Jackie Kemp

‘Confusion To Our Enemies’

Selected Journalism of Arnold Kemp (1939-2002) edited by Jackie Kemp. (go to forthcoming titles on nwp.co.uk for more info).

From the Foreword by Professor Tom Devine: Arnold Kemp, one of the greatest of Scottish journalists and editors of the 20th century, died prematurely at the age of 63 in 2002. He edited The Herald with memorable elan and panache between 1981 and 1994 and his prolific writings also regularly graced the pages of the Scotsman, the Guardian and the Observer in a career which spanned more than four decades from the year he began his first job in journalism in 1959 as a sub-editor on the Scotsman, fresh out of Edinburgh University.

Politics<

My father Arnold Kemp and the Leveson Inquiry

From the Scottish Review March 21, 2012. What would Arnold Kemp have thought of the Leveson inquiry? My father, journalist and editor of this parish, will have been dead 10 years this September. So it was something of a surprise to his nearest and dearest to be called by the Guardian and told that his name had been raised at the Leveson inquiry in connection with a tragic and distressing case surrounding his columnist Jack McLean in the early 90s, a case touched on by Kenneth Roy in his SR column (13 March).

Politics<

The agenda behind the bill: feminisation of Scotland

From the Scottish Review, Dec 2011. This piece is also in the Scottish Review anthology, Scottish Review 2012, available from www.scottsihreview.net. It seems bizarre that the Scottish Government has forced through such a wide-ranging set of laws as the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Bill in the name of anti-sectarianism.

Culture<

Robert Kemp on the Edinburgh Festival

Twice before in my life I have seen Europe go dark and watched the doves of peace having their necks wrung. …”

Robert Kemp on the 21st Edinburgh Festival, from the Scottish Field 1967

Festivals are not like people. They never “grow up”. So perhaps it would be a mistake to make too much of the 21^st Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama (to bestow upon it the full title which leaves out a lot of what happens), except that to say that its continuance for all of those years proves that the original idea was a durable one.

All those years…I , who happen to have seen something of them all, find it difficult to believe that among this years’ audience there will be those who were not born when the early Festivals took place. For them it may seem a venerable institution this Edinburgh Festival Society which some at first predicted would not last for more than a few years.

Culture<

Robert Kemp on the Edinburgh Festival

“Twice before in my life I have seen Europe go dark and watched the doves of peace having their necks wrung. …”

Robert Kemp on the 21st Edinburgh Festival, from the Scottish Field 1967

Travel<

Holidaying with teens in Sutherland

Herald, Saturday magazine 30 May 2011

To say our teenagers were not keen on a week in a cottage in the far north of Scotland would be like saying Ryan Giggs is not a fan of Twitter. It was not, apparently, their idea of a holiday. The word they used in fact was “nightmare”. But I closed my ears to their girning – second nature now – and insisted they pack plenty of warm clothes and borrow some holiday reading from the school library.

Of course, I told myself, no self-respecting teenager would welcome a week in the Highlands with their parents. I am sure I made the same kind of extravagant complaints myself – but I did enjoy it once I was there.

Arnold Kemp archive<

Ireland – land of many welcomes

AS day breaks the storms blow in again from the south-west. From the radio, left on overnight, come the strains of a sonata; heard faintly against the noise of the wind, it sounds like an Aeolian harp, the notes carried as if from a great and mysterious distance.

Later in the day the tourists walk stiffly but resolutely on the beach as the waves roll in from the Atlantic. Behind them the mist clings to the slopes of an elemental landscape of bog and crag.

Literature<

A book on the Highland Clearances

From the Observer 21 October 2001

If, as Ambrose Bierce argued, a violin is the revenge exacted by the intestines of a dead cat then history, in the hands of a skilled interpreter, may avenge vanished generations. The Highland Clearances are a good example of the phenomenon.

