Two days before Christmas in 2015 Russell Findlay went to answer his door in his pyjamas and found a postman asking him to sign for a delivery.
He took the chit to scribble his name and suddenly felt cold liquid splash on his face. Its sharp sting told him it was acid. This was no postman. It was a hitman.
The assailant now lunged at his target with a knife and, instantly aware of the mortal danger he faced, the journalist fought back.
The two of them crashed onto his driveway where Mr Findlay’s then 10-year-old daughter found them wrestling. She froze momentarily, then dashed to neighbours who called 999.
Even as the acid burned into his skin, Mr Findlay overpowered the hitman, rained punches on him and held him down until the police arrived to bundle him into a van.
Russell Findlay has been told by police of a fresh threat to kill him
Much of the rest of that day was spent in A&E where gallons of sterile water were poured directly on to his right eyeball – an urgent necessity, he was told, if his sight were to be saved.
This terrifying morning call was payback for doing his job. Exposing underworld criminals in the press, he had always known, carried risks.
Nine years on, Mr Findlay has just announced he is standing to be the next leader of the Scottish Conservatives – and is submitting to the first sit down interview of his life. The first, that is, where he is not the one asking the questions.
Taking a seat on his living room couch, he asks if he should be lying down.
It is a light-hearted acknowledgement that he is straying far outside his comfort zone.
But there is another, darker strand to the joke. There is much unburdening to do. Traumatic events to unpack. Worse than that, there are fears the nightmare he is about to speak of may not lie entirely in the past.
A few days ago, Mr Findlay, 51, was visited at home by two CID officers who informed him they had intelligence which suggested his life was in danger. They gave him the name of an individual based in Paisley. The mention of the Renfrewshire town had a chilling effect.
William Burns, the hitman who came for him in 2015, was from Paisley. He was ultimately given a 10-year jail sentence – but, Mr Findlay now learned, his latest parole hearing is next week. He could be back on the streets within days.
A few days after that visit, detectives gave Mr Findlay an update. They said they had now spoken to the individual in Paisley.
‘They were not forthcoming about the content of the conversation, which is understandable,’ he says. ‘But they were able to then say they had established a link between this individual and my assailant, which didn’t come as any great surprise.’
To learn of an underworld threat to one’s safety would make the blood run cold on any day.
But Mr Findlay was on the verge of announcing his candidacy for the leadership of his party. He would be in the public eye.
And, even as he set out his stall to the party membership, he would be haunted by a threat linked to his former life as a journalist who exposed organised crime.
‘Well, the timing of it is extraordinarily unhelpful,’ he says now. And yet planning his campaign has helped keep his mind away from the alleyways of dread which many, in his situation, might explore.
He says: ‘I think being as busy as I’ve been means I’ve not dwelled on it as much as I perhaps ordinarily would. I’ve thought to myself that Burns had a bad day that day. He ended up being imprisoned for 10 years. His reputation took a bit of a doing in that world.
‘It’s a little bit tiresome and concerning that he would regard this as potentially unfinished business, if this is what this threat represents. So I would be foolish to be dismissive and flippant about it, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it. And I feel rather defiant, but in a measured kind of way.’
By the time of the 2015 attack, Mr Findlay had lived largely under the radar for most of his working life.
He was a successful and prolific national newspaper journalist and published author, but his picture never appeared next to his name on stories.
He was not on the voters’ roll. He was never on television. Few beyond friends, family and colleagues knew what he looked like. It was the way it had to be, he reasoned, as he waged war on organised criminals through his exposes.
And yet, on that day nine years ago, the underworld showed up at his front door.
Doesn’t he worry that, by bidding to become one of Scotland’s most high-profile politicians, he is poking the beast?
Mr Findlay had acid thrown in his face by an underworld thug in 2015
‘Being anonymous hadn’t helped me,’ he says. ‘They found me. They got to me. It could have been life ending rather than life changing.’
