Jackie Kemp

Jackie Kemp

Devolution

Roland Muirhead’s fight for a Scottish Parliament

THERE arrived in the office this week a slim volume called Scotland’s  Constitution. It is dedicated to the memory of Roland Eugene Muirhead  (1868-1964) who for 75 years ”relentlessly campaigned” for an  independent Scottish parliament.

The publication of this constitution is an act of piety by a small  band of faithful followers, for Muirhead, called by Tom Johnston the  grand old man of Scottish nationalism, is now very largely forgotten in  the country to which he devoted so much energy.

People

A defence of Malcolm Rifkind

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 24 April 1993.

THERE appeared in the London Evening Standard, on Friday, April 16, a vicious attack on Malcolm Rifkind. It was written by a Matthew Norman. I have never heard of him and I entertain absolutely no desire ever to meet him.

The article is a critique of Mr Rifkind’s considered response to pressure put on him by Lady Thatcher and others to support military intervention in former Yugoslavia.

People

Jimmy Logan, selling water and playing safe

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 29 May 1993.

THE water in the Grand Canal looks filthy but the fat lady from the Bronx reclines in the gondola and trails her fingers langorously in it. This early in the year the smells are not yet ripe but the occasional pong wafts up to the restaurant where we sit in the garden as evening falls.

Places

Regent Terrrace Gardens

The Herald, Ediorial Notebook, c1993.

TO the east of Princes Street, on the flank of Calton Hill, lie graceful private pleasure gardens laid out by the great William Playfair. They are one of Edinburgh’s hidden delights, concealed in the horseshoe formed by Regent, Royal, and Carlton Terraces.

Culture

On the correct rules of hat wearing

AN unexpected pleasure of the week was to tune into Gerald Scarfe’s ironic BBC2 essay on the subject of class and its totems. People, it seems, are still prepared to pay large sums of money for the titles of old feudal baronies. Indeed, it was revealed elsewhere this week, some of the hard-pressed Lloyd’s names are selling superfluous titles to raise the wind.

We heard too of the earl outraged to hear that the applicant for the post of butler, having made a fortune buttling in America, had sent his sons to Eton where, egad, they might meet the earl’s own offspring. The butler was shown the door.

Culture

On plans to charge for the Botanics in Edinburgh

FOR a blessed half hour this week I sat on a bench at the herbaceous border in the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Myriad plants were in bloom below the high hedge marching gracefully above them; their subtle colours soothed the mind and emptied it of care.

I have been coming here, on and off, for most of my life. We played childhood games on the daisy-strewn turf and ran about the magically mysterious rock garden, occasionally to the kindly rebukes of the keepers.

People

White Settlers

ON these sunny mornings of our Indian summer it is hard to feel bad tempered, but there are people whose behaviour can nudge you towards irritation whatever the weather. Among these, the imperious Englishwoman is a world champion.

Such thoughts occurred to me as I queued behind one of the breed at the express till at our local supermarket this week. She caught my eye because she was carefully reading the notice explaining that transactions were cash-only.

People

Rain in St Malo

St Malo

COCO the dog is a trifle wet. His mistress has taken him on his morning walk and, because it is raining, chained him to a banister rail until he dries and can resume his usual place on a settee. For most of his life the boxer, grave and dignified, has sat around the lobby of the hotel and watched the tourists come and go. They pet him still.

Devolution

A Burns NIght ‘massacre’ – failure of devolution in 1979

The Herald, Editorial Ntebook, 25 September 1993.

SIR Myer Galpern, who died this week, was a Lord Provost of Glasgow and a Labour MP. But he will be remembered because of his time in the chair of the House of Commons as Deputy Speaker.

On Burns Night, 1978, he presided over the humiliation of the Callaghan Government when it suffered a series of defeats in the division lobbies. The result was the 40% rule which turned the devolution referendum into a mountain too high to climb.

 

People

Nelson Mandela

NELSON Mandela joins us for a working breakfast though, at 8am, he has already eaten. He does not look his 75 years, and he speaks to the journalists, with energy and conviction, for more than an hour. Our breakfast sits unnoticed on the side table.

Devolution

“Were we just wrong, Jim?” Sillars and devolution

From Arnold Kemp’s book, a personal history of post-war Scotland “The Hollow Drum”.