One view is that landowners brutally swept away the native people. Harder-nosed academics say that the Clearances were part of an inevitable change. But although we are in an age of opulence, a time when, in the words of Luiz Felipe Scolari, the Brazilian football coach, we tie dogs up with sausages, we seem to grow ever more bitter about the misfortunes of our Highland forebears who lived not in Arcadia but often in poverty.

Culture<

Architecture in Scotland

From the Observer 7 October 2001

THE FAILURE of high-rise architecture in Scotland’s cities is so universally acknowledged that it is often assumed that tower blocks are inherently incapable of supporting civilised life. The Wee Malkies, the urchins of Stephen Mulrine’s poem, will come as surely as rats to a cargo ship. They will put out the stair-head lights, sabotage the lifts and make the journey from entrance to flat more hazardous than any midnight walk along the meanest city streets.

Not just in Glasgow or Edinburgh, but in London and Paris, too, towers have become symbols of alienation, poverty and despair, the very evils they were designed to overcome. Yet this form of urban architecture can succeed. For the rich, the high tower can be a secure fortress, guarded by concierges where residents pay their dues and repairs are carried out without delay.

The Press<

The rise and rise of the unattributed quote

From the Observer 28 July 2002

There are times when politics approaches blood sport. All last week, before his sudden decision to resign, poor Henry McLeish looked like a hunted fox, increasingly terrified by the baying of the media pack.

The press, of course, was perfectly within its rights to pursue the matter tenaciously. McLeish and his advisers signally failed to deal with it promptly, openly and fully. But some aspects of the media pursuit left me feeling uneasy.

By chance, the evening before the resignation, I was at Stirling University to hear Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, deliver the third Hetherington Memorial Lecture. Rusbridger’s theme was political language. He demonstrated how an open discourse between media and politicians has become virtually impossible. Indeed, the relationship has become an arid kind of game in which the politicians stonewall their inquisitors.

People<

Alex Salmond renounces SNP leadership in 2001

From The Arnold Kemp Archives: Observer, Sunday 28 January 2001

Somewhere at home I have a collection of tapes of political interviews dating from the early 1990s. I have always meant to listen to them again, not for their substance but for the eccentric extraneous noises.

Interruptions by waiters have a deadly effect on anecdotes; they are always perfectly timed to ruin the punch-line. The chatter and laughter of fellow diners constitute other hazards.

People<

Alex Salmond renounces SNP leadership

From The Observer, Sunday 28 January 2001

Interruptions by waiters have a deadly effect on anecdotes; they are always perfectly timed to ruin the punch-line. The chatter and laughter of fellow diners constitute other hazards.

Culture<

Attacks on asylum seekers in Glasgow

- From the Observer Sunday 27 May 2001

Culture<

The prohibition of drugs

From the Observer, Nov 25, 2001

Since the days of Adam and Eve, forbidden fruit has lost little of its power to tempt. There is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that prohibition is counterproductive and may actually stimulate the consumption of the banned goods. In 1675, Charles II forbade by proclamation the sale of tea, coffee, chocolate and sherbet from private houses. His aim was to discourage sedition. In Scotland, the pulpit denounced tea-drinking as frivolous and ungodly. A consequence of such fiats was that tea became the national drink.

Politics<

In Ireland, on the introduction of the Euro

rom the Observer, 30 December 2001

The currency may change but life goes on. Ireland, as it prepared for the euro, fell about the Christmas feast as if it hadn’t a care in the world. The free-range Wexford turkey was the least of it: the ancestral Irish festive board is not complete without a ham and a hunk of spiced beef as well.

Arnold Kemp archive<

In Ireland on the introduction of the Euro

From the Observer, 30 December 2001

Literature<

On a compilation of Scots poetry

The Observer, Sunday 1 July 2001

At the heart of what makes poetry Scottish lies the question of language. There are at least four varieties. First, there is the Scots of the old court before the Union of the Crowns. Then came the vigorous and assured tongue used by Robert Burns in his best poems, or richly put in the mouths of his native characters by Sir Walter Scott.