Alistair Carmichael has written a tribute to Jim Wallace – "a man of profound faith and exceptional talent" – for The House magazine. You can find it on the Politics Home website:
At a time when our political debate is often ill-tempered, Jim’s career is a reminder that to be productive our politics should allow parties to cooperate where they agree. He led the Scottish Liberal Democrats into and through the Scottish Constitutional Convention that eventually produced the blueprint for the Scotland Act of 1998. He then led us into a coalition with Scottish Labour in the first Scottish Parliament.
It was a government that had an enduring legacy, delivering change in areas such as free personal care for the elderly, which governments in the rest of the UK have struggled to achieve more than 20 years on.
When he eventually left the Scottish Parliament in 2007, he was an obvious candidate for nomination to the House of Lords. There he remained an active contributor until his death. As Lord Wallace of Tankerness he handled the chamber with consummate ease as advocate general for Scotland in the coalition government and later as leader of the Liberal Democrat Lords group.
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