulb went on. "I thought: hang about, it's a crime. And if a crime is happening, you don't go to a politician. You go to the police," he points out.

Few politicians or journalists took his complaint seriously. But the Metropolitan police did - and their trail has led all the way to Downing Street. First came the startling arrest earlier this month of Lord Levy, Labour's chief fundraiser and a close ally of the prime minister. Now the Met has indicated that it expects to interview Blair himself.

Whatever the outcome of the inquiries, the story is irresistibly reminiscent of another classic movie: Mr Smith Goes to Washington, in which a naive, small-town senator takes on the corrupt political establishment.

MacNeil, a native Gaelic speaker, began minding sheep at the age of seven; he was 10 when his family acquired its first television. By 1997, he was working as a primary school teacher, "and when Labour was elected, a six-year-old said to me: 'Tony Blair is the new John Major.' From the mouths of bairns come great truths," he recalls with a chuckle.

Back then, the Labour party was proclaiming itself "purer than pure" in contrast to the sleaze that had preceded it. MacNeil, raised as a Labour voter, was pleased at its victory. He had no thought of entering politics himself, despite an anoraky streak ("as a teenager, World in Action and Panorama were central viewing," he says).

He became convinced of the need for Scottish independence, but attended his first SNP meeting reluctantly. Then "one thing led to another and I ended up as a candidate. Parties are not like football teams; if you find a better argument, you move. It's easier to concede the world is spherical than keep on arguing for the Flat Earth Society."

At present there is little sign of voters agreeing. Many argue that the SNP has lost its raison d'etre since devolution; the party has 12,000 members but only six MPs and its presence in the Scottish parliament has fallen from 35 to 25. Happily, it refuses to sit in the Lords.

MacNeil freely accepts that only the SNP and Plaid Cymru were able to challenge the handling of peerages. "Yeah, because we don't go near the House of Lords. We've got nothing to sell. I'd actually said at our last conference that we should be in the Lords ... There's an irony." But he says that backbenchers from all parties are privately supportive. In truth, most are surprised rather than annoyed by his starring role.

"He's a likeable guy and commendably free from the chippiness that almost every other member of the SNP I've encountered has in abundance," says one MP. "I wouldn't have had him down as an astute political operator. But he's very sincere and I think he just saw something he disagreed with and thought he should do something, without necessarily knowing what the result would be. He got lucky in a sense, but it's an important issue."

Another Westminster acquaintance observes: "He doesn't bowl you over at first. But I suspect he's not as daft as he'd like you to think."

MacNeil's doggedness surfaced when he unseated Labour at last year's general election. Calum MacDonald had held the seat for 17 years, but local outrage at the war in Iraq and opposition to a controversial windfarm scheme tipped the balance. "Calum got into the New Labour programme, but he was a nice fellow," MacNeil says loyally, adding: "The size of our constituency means you know people and have to live with them." Na h-Eileanan an Iar is the length of Wales but has the fewest voters - "21,149 last time we counted" - of any parliamentary seat.

"I come from a place where people try to get on. Small personal waves they won't make, but larger ones they will. There's a historical aspect of challenging authority; the battles with landlords, and the Free Church's split from the Church of Scotland." In keeping with that tradition, MacNeil plans to keep honours on the agenda. He has called for a public inquiry and tabled a draft bill to ensure that donors cannot receive a peerage for several years after giving money. It is unlikely to get parliamentary time, but he hopes it will keep people talking: "It's not the final word, but the first one," he says.

So far, the married father-of-three's own copybook is free from blots, though Labour gossips accused him of using prepaid House of Commons packages to send homegrown potatoes to relatives. "I didn't, but it's a good idea," he tells me. "I might send Lord Levy some Duke of Yorks or King Edwards - only titled potatoes." To date, his new-found friends at Scotland Yard show no interest in a Tattiegate inquiry. But, as the MP has proved, political scandals have unlikely roots these days.

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