The Arnold Kemp Archives

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.

On Scottish self esteem

    • Arnold Kemp
    • The Observer, Sunday 8 July 2001
      • The Scottish identity has long been a rich source of material for writers and academics. They are attracted to it because it is such a ragbag of disparate elements and influences.

      It has survived, undoubtedly, because Scotland has wanted to be different from England, just as the Tartan Army conducts itself with sozzled amiability as it marches around the world in order to show up the English supporters.

Cronyism and Jack McConnell

  • The Observer, Sunday 18 November 2001
    • The word crony has become the standard terms of abuse for the Scottish Labour Party, but it acquired its pejorative overtones only relatively recently. Souter Johnie was Tam O’Shanter’s ‘ancient, trusty, drouthy crony’: they had been ‘fou for weeks thegither’. In his diary Samuel Pepys spoke warmly of a ‘chrony’ and some think the word sprang from seventeenth-century student slang at Cambridge University.

    In the political sense it now means something just short of corruption. Cronyism is to friendship as cunning is to wisdom – ‘Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise’, wrote Francis Bacon. Cronyism in the political meaning appears to have been used for the first time by a journalist on the New York Times in 1952. He was describing the Truman administration’s practice of appointing friends to government posts irrespective of their fitness for them.

An early assessment of the Scottish Parliament

  • Arnold Kemp
  • The Observer, Sunday 16 December 2001 00.41 GMT
    • The legendary Irish heroine, Grace O’Malley, who led a band of 200 sea-raiders from the coast of Galway in the sixteenth century, found her enemies among the Irish as well as the English, and was eventually pardoned by Queen Elizabeth. The Scots turned to the same Queen to help them get rid of Rome and the French.

    The old political truth, that your enemies are not necessarily those who sit on the opposite benches, has emerged to haunt the Labour Party in Scotland. It has been in many ways a wretched couple of years since our new parliamentarians took the stage. The death of Donald Dewar, the embarrassment of Henry McLeish and the private troubles of our new First Minister, Jack McConnell, have damaged the standing of the Parliament, though mostly in the eyes of those who didn’t much value it in the first place.

Thoughts on churches

  • The Observer, Sunday 13 January 2002 
    • There is nothing like a row among Christians for sheer malevolence. Bishop Nazir-Ali, said to be the leading contender to succeed George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury, found himself all over the front page of the Times yesterday because, as the paper rather piously reported, there was a ‘whispering campaign’ against him. But thanks to the Times, it wasn’t sotto voce but more a scream from the rooftops.

    The allegations against the Bishop of Rochester included the suggestion that he once had been a Roman Catholic, hardly an unforgivable aberration in a Christian. There was, of course, a less visible and uglier subtext, for Dr Nazir Ali is from Pakistan.

Henry McLeish’s resignation as First Minister

  • The Observer, Sunday 27 January 2002 01.46 GMT
  • Article history
    • There is a school of newspaper writers who believe in adding culinary detail in order to satisfy the dictum of the great American journalist A.J. Liebling, who said that the first duty of the reporter was to convince the reader that he was there.

    In the heyday of the Sunday Times Insight team, a great deal of manpower was expended on what was called the theory of corroborative detail. A friend recalls phoning the butler at the Hirsel in 1963 to establish just what Alec Douglas-Home had for breakfast on the morning he received the call to lead the Tories.

On a resignation by Wendy and critics of Holyrood

The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2002

    I once asked a leading herbalist if he had a cure for a hangover. His reply was brief and crushing: ‘Don’t get one.’ We have to fall back, therefore, on some foul Italian concoction or Jeeves’s recipe for Bertie Wooster – two raw eggs and a dash of Tabasco. In politics, the equivalent is a spell in the wilderness. It has been the fate of many, some of whom, like Churchill and de Gaulle, have gone on to greatness.

    In Scotland, Wendy Alexander has exchanged a portfolio in the Scottish Executive for a seat on the backbenches while Alex Salmond, conclusively confounding my suspicion that he has become addicted to Westminster, has announced his intention of returning to Holyrood in 2007. By then, he appears to acknowledge, he will have been on the fringes of the main action for too long, and the expectation is that he will attempt to resume the SNP leadership.

On consultants and chief executives

The Observer, Sunday 30 June 2002

    I have always entertained an especial detestation for the Irish saint Ursicinus of Saint-Ursanne, a pal of St Columba, who loathed wine and those who served it. Down the years, only management consultants have aroused my deeper dislike. The growing scandal surrounding corporations is thus an ill wind. It has wiped millions off the stock markets but it has brought an end to the myth of the visionary chief executive and punctured the arrogance of the consultant.

