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.
