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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
12 May 1989
IT IS a curious experience to sit on a sunny bench in this city which is Europe’s supreme memorial to political failure and read a series of essays on the unexpressed rights and will of the Scottish people.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
THIS year the Herald has, after a period of some years, resumed publication on Boxing Day and January 2. The decision arose not from officiousness but from movements in the market-place which could not be ignored. As we made our preparations, it became clear that New Year is not what it was. Most people would rather have Christmas Day off than January 1.
Christmas is often regarded as the English festival and New Year the Scots. The reality is more complicated but their modern mingling is not surprising because essentially they are the same midwinter festivals that somehow became separated from each other. The English Christmas, Christian but always with its pagan undertones, has merged with Scotland’s Auld Yuill, more frankly irreligious.
THE day before the premature closure of Ravenscraig was announced I chanced to be in Caledonia Books, one of the excellent second-hand bookshops in the West End of Glasgow. Among my purchases was Memories, the autobiography of Tom Johnston, Secretary of State for Scotland during the war. He is remembered today mostly for the foundation of the Hydro-Electric Board but there was more to him than that.
When Churchill summoned him to London in 1941 and persuaded him — rather against his will, for he wanted to write books — to join the national Government he made two conditions. One was that he didn’t want to take any money for office during the war. ”My resources are adequate to my needs and I don’t want to make a song and dance about it.”
The House of Lords remains an amiably dotty place. We are at dinner with the Scottish peers, an annual affair to which I am from time to time lucky enough to be invited. It is a very enjoyable evening, especially because they don’t allow speeches. Instead civilised conversation is the rule.
THE way a nation chooses to queue says much about its culture and economy. A queue represents, the theorists would say, an imbalance between supply and demand and it is at this margin that the tout and the black-marketeer make a living.
Whatever kind of queue it is, whether in Moscow for the bare essentials of life or in Glasgow for tickets to the big game, there are always people who beat the system. They have friends in places high and low; they pull strings; as the French say, they have pistons. I suspect that I always pay more for my air tickets than the chap sitting next to me because beating the system takes more nerve, time and energy than I am prepared to invest in the task.