    In my not always happy experience, there could often be an unhealthy degree of connivance between them. The executive called in consultants to help him force through changes on which he had already decided. The consultants, with an eye on their fee, were always happy to oblige even if the scheme were rash, dangerous and ill-advised or, as often seemed to happen, a false economy.

Decline of the Scottish Conservative Party

The Herald Jan 18-20, 1989, ran as a three-part series.

PUBLIC squalor and private affluence, Professor Galbraith’s famous phrase, implies a polity where individual wealth and consumption are encouraged and public spending restrained.

Problems facing Scotland in Europe

The Herald c 1989

…At Westminster Scottish opinion is organised on party lines; Parliament speaks for Scotland only as part of the UK, not as an entity with preoccupations of its own. It cannot even muster a Scottish Select Committee and English MPs are drafted in as cannon fodder. Our disagreements ease the path of our political rulers, the Tory Ministers in Scotland, who enjoy constitutional legality but lack popular authority.

Yet it is becoming clearer as we move towards the economic and political development of the European Community that the enunciation of a Scottish viewpoint will be increasingly vital if we are not to become peripheral or even second-class citizens.

Scotland in Europe

The Herald c 1989

AS A SLOGAN, Scotland in Europe is like a piece of glass. If it catches the sun it sparkles like a jewel, dazzling and beguiling. In other lights you can see right through it.

Subsidiarity and an official handbook to Britain

From the Herald, Ediotiral Notebook, 16 January 1993

ON my desk this week landed a handsome volume. Its cover carries a colour photomontage including pictures of the Queen, Big Ben, and Mrs Betty Boothroyd, the admirable Speaker of the Commons who looks like becoming one of the TV personalities of the decade. Britain 1993 is an official handbook prepared by the Central Office of Information. I looked through it in the expectation of being irritated by it and was not disappointed. But its crassness surprised even me.

ON the rise and fall of the SDA

WE had hardly sat down for our ”power breakfast” when we got into an argument. A lecture in elementary economics is pretty hard to take at that time in the morning but that is what my old sparring partner Professor Donald MacKay was giving me.

Donald, I happen to know, was not brought up in the Glasgow bar-room school of argument but he has acquired some of its mannerisms. He hunches his shoulders to prosecute his argument with greater intensity and he wags his finger to underline his points.

An open letter in defence of perestroika

BERLIN, May, 1989.

Dear Secretary of State,

Last week you rattled your sabres in the House of Commons, and again at Perth. You reaffirmed the highly dubious principle of nuclear deterrence: states must be prepared to use their weapons even if in so doing they destroy the earth. A couple of weeks ago your boss came to West Germany to insist that the Federal Republic continues to support the modernisation of Nato’s short-range nuclear missiles.

John Updike’s autobiography

THE writer must quarry his own life: he has nowhere else to turn. ThatJohn Updike has done so has always been clear enough, but what hasalways puzzled me has been his underlying attitude as a lyrical butclear-eyed chronicler of domestic and sexual politics.

The art of Lesley Banks

THE chilly, misty weather of this week has brought intimations of winter and the retail trade, after a September in the doldrums, is beginning to sense the quickening pace of approaching Christmas. It is a time when the corporate mind, if it has not done so already, must settle the question of the Christmas card.

For some reason the choice has always been difficult for us at the Herald, but this year matters have been greatly if inadvertently simplified by a rising young artist living and working in Glasgow.

Was Taggart McIllvanney sleuth’s doppleganger?

THIS week I finally got round to reading William McIlvanney’s latest book, Strange Loyalties. It has already been favourably reviewed in the Herald by Hayden Murphy and I too enjoyed it immensely.

It is the latest and, Willie tells me, the last of the novels about Jack Laidlaw. In the book the Glasgow detective goes in search of the truth about the death of his brother. It is set inter alia in Glasgow, Ayrshire, Kelso and Edinburgh. As a crime novel it seems to me considerably superior to the new Elmore Leonard, Maximum Bob, which is piled so high in all the bookshops.

Housebreaking in Helensburgh

THE dinner party in Helensburgh was going well. A magnificent Beef Wellington, a whole fillet in an envelope of pastry, was being carved when the lights went on in the garden outside, activated by a cell which detects the approach of visitors or intruders.

The economy – and easy credit

From the AK archive: MOST of what little knowledge I have about economics has been gleaned from colleagues and contacts down the years, together with a bit of reading. The result is a strange brew in which the chief ingredient is confusion. I take comfort from the fact that I do not seem to be alone; our policy-makers often seem just as muddled.