But his lifelong passion in politics was to see the establishment of a Scottish Parliament, and sit as a Member of it. So when the Scottish Parliament was established by the referendum of 1997, he announced he would retire from Westminster after just one term as an MP to stand for the new Scottish Parliament. He was therefore elected in 1999, as Liberal Democrat MSP for the Central Scotland region.
Opponents
A feisty and independent-minded politician, he was always fiercely loyal to his liberal instincts, and had a particular mistrust of the Labour Party, which he saw as centralist and corrupt. He was firmly on the radical left of the Liberal Democrats, believing in full-scale political reform and significant increases in spending on public services. This put him at odds with the more cautious Liberal Democrat party leadership at the time, and he was often seen as a renegade member of the 'awkward squad,' for example in his implacable opposition to the coalition with the Labour Party formed after the 1999 elections. Gorrie disliked his characterisation as a rebel, pointing to the fact that he was merely sticking to the Liberal Democrats' manifesto commitments.
Second term
As time passed, and particularly after he was re-elected for a second term as MSP in 2003, he mellowed, however, and – confined to the backbenches with no hope of ministerial appointment – he concentrated on campaigning on a number of particular themes which interested him. His boldness and eye for publicity endeared him to a media corps that was often starved of stories by the cautious and tightly-controlled party machines that operated at Holyrood, and he became associated with a number of individual causes, like the spiralling cost and mismanagement of the Holyrood building project, and later his campaign against the sectarianism that plagued Scottish society. Though controversial at first, this latter campaign raised the profile of the issue until eventually it was taken up by First MinisterJack McConnell, who instigated a series of legislative attempts to deal with the issue. Disliked by some for the uncompromising stances he has taken, Donald Gorrie is nevertheless widely respected for his consistency of principle and his long record of service to liberal politics and public life in general. He retired from the Scottish Parliament at the 2007 elections. He upset the party leadership during the campaign by saying the Lib Dems should 'never say never' to an independence referendum – as that would resign them to another coalition with the Labour Party.