He adds: ‘Being public … gives you, I think, a layer of protection. Because, do Police Scotland want a dead MSP, not to put it too bluntly? I’m not being gallus or thinking that I’m somehow bombproof, far from it.’
He is aware it is not just in former Soviet states or African regimes that crime gangs have targeted senior politicians.
The Netherlands and Malta are both awash with parliamentarians fearing for their lives after receiving credible threats.
Mr Finlay says: ‘Yes, you’re poking the beast but, bloody hell, you can’t run away from this. You have to be defiant. Not in any reckless, foolish way, but they don’t respect weakness. If I back down and go away quietly, what am I? Safer? I don’t think so.’
That said, his decision to quit journalism and stand in the Scottish Parliament elections in 2021 was not his alone.
He says: ‘My daughter was still relatively young but mature enough to know what this might entail, and she had an absolute veto.
‘I had reconciled myself to the fact that I would have to go from anonymity – not that that had done me much good as it turned out – to being public and I think the trade off, the benefit of that platform and that voice against the potential drawback of being public was a worthwhile price, and then my daughter gave her wholesale backing to that.’
A few days ago, the daughter he brought up as a single parent had another veto. Had she ‘any qualms or concerns’ about his plan to stand for party leadership, his hat would not be in the ring.
‘If anything, she had unbridled enthusiasm for the idea. I was kind of hoping she would say no,’ he adds, laughing.
The Mail is not naming the 19-year-old whose childhood was scarred by the horrific events on her doorstep nine years ago.
But, just as her father’s facial wounds healed in time, leaving no visible trace of the sulphuric acid flung in it, so she has bounced back from the scenes she witnessed.
Mr Findlay could not be more proud of her. Tears well in his eyes as he talks about her.
‘I think there’s a little bit of pride, which is very touching, that she sees me doing something that has largely been outwith my comfort zone,’ he says.
‘Raising my daughter was the single greatest privilege of my life. I almost sound emotional but nothing compares, you know?’
He adds: ‘I think she’s got an incredible resilience. I wish nothing else than she would not have had her childhood contaminated. I strove to give her the best education, the best opportunities … whatever happened I always undertook to find the money to pay for a summer holiday. That was an absolute.
‘I daresay some psychologists or some such would have a better assessment than me, but you must assume that what has occurred has had some form of impact. But she’s confident, she’s outgoing, she’s smart and she’s extraordinary in terms of how she has not been, I believe, negatively impacted by any of this.’
Does his daughter know about the latest threat?
‘I couldn’t not tell her. I didn’t feel comfortable telling her, but she is a young adult. She was a little bit … not upset, but quite indignant, almost like “how dare they?”’
By necessity, Mr Findlay’s life was a closed book throughout his journalistic life. Now, with a potential new threat hanging over him, he is not about to fling it open completely.
He prefers not to discuss his wider family.
On personal relationships, he says simply: ‘I’ve been married twice and divorced twice, so I’m not very good at that stuff. I’m not planning to get married again.’
Is he in a relationship right now?
‘No, I’m not. I have found this job to be so full-on that I’ve really not had the time or, frankly, I’ve really not had the inclination. I think when you get to a certain age, having been through the wars a wee bit, I just feel I’m not in any great rush to get into any form of serious relationship.’
The leadership candidate presents a curious conundrum. As a top journalist, admired and respected throughout his trade, he developed the kind of hinterland which is sorely missing among so many of today’s career politicians.
He knows the criminal justice system inside out and brings a multitude of transferrable skills to the table in the Scottish Parliament.
Yet there are limits to what he can share of his back story.
He offers that he attended Douglas Academy in Milngavie, Dunbartonshire where he excelled more in rugby than in academia.
At home, he read newspapers voraciously – ‘from cover to cover, including the classifieds’ – and, before leaving school, already had work experience at his local paper under his belt.
That helped earn him a place on a two-year journalism course at the then Napier polytechnic in Edinburgh. ‘When we went back for year two after the summer it was Napier University, so I suddenly felt cleverer,’ he laughs.
He landed a job on the now defunct freesheet The Glaswegian and, within a few months, masterminded an expose on a tenants’ association boss who was selling for profit tinned beef which was meant to be distributed free to people in deprived areas.
On the back of the scoop, he was offered a job on the Sunday Mail and his investigative journalism career was off and running.
Party politics rarely crossed his radar and his absence from the voters’ roll meant he didn’t have a say anyway. ‘I effectively disenfranchised myself on the basis of personal safety,’ he says. ‘I was a blank canvas.’
That changed in the run up to the independence referendum in 2014 – in which he decided he would vote.
He says: ‘I listened to all the arguments and weighed them up. I think I was instinctively “No”, but I didn’t go into it with a closed mind. Very quickly it became apparent that this was an absolute snake oil exercise.
‘The benefits of being in the UK are demonstrably compelling and I thought – naively – after the result, having done my civic duty and voted “No”, that that would be that. And I watched in astonishment the very next morning the way in which the SNP refused to accept the democratic will of the Scottish people.”
Over the next few years, he began to wonder if he could address the issues he cared most about – exploitation of the vulnerable by organised crime, inadequacies in the criminal justice system, spiralling drugs deaths – more effectively as a politician than as a journalist.
His election as a list MP in 2021 prompted a rapid ascendancy through the line of succession of potential party leaders. Almost immediately, colleagues identified him as a future candidate for the top job.
‘People had said to me – friends, associates – they said to me when I became an MSP, “Oh, you’ll be the leader quite early on.” I was saying “Shut up, will you? This is ridiculous”, but as time passed, more people were saying this.’
When current leader Douglas Ross announced he was vacating the role, the nudges from colleagues became more insistent. ‘People were much more seriously saying “you should do this” or “we want you to do this” or “you need to do this, but you have to want to. It’s your decision.”
The decision – a joint one, it turns out, between father and daughter – is now made. Mr Findlay says he did not tell the CID who visited him he was considering running for the job. ‘It was not confirmed/official and did not seem particularly relevant to the situation.’
He has, however, flagged the threat with security at the parliament and with the Police Scotland officer with responsibility for MSP security.
He was offered a home visit from an officer with counter terrorism expertise to appraise his home and personal security.
To an extent, however, it is situation normal for a man who has long known he has highly dangerous enemies.
His home, he says, has ‘security measures that an ordinary home probably wouldn’t have’ and he goes about his business in a state of ‘almost hyper vigilance’.
One positive effect of the attack is it prompted a ‘big stock-take’ of his life.
He vowed to get fitter, to cycle more and to re-hang the punchbag that lay dismantled in his garage. He now regularly slips on box gloves and pounds away at it.
‘I am perhaps more conscious of fitness,’ he says. ‘It’s maybe an age thing as much as what happened.’
His bike, he says, has become his main mode of transport. All the more so since his diesel car is non-LEZ compliant in his home city of Glasgow.
Given that the newly- introduced low emission zone in Edinburgh takes in the Scottish Parliament, he could not drive to work even if he wished to. He commutes by train.
As the conservation turns to down-time pursuits the politician seems thankful for frivolity’s respite.
He is a huge fan of Scottish comedian Kevin Bridges – ‘he’s just absolutely hilarious’ – and once approached him in a Morrison’s supermarket to tell him so. ‘It was probably not what he wanted me to do.’
And he is expansive on multi-series dramas such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad which feature American versions of the hoodlums he has spent much of his working life exposing.
He says these shows largely get it right, depicting broken, desperate characters, but he rails against the lazy glamorisation of organised criminals in lesser series.
‘They are bloodsucking, parasitical, venal, corrupt, animals who profit from exploiting the most vulnerable people in society,’ he says. ‘I would just like to be very careful that when you are telling it, you are not adding a sheen of excitement or glamour to it.’
More than most, this remarkable politician understands the malign influence of real-life organised crime. He has grappled against it in newsprint and once with his bare hands at his front door.
Running away now is not an option.
