Tracking down a Glasgow cabbie with a passion for controversy... and poetry.
When I found Stef Shaw one June morning in Alfredo’s, a daylight-proof pub in Glasgow with mahogany panels and a dozen flatscreens, he lifted his blue polo shirt to show me his scars. One around his forearm, a long slash from a meat cleaver, and a pathway of divots up his belly; a gang of lunatics had stabbed him at a family birthday party nearly 20 years ago. ‘I’ve died twice, been brought back twice,’ he told me.
Now in his late 50s, Shaw has lived multiple lives, all touched by disaster. In December 2014, he taped a page of anonymous verse among floral tributes to the victims of a bin lorry crash. The poem, Glasgow Spirit, went viral. Once Shaw identified himself as its author, he became a reliable good-news story for the tabs. (‘Hero taxi driver’ was a typical headline.)
Subsequent poems presented the usual suspects of shortbread Fantasia – the Loch Ness monster, bagpipes – with a gushing confidence that nonetheless found a place on university windows and government buildings. When I first met Shaw in the mid-2010s, as a passenger in his cab, I spotted one poem, Welcome to Glasgow, affixed to the window: ‘Whenever you arrive here / You’ll see a smiling face / You’ll hear the Glasgow banter / And feel a warm embrace.’
If Shaw wasn’t exactly a star, he was at least orbiting the elite: selfies with Nicola Sturgeon, praise in the House of Commons, a lead role in a short sci-fi film. Campaigns for good causes did as much to raise his profile as his thudding metre.
That was until lockdown. Shaw’s encomiums to civic pride gave way to posting and protests. His Facebook page was suddenly replete with vaccine scepticism and ‘face pants’. Once he got a taste for ‘despising the SNP’, he styled himself as the common-sense voice against ‘child grooming’ and, most consequentially, the gender reform bill, a doomed and misguided piece of legislation to simplify self-ID that tore the SNP apart. Shaw briefly considered standing for political office. But his crusade against the Scottish government came to a head with his last campaign: a calamitous, Tommy Robinson-backed anti-immigration rally he’d organised, then abandoned, in Glasgow last year.
Back in Alfredo’s, Shaw’s brother John, a coachbuilder with a slender frame, teasingly described Robinson, the grievance entrepreneur and prison enjoyer, as ‘your pal’. ‘That’s nonsense,’ said Stef, indignant through laughter. ‘I’ve never met or contacted Tommy Robinson.’ He pulled out of that rally, he said, because he’d been threatened, but didn’t elaborate. Shaw got one of several rounds in and called me a ‘beautiful boy’.
To locate him, I’d spoken to a dozen taxi drivers in George Square. Over a Stockhausen symphony of bagpipes and diggers, they said they hadn’t seen him for weeks. There was nothing to glean from his Facebook page, The Glasgow Cabbie, whose 35,000 followers had until mid-April been fed rambling posts – complaints about lamp-posts, tirades against ‘woke folk’ and appeals on behalf of local cleaners looking for work.
It turned out that Shaw had been getting sloshed in Alfredo’s and another pub east of the city on an almost daily basis (he got divorced last year). Far from seeing Shaw as a virulent ‘Nazi, racist, right-winger’ – labels that Shaw himself reeled off – I found a wounded Nixonian figure, monologuing about past glories not unlike the retired prizefighters mounted on the walls around us.
Those glories, in brief. The nadir of his protest against a school sex survey was a cascade of messages to the then-First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, asking, in a vulgar satire of the questionnaire, if she’d ever tried anal sex. Shaw – who’d once praised Sturgeon’s ‘human touch’ – later organised a conga line of around 250 people in George Square upon her resignation, leading chants of, ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead.’
Stranger still was Shaw’s fight over a river-diving sniffer dog. In an inbox-flooding effort to convince Glasgow’s Lord Provost to ‘recognise’ Barra the springer spaniel, Shaw demanded that the dog be declared the winner of a children’s drawing competition. He then suggested that the existence of the contest was an SNP cover-up engineered to sideline him.
Shaw’s suspicion wasn’t groundless. His role in a successful suicide prevention scheme along the River Clyde was omitted from public recognition by the SNP city council leader, Susan Aitken, leading Shaw to take up a digital grudge against her over feral rats. Though Shaw is not averse to conspiracy theories – chiefly around cash and vaccines – his paranoia is less concerned with the powerful than his exclusion from those circles.
John, his lips now shining, often derailed Stef’s train of thought with braying interruptions. But he was a sharp observer of his brother’s ambitions. ‘People stop me in town,’ said Stef, ‘but I don’t want to be famous; I just want to be Stef Shaw.’ John wasn’t having it. After a pause, and in a serene register, he said, ‘You love notoriety. You want to be known.’
In the afterglow of the 2014 independence referendum, to which Shaw’s earnestly optimistic poetry felt so apposite, ‘Yes’ voters read Scotland’s historic shunning of the Tories as proof of a more liberal polity. That era is over. In June’s Hamilton by-election, Reform secured 26% of the vote (UK polling was 16%). Its 10,000-strong membership outstrips the Scottish Tories, Greens and Alba parties; a firewall coalition between the SNP and Scottish Labour, who absolutely loathe each other, looks inevitable.
This shift has come in part from an emergent network of Scottish alt-right pundits. Shaw, until recently a fixture of this gobby milieu, was especially fond of the podcaster James English, whose tawdry obsession with the underworld calls to mind a red-pilled Sunday Sport.
As Shaw theorised about why ‘Handsome James’ wouldn’t invite him on the show – another plot against him, of course – I had in mind the 19th-century poet William McGonagall, whose commitment to the limelight was legendary. During a local theatre performance in Dundee, McGonagall, playing Macbeth, refused to die in the final act. (‘The actors of the company felt very jealous,’ he recalled, ‘owing to me getting the general applause.’)
McGonagall is more famous still for a poem about the Tay Bridge disaster, in which he rhymed ‘1879’ with ‘very long time’ – a couplet that earned him worldwide renown as the worst poet to have ever lived. Shaw’s legacy is unlikely to be so noble.
‘I’m one of Scotland’s most famous poets,’ he told me. I nodded, in the spirit of commiseration, and said he was right.
