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Although a shrewd and capable businessman, Muirhead was not interested in acquiring surplus capital for his own personal consumption. Instead, he used his money to finance any political organisation or radical cause that he felt warranted his support. From the 1890s onward, this meant supporting Scottish home rule. In 1901, he joined the Liberal-orientated Young Scots Society, whose aim was to encourage home rule legislation. But as Parliament turned down one home rule bill after another, Muirhead grew disillusioned with the Liberals.
In 1918, he became a member of the Independent Labour Party. With the help of some of its leading members, he revived the waning Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA). But he soon tired of Labour’s lukewarm support for the cause of home rule, and in 1928, he resigned from the party and the SHRA. With likeminded Nationalists, Muirhead formed the National Party of Scotland and was its first chairman. He stood for Parliament as a Nationalist candidate a number of times in the 1930s, convinced that ‘English rule in Scotland had been a failure’, but he received only a tiny number of votes.
The National Party joined with other groups in 1934 to form the Scottish National Party. And in 1936, Muirhead was elected honorary president. As part of his opposition to the British state, he refused to support the call for king and country in both world wars and opposed conscription as contrary to the Treaty of Union. Later, he was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1960s. Although he failed to see the Scottish National Party take off as a popular political party in Scotland, the ‘Grand Old Man of Scottish Patriotism’, as he was known, was one of a number of stalwarts who built the platform, and he should be remembered for it.