…Jim Sillars told me a story about himself which, he said, explained his character. When he was 15 he was apprenticed to a plasterer and was one of a team working on a job. Although he was the junior apprentice he found he was expected to do the labouring. On further inquiry he discovered from the boss that the job had been priced to allow for three labourers, a junior apprentice, a senior apprentice and a journeyman. The boss had not employed any labourers; he was skimming more profit by making the junior apprentice do the donkey-work.

Sillars walked off the job. There was an enormous row. His father was called to a meeting. But it was to no avail and that day the plastering trade lost a recruit.

 

Food

Warsaw

A LETTER arrived from Warsaw this week. At least, it was a belated Christmas card that had somehow grown into something bigger, an epistle of six pages jotted down between times by my old friend Stas, running from one card on to another and then on to writing paper.

People

Pat Chalmers and the BBC

Pat Chalmers, controller of BBC Scotland between 1983 and 1991, has retired from the corporation after a two-year stint in Hong Kong, and this week friends and colleagues attended a dinner given for him in London.

Pat belonged to an era of broadcasting that seems now to be disappearing. Both in the Birtian BBC and in the commercial world increasingly ruled by market forces, it would now be difficult for an independent and rumbustious spirit like Pat to survive.

Food

Finnan Haddie

SCOTLAND’S greatest gift to international cuisine is not, I submit, salmon, beef, mutton broth, haggis or oatcakes, or even the simple bacon roll, that blessed balm for over-indulgence. It is the finnan haddock, served with a poached egg on top.

People

John Smith

ACROSS the Ness from the hotel policeman keep watch from the roof of the Eden Court Theatre where the Tory conference is in session. The Prime Minister is arriving shortly to bring this melancholy but oddly inspiring week in British politics to a conclusion.

It has been melancholy, of course, because of the cruel death of John Smith. In its grief the British political establishment has found a rare unity. Our adversarial system has the virtue of in the end producing a Yes or a No to any political question. Its defect is that its perpetual mutual slagging becomes arid. The prying eyes of television, and the eavesdropping radio microphones, have revealed also its petty, schoolboy side.

Places

A win at Kelso races

THE old saying that you don’t meet many poor bookies has a self-propelling logic. Once I did see a bookie at Kelso come close to a lynching after he had increased the odds to drum up trade: just in time a runner arrived with more cash as the punters turned nasty. It is a profession in which incompetence is quickly punished.

People

Billy Connolly

ONCE, during a short season on the staff of the old North British Hotel in Edinburgh, I took up in the lift such notables as Gene Kelly, Kenneth More, and Sir Arthur Bliss. Quite apart from acquiring a lasting appreciation of the patience of those who have to wait on the public, and a tendency, out of a lingering feeling of solidarity, to tip too much, I have been dining out on my days as a lift boy ever since.

Glamour rubs off on those who find themselves close to it but celebrity is a two-way street. This week in Edinburgh, a tourist in my own home town, shuttling about the place as a consumer of culture, I have again seen this truth at work.

People

Michael Heseltine

THE class politician is recognisable, among other things, by his ability to improvise. It is a necessary gift not just in the bearpit of the Commons at question time. There are moments, too, when a speech has to be discarded or radically adjusted at the last minute.

People

Spy Kim Philby – distrusted by his Russian masters

NO THEME has preoccupied post-war British writers more than that of betrayal. It is arguable that Le Carre is our major post-war novelist and the figure of the spy is pervasive in the literature of our time. As in Le Carre’s An Honourable Schoolboy, he is a metaphor for more general infidelities in an age that has seen the rapid loosening of marital and familial ties.

The figure of Kim Philby, in particular, continues to haunt the imagination. His extraordinary career has already been thoroughly documented, by the journalist Phillip Knightley and others, and most people are reasonably familiar with it in outline.

A convinced Marxist, he was recruited as a KGB agent while at Cambridge. He entered the British foreign service in 1941 and was first secretary at the British embassy in Washington from 1949 to 1951. After the defection to Moscow of Burgess and Maclean, his friendship with Burgess led to an investigation. Although nothing could be proved against him he was forced to resign. He went to the Middle East as Observer correspondent until he disappeared from Beirut in 1963, surfacing soon afterwards in Moscow as a KGB major-general and confirming that he had been the ”third man” in the Burgess and Maclean case.