Blair McDougall is a Scottish political adviser in the British Labour Party. He is best known as head strategist to the Better Together campaign during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. [1] [2]
He was educated at the University of Glasgow, where as chair of the Labour Club he was Ross Kemp's campaign manager during the 1999 Rectorial election. [3]
He went on to serve as chair of Scottish Labour Students from 2001 to 2003 before becoming a special adviser to Ian McCartney, Minister for Trade, Foreign and Commonwealth Office and James Purnell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. [4]
In 2006 he took the post of Youth Representative on Labour's National Executive Committee. [4]
Following Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election, McDougall coordinated David Miliband's unsuccessful campaign for the party leadership. He became Campaign Director of Better Together in 2012. [5] After the No vote in the referendum on 18 September 2014, McDougall explained a key element of success had been regular and rigorous voter research and message testing. [6]
In 2014, he was appointed to an advisory role in Jim Murphy's successful campaign for the Scottish Labour leadership. [7] Murphy subsequently lost his seat to the SNP in the 2015 general election. [8]
In April 2017, McDougall was confirmed as the Scottish Labour candidate for Murphy's former constituency of East Renfrewshire in the 2017 general election. [8] [9] He came third in that election, with 26.7% of the vote, a fall in the Labour vote of over 7 points as compared with the 2015 election, in which Murphy came second with 34% of the vote. [10]
In January 2020, Labour MP Jess Phillips hired McDougall as Scotland adviser for her unsuccessful leadership campaign. [5]
McDougall announced in July 2023 that he was running to be the Labour candidate for East Renfrewshire at the next United Kingdom general election. [11] [12] [13]
McDougall has two children. [14]