Citizen Sheridan.

The last time Tommy Sheridan was in Prison I got to witness the event close up.

Let me explain.

In 1992 I had cause to visit the Training For Freedom unit (TFF) in Saughton prison several times.

I was a Social Worker specially designated to work with offenders. At the time this was a close as anyone was in Scotland to being a Probation Officer.

My client in the Saughton TFF was a lifer. By the time I had met him he had been in prison for more than 15 years of a life sentence. He had knifed another young man in a gang fight in the West of Scotland.

The Training For Freedom unit did what it said on the door.

This is where long-term prisoners were prepared for release back out into society.

The regime was as different to a prison one as you could get and still be in prison.

Although within the prison walls of Saughton Prison it had previously been staff accommodation.

It had the feel of a youth hostel about it.

Although prisoners could be locked into their room most of the time it was free association.

As I recall they cooked their own meals. There was a pool table, TV, a large sitting room area.

One my way into see my client there I noticed a brightly coloured A4 sized piece of paper on one of the room doors (it would be a complete misnomer to refer to them as cells).

It was clear that the “sign” had been created by someone who had been given a handful of text marker hi-lighter pens.

It was garish, multicoloured and looked almost childlike.

It said “Councillor Tommy Sheridan”.

While he had been in prison he had been elected to Glasgow City council.

Part of my memory thinks that it also had “Political prisoner” on it, but that maybe a false memory and, of course, I would not want to libel Mr.Sheridan.

Like any closed community that suddenly has a celebrity imposed upon him there will be various reactions.

Some negative some positive.

My guy, the lifer, had the sort of gut wisdom about things that probably only prison can give you.

“The guy thinks he is somebody” was his assessment.

Councillor Sheridan’s presence in the TFF unit rankled with this “graduate” of the Scottish prison system.

Firstly it had taken him a decade and a half to get there coming through the shittiest (literally) of conditions in places like Barlinnie in Glasgow.

All the other guys in the TFF would have had a similar story.

They viewed that Sheridan was getting special treatment and resented this while some others flocked to him.

It is always the way with the Alpha Male.

Given the adulation that they seem to attract hubris must be an occupational hazard of the natural leader.

My guy seemed to use Sheridan as displacement. When I had first met him Sheridan hadn’t yet checked in at Saughton. Then his main gripe was the prison issue jeans given to him to go out on work placement. They had large yellow stitching up the legs. He told me he felt humiliated going out of the prison wearing them.

As a very minor cog in the penal system there wasn’t anything I could do for him.

My role would really kick in once he was released. The re-settlement of offenders is necessary and useful work in any criminal justice system. Even most “lifers” are eventually freed.

Interestingly for a “political prisoner” Sheridan had no problem wearing the standard issue striped shirt issued to him.

At the time of Sheridan’s incarceration the UK’s prison system were dealing with political prisoners of an entirely different calibre.

For them putting on a prison uniform was a matter of such import that they would rather be covered only with a blanket and shiver on freezing floors.

Tommy Sheridan was no Bogsider. He didn’t witness Paratroopers murder his neighbours. He didn’t see his father taken off to an internment camp when he was a young child.

There was, of course, natural anger felt by working class people in “Thatcher’s Scotland” of the 1980s especially about the Community Charge, the hated “Poll Tax”.

This genuine emotional reaction to the gross unfairness of this attack on poor communities gave Sheridan a perfect vehicle upon which to build his career.

Yet there was always an element of the Tooting Popular Front about it all.

At the time I thought Citizen Sheridan’s incarceration did all seem rather like the martyrdom dreamt of by a student union Che Guevara.

It was perfect. Here was the accolade of “political prisoner” without actually having to earn it.

Here was martyrdom at very little personal cost.

I have real political prisoners in my line.

My grandmother’s two brothers were arrested in their native Mayo and taken to Frongoch Prison Camp in Wales after the Easter Rising.

The mistake that the British government made (British governments have made LOTS of mistakes in Ireland, trust me on that one dear reader) was to release my two Grand Uncles and allow them to return to West Mayo.

Once back home they promptly started organising the IRA for the War of Independence.

During the Civil War one of her brothers, Tom, was in Kilmainhaim awaiting execution by “Free Staters”.

Only the truce saved him from the same fate of 77 of his comrades.

He didn’t face the firing squad that he was sentenced to die by.

My grandmother said neither of her two brothers ever spoke of their time inside.

It was something they endured; it wasn’t part of a career plan.

When the Sheridan perjury trial was in full follow I met with an NUJ colleague in Dublin and, as a native of Liverpool, he had lived through the chaos of the Militant Tendency controlled council in the 1980s. I put the following t question to him. “Would it be wrong to characterise Tommy Sheridan as Glasgow’s Derek Hatton?”

He said the comparison was spot on. There seems to be something in leftwing politics that gives a readymade vehicle to the wide boy alpha male from the streets. It authorises and validates their chippiness and, of course, there are usually a gaggle of compliant females willing to service the leader.

So what?

In Southern Europe they expect their leaders to be Alpha males and they behave as advertised.

Subsequently the general populace are a tad disappointed if they find out that their leader isn’t a serial philanderer.

Perhaps Sheridan’s undoing wasn’t that he lied about visiting a sex club in Manchester, but that he felt he had to lie.

Would such a revelation sink the leader of a political party in France?

Would it?

Really?

Sheridan was interviewed several times by the media in the TFF unit in Saughton in 1992.

On one occasion he said to the journalist that he didn’t understand the word that the reporter had used and that “I’m a working class guy I’ll have to go and look that word up.”

At that point Sheridan was an honours graduate of Stirling University.

His degree is in political science.

It was risible that there is any word in the political lexicon would be unknown to him.

But it was all part of the theatre just like the clenched fist salute as he took the loyal oath to the British Queen in Holyrood.

Abstentionism would have denied him the pay and the perks for being an MSP.

Sheridan’s life has, heretofore, been based on a charade of the working class hero.

The reality is much more prosaic.

Sheridan benefited hugely from the society he railed against.

Educated to degree level at the public expense.

Even when imprisoned for “political” offences the state he detested gave him special treatment while he was inside.

I rather suspect when he is sent down next month that he will find that his second spell in prison is a bit more, well penal, than his first.

This maybe his first introduction to reality since he appointed himself the leader of the Popular Front for the liberation of Pollok.

Perhaps he will use his time in prison well, as all criminals should, to train for his future.

A future based on honesty.