LAND OWNERSHIP AND IRISH home rule were fiercely debated topics during this period, and they were particularly relevant in the constituency that Graham wished to represent, which contained significant Irish and Highland populations, and these became fundamental and recurring themes of his early campaigns. Land ownership in particular became a political entry point for many reformers and proto-socialists, at a time when the Scottish Land Restoration League was contesting seats at the upcoming election and encouraging land raids on Tiree, which were regularly reported in Scotland’s industrial heartland. David Lowe, who ran the office of Keir Hardie’s Labour Leader publication, related how Graham had declined to stand for his initial choice of seat at Blackfriars in Glasgow when he heard the Crofters’ Party candidate, James Shaw Maxwell, speak: ‘Graham did not go to the platform, but from the front seat he followed the speeches with great eagerness. The ideas which had long been simmering in his head were being clothed in words and adorned by reason.’

Graham’s first recorded political speech was on 11 August 1885, when he was a guest speaker at Coatbridge in the contiguous constituency of North-West Lanarkshire, which, like Camlachie, was an industrial black-spot with significant Irish and Highland populations. As a large landowner himself, he began diffidently on the subject of the speed of social and political reform, but unexpectedly, as if to distance himself from his own social position, he launched into an attack on the British upper classes, and their monopoly of the land:

With these words, we can discern the first indication of the source of Graham’s general disquiet and perturbation: that there were glaring disparities and imbalances at the very foundations of society, which were deforming it for the benefit of the few but to the disadvantage of the many.