PEOPLE: GRAY MAN SHOWS HIS COLOURS

THUMP. And again, thump. The man with the bright purple coloured tie, sitting in front of the bright primary colour splodges of a modern art painting on the wall of his office, is making his point by thumping his fist down on the table.

He's sitting in what can only be described as a compact office at Holyrood, the view from his window is of an uninspiring concrete wall built to withstand the blast of a terrorist's bomb and the memo board pinned next to the painting hints at work ahead: Japanese TV, says one impressive scribble.

His voice is getting louder. He's angry, passionate even. He's raging at his political foes and he's even putting the boot in.

Who can it be? Surely not Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray, a year into the job and still not known for his colourful nature or fiery temperament, a grey politician said to be so devoid of personality that some have likened him to having all the charisma of a turnip.

Yet here he is, fist thumping the top of a polished round table, driving home another point about how the SNP - and Alex Salmond, Enhanced Coverage LinkingAlex Salmond, -Search using:News, Most Recent 60 DaysBiographies Plus Newsin particular - are gradually dismantling Scotland with their myopic plan for independence.

"What we want to do," he declares in earnest, "is to make the Labour Party in Scotland talk again to Scotland.

"We want to lead," he thumps the table again, "and we will do that."

And so, acutely aware that he's not exactly the first person many voters think of when hit with the words "Scottish Labour politician", he's started his own national conversation.

While Alex Salmond Enhanced Coverage LinkingAlex Salmond -Search using:News, Most Recent 60 DaysBiographies Plus Newsand the SNP pour millions into their chit-chat about independence, Iain Gray has been down the shops, accosting women with their trolleys at Tesco and Morrisons on a kind of "getting to know you" tour of the sticks.

Dubbed "Iain's supermarket sweep" by him and his advisors, every now and again Gray heads off from the confines of his bomb resistant bunker in Holyrood to venture to places like Grangemouth and Greenock, to hover outside shops and corner passers-by about what they want him, his party and parliament to deliver.

Once he's told them who he is, of course.

It's part of a master plan to raise what is to many a fairly dire profile and, it appears, tap the man and woman in the street for ideas as to where Labour should concentrate its focus for Scottish Parliament elections in 2011.

So is this back-to-basics approach actually working?

"I'm definitely more recognisable," insists Gray, who just last week in one interview admitted that many Scots still don't have the foggiest idea who he is. "On a Saturday, I go out to buy a suit, someone will come up, they pick me out. If I go out on a by-election campaign, people recognise me.

"Look, I'm a year into the job," he adds, patience wearing thin. "Alex Salmond Enhanced Coverage LinkingAlex Salmond -Search using:News, Most Recent 60 DaysBiographies Plus Newshas been doing his job as leader of the SNP on and off for almost 20 years.

"Yes, this is a high-profile job and my profile has to be high - people have to know who you are - but the most important thing is to make sure they know what I stand for."

There are those who might suggest this 52-year-old grandad-in-waiting from Haddington could have substantially raised his profile had he held his nerve and pushed for a vote of confidence on the Scottish Government as they battled to justify the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber.

Others could point to his U-turn on predecessor Wendy Alexander's "bring it on" fighting talk when it came to the possibility of an independence referendum. Instead, Gray has preferred to avoid a head-on collision, talking most recently of the possibility of a poll at some point in the future.

And there are those who might wonder if, despite his insistence that "I'm my own man", he's still too deep in the pockets of his Westminster friends, a certain Mr Brown and Mr Darling, and perhaps even tarnished by them.

A steady hand on the tiller he may have been for the Scottish Parliament's Labour group after a chaotic period, but when a YouGov poll commissioned by the Nationalists recently put them eight points ahead of Labour in the constituency vote and four points ahead in the regional vote - enough, they say, to oust Gray and a trio of other Labour names in an election - then it starts to look serious.

"I speak up on apprenticeships, child protection, I spoke against the decision that Kenny MacAskill took to release the Lockerbie bomber," he insists. "I would rather be known for that than on the basis of who shouts the loudest.

"I don't like playground politics," he continues. "But if I'm up against Alex Salmond, Enhanced Coverage LinkingAlex Salmond, -Search using:News, Most Recent 60 DaysBiographies Plus Newsfor whom playground politics is meat and drink, then I'll take him on and I will stand up to him and take him to pieces to get to the truth of what he is doing."

Gray is, like the rest of his Labour Party cohorts showed at their annual conference in Brighton, in a fighting mood.

And so he sets about unpicking Nationalist policies, accusing them of wasting public money to fund their independence campaign.

There's no doubting his sincerity or his passion as he rages against the Nationalists' spending priorities: "Wasting money on the National Conversation, GBP 23 million for the Scottish Futures Trust which hasn't even commissioned a single report in two years," he fumes. "Education is the investment you make in our future and the SNP are making a complete shambles of it."

As he chats, his conversation is peppered with achievements that he and his colleagues have notched up over the Nationalists - including the Glenrothes by-election, pressure to improve Scotland's commitment to climate change measures and a boost for apprenticeships, a trade-off on the Nationalists' budget plans.

But until this time last year, when he was thrust into the leader's role made vacant by Wendy Alexander's departure, Hibs fan Gray was always a behind-the-scenes kind of bloke in a suit.

He joined the Labour Party in 1979, and became an MSP - leaving behind a past career as a teacher at Gracemount High and Oxfam's Scottish campaigns director - for Edinburgh Pentlands in 1999.

He instantly took on a deputy ministerial role in health under Donald Dewar's new devolved government.

As transport minister, he made nearly GBP 400m available for what was then intended to be Edinburgh's three-line tram network.

The 2003 election, however, saw defeat by then Scottish Tory leader David McLetchie. Gray went on to work as a special advisor to the Scottish Office under Alistair Darling while setting his sights on the 2007 election and his bid to become East Lothian MSP.

A year on from his election as Scottish Labour leader, and as he sits in this compact office - the Nationalists, he explains, snatched all the best ones - and his attention has turned to those supermarket shoppers in small towns around Scotland.

"There's a danger in parliament that everything becomes encompassed in this building and we lose contact with wider Scotland.

"So I have a rigorous programme of getting out of here, getting out of Edinburgh and Glasgow and going around Scotland," he says. "By the 2011 election, we will have policies that make sense to people whose votes we are seeking."

And, if operation supermarket sweep does its job, they might even know just who the chap in the purple tie is.

Edinburgh Evening News October 2, 2009