Romantic Scot
Sir: I was flattered — if slightly apprehen- sive — to read the approving comments from the president of the Scottish National party (Letters, 5 September) about my arti- cle on political attitudes in Scotland CA bletherer bites back', 29 August). She refers to my father, Eric Linklater, as a Scottish Nationalist. She is going back a bit. He did stand as an early and romantically inclined candidate for the National party of Scot- land in the famous East Fife by-election of 1933, where Lord Beaverbrook was pro- moting his Empire Free Trade party. But he had cause to regret it. He came bottom of the poll and lost his deposit, describing it later as 'a calamitous experiment for which I had no natural gift'. He did, however, put it to splendid use in his novel Magnus Mer- riman. Thereafter his politics moved fur- ther to the right, and I would imagine that he was better described as an old-fashioned National Liberal. Incidentally, I still have his East Fife manifesto in which he advo- cated 'the independent status of Scotland within the Commonwealth of Nations' — possibly an early precursor of the current SNP slogan, Independence in Europe.
Magnus Linklater
5 Drummond Place, Edinburgh
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