Mark Logan is not at all happy with the Conservatives and their media cheerleaders. The Scottish government’s chief entrepreneur unexpectedly quit his post last week, following criticism of his salary.
The decision brought to an end four-and-a-half years in which Logan, formerly the chief operating officer of the Scottish “unicorn” firm Skyscanner, led attempts to bring fresh dynamism and growth to the nation’s tech sector. With his contract due for renewal, he knew there would be a fresh focus on his pay, placing him firmly in the headlines and the public eye – not a position he has ever found comfortable. “I don’t have the temperament for it,” he says.
But as he leaves the job, he wants to have his say, and to challenge those he believes made his role all-but impossible.
Logan first became aware that he was a subject of political controversy a couple of years ago while giving evidence to Holyrood’s economy committee. He had recently published a well-received review of Scotland tech “ecosystem” and was implementing its proposals. “I was asked a lot of good, thoughtful questions across the political spectrum from the Green Party to the Labour Party to the Liberal Party, but I wasn’t asked any questions at all from the Conservative members of the committee about the economy or the work I’d been doing.
“Instead, [Tory MSP] Graham Simpson opened with suggestions that I was a participant in cronyism, that I was unqualified. I remember in real time feeling both astonished and disappointed – astonished at the purity of Graham’s hypocrisy, given that this is the party of the VIP fastlane for PPE. Also, I wasn’t used to people taking such a delight in their own ignorance. I was already concerned at that point that I had taken on a role that was going to become a proxy to beat on the party of government of the day.”
Logan, who has been scrupulously non-political in his post, was taken aback by the Conservatives’ hostility, given their position as the “self-styled party of business” and that his work was an attempt to boost the private economy and economic growth. “I fear the Conservative Party is at risk of becoming a bad episode of The Walking Dead, where members are aimlessly shuffling around with no purpose except to attack any signs of life that might come past them,” he says.
The Tories were particularly exercised by his remuneration, which was reported as being £200,000, though he says he actually earned £130,000 a year. He talks of a “frenzy” of freedom of information requests and “attempts to divide the number of meetings I’ve had by what I’m earning to say ‘this is what he charges per meeting’ – all this attempt to create hatred and anger towards me… it’s probably to be expected in this day and age, but Scotland just needs better from its media and especially from its politicians.
“As I came up to my potential contract renewal with the Scottish government it was clear to me – had been made clear to me – that there was going to be more and more of these stories appearing in publications like the Express, the Telegraph and so on, and not only was that going to be personally very difficult, it was going to be difficult for the government and it was going to distract from the work that I was trying to do.”
Logan is that relatively rare thing in Scotland – a successful businessperson who chose to get involved in public life and policy development. As chief entrepreneur, he set up the tech scaler network, which helps start-up businesses in the sector develop and grow. There are currently more than 900 companies involved in the project, vastly more than he expected at this stage. He was highly rated by First Minister John Swinney and his deputy Kate Forbes, both of whom tried to stop him from resigning. The job of chief entrepreneur was created specifically by Forbes to bring him on board, and he is unlikely to be replaced.
Logan is whip-smart, charismatic, and a deep thinker, but usually prefers to operate, in his own words, as a “number two”. “That meant that inside the tech companies I’ve worked in, for example, I had a lot of responsibility and control, but outside of them people didn’t necessarily know who I was. I liked it that way. I feared it wouldn’t suit me to be in too public a role.”
He worries that the way he has been treated will dissuade others from non-political backgrounds from opting into public service. The nation needs more collaboration between ministers, the civil service and people with private sector expertise, he says. Now, “there’s a lot of people looking at this who’ve contacted me from industry saying ‘I wouldn’t go near that’.”
Asked about his legacy, he believes he has helped to bring about a “sea change” in how Scotland approaches the tech sector and how it’s viewed around the world. “I was in Shanghai three weeks ago at a forum, talking about what we’re doing in Scotland, and there’s a lot of interest in it. Countries are looking at what we’re doing and asking how they can do something similar. I’m quite proud of that, and the large number of people who have been co-contributors. We’ve absolutely moved up the global league table.”
That doesn’t mean he thinks his task is complete, however. He identifies “a level of vulnerability” in the sector and warns that “it would be perfectly possible for us to undo the good work we’ve done to this point”. “We need to elevate the work we’re doing here from an opinion to a conviction in the country. So by way of analogy, whichever political persuasion people come from, everybody agrees we should educate children in Scotland and we should have hospitals. These are convictions that don’t appear in binary form in manifestos. There’s debate about how we should do these things but there’s no debate that we should do them.
“In Scotland we are well on our way to making the idea of a systematic stimulus of a tech ecosystem a conviction, just as they have done in Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, to name a few. But we still haven’t got unanimity across the political spectrum in the major parties that this is important. I think we’ve made good inroads there, but we’re still vulnerable until this becomes a conviction.”
He describes Forbes as “one of the most gifted politicians of her generation in Europe – her ability to grasp detail and quickly direct action is as strong as the very best people I’ve worked with in industry and I couldn’t pay her a higher compliment than that.” He also appreciates Scottish Labour for its understanding of and commitment to his work. “Whatever your political persuasion, you need serious minds across the spectrum to be able to have the necessary maturity. I think that’s what Donald Dewar intended when he pushed for and introduced devolution, that in certain matters we can share a common view because it’s good for the country, that not everything should be opposed for clickbait on Twitter.”
I ask him about how he sees AI impacting on Scotland’s future. “There’s a famous saying that we tend to overestimate progress over two years and underestimate it over 10 years, and I think that will very much apply. People, after the first wave of ChatGPT, are starting to think that they understand what the world’s going to look like. We don’t – that’s the only thing that’s true. You can see that the internet has not stopped massively disrupting society. The latest vulnerable sector is the cinema sector – will we still have cinemas in five years? I don’t know. So that’s a wave that started 30 years ago and is still causing massive changes on an ongoing basis in our society. You can be sure that’s going to happen through civil society with AI as well. Scotland will do just fine economically out of this if we are trying to live in that future now and if we have the right technical model for how to exploit that future. We can’t avoid it, we’ve got to roll with it, so let’s roll early.”
Logan will continue teaching computer science at Glasgow University and keep up his private consultancy work. As he steps back from the limelight he is more than a little bruised, but I suspect he’ll find new ways to contribute. “I want to, but in a way that better suits my temperament,” he says. “I’m not sure what the answer to that is just yet, but maybe in a way that’s more hidden behind the scenes.”
