As an expat Scot, I know how Scottish ministers lost touch with Scotland
There is a thing that many Scots do when they meet with other Scots. They start to sound more Scottish. Their consonants either grow jagged or fade away all together, their vowels twist, collude and extend. They start to say ‘aye’ in place of ‘yes’. They may even, if among friends, be tempted to risk the odd ‘och’. I wonder if this ever happens in Cabinet.
I can see Gordon Brow kicking it off, perhaps with a modest, Fife-ish, slightly extended ‘r’. John Reid might retort with a competitive Lanarkshire ‘gonny’ or ‘canny’. Pricking up his ears, the Glaswegian Douglas Alexander might decide to get in early with an ‘aye, but’, or a ‘nay, but’, and Kilwinning’s Des Browne might spot it, and note it, and emulate it.
On a bad day this could give Ian McCartney (Dunbartonshire) the courage to start talking, and that would be that. It would be like that Monty Python sketch about Yorkshiremen, and the likes of David Miliband and Tessa Jowell might as well close their red boxes and leave. Lord Falconer would feel honour-bound to come wheedling in from Morningside, and that secret Edinburgh public schoolboy Alistair Darling might even actually speak for the first time since about 1999, and risk one of the easy ones, like rhyming ‘tortoise’ with ‘anglepoise’.
By now, Tony Blair (also Edinburgh) would be in a rare state of agitation. Sitting there with all this ringing in his ears and with the ghosts of John Smith (from Argyll), Donald Dewar (from Glasgow) and Robin Cook (from Bellshill) urging him on. Social chameleon that he is, he could easily abandon the restrained Richard Wilsonesque tones he normally adopts when speaking Scottish, and launch straight into a ‘reet lads, that’s aw’ barry an’ spesh, but fit the feck er we gang tae dae aboot Basra?’ How have they done it? How has a government dominated so comprehensively by Scots managed to lose touch, so comprehensively, with Scotland? And how do they feel about it? Is our Prime Minister on his sofa with his Stratocaster, picking out the forlorn riff from Dougie MacLean’s ‘Caledonia’? Is our Chancellor resolving to feign an interest in single malts? Is our Home Secretary practising his Glasgow kiss in his bathroom mirror? These are men displaced. They are exiles. Or rather, they are expats. All bar Blair still have homes or constituencies north of the border, but they are expats from what Scotland used to be, now living in what Scotland has become. It is easily done. It is over a decade since I lived in Scotland fulltime, but only a couple of years since I stopped writing about Scottish things for Scottish newspapers. And already I feel like a stranger. There’s a sense of panic in it.
Scotland has new attitudes. New to me, at any rate. Not long ago, Edinburgh drinkers were sneering at the idea of paying London prices for a pint in a gaudily converted George Street bank, when the folksy pub around the corner would charge half of that. Now, many seem proud that theirs is a city where you can. In 2003, Holyrood was still a national joke, an overpriced breezeblock monstrosity, full of overpaid, overpromoted local councillors. Now, making that joke marks you out as somebody from somewhere else. I’ve made it. People clang shut.
I’m close enough still to recognise all this, even if I don’t share in it. I can understand why the Notting Hill Tories attract quite so much scorn up there, why they might as well be preaching from Belarus, or from Sirius B. I wonder, though, if Tony Blair fully understands why David Cameron doesn’t work in Scotland. Or even if Gordon Brown does. I suspect they might not. They probably think it’s just windfarms and bikes.
If this bothers them, and it surely must, then all they can do is go there. And for a while, not just for a weekend. Not just to the Old Town fiddle bars, or those unexportable Scots–Italian restaurants. They need to go to the Starbucks and the horrible All Bar Ones, the bits of Scotland that are exactly like everywhere else.
So it would be wrong, I’d have thought, to view Scotland’s battering of the govern ment as a battering of the Union. It’s actually a battering of the London Scottish. The people who sound Scottish with other Scots, and make the mistake of thinking that counts for something. The people who opted out, but won’t admit it, like Blair and Brown and Reid and Darling, and me.
Impressive buck-passing, meanwhile, over Prince Harry’s intended tour of duty in Iraq. In a single day, headlines in some newspapers had the army passing responsibility to Downing Street, while others had the MoD passing it right back to the top brass. Why, instinctively, does nobody assume that Harry is responsible for himself?
You feel for him. Here is a trained soldier (and, if his efforts with photographers outside nightclubs are anything to go by, probably quite a good one) coerced into pointlessness by the whims of others. This sort of thing really matters to the third in line. Nobody seriously believes that the current Duke of York fills his days in any sort of useful fashion, but his endeavours in the Falklands have won him a lifetime of grace.
What options, then, for a spare royal, if useful military service is no longer possible? Business has too much potential for embarrassment, politics simply isn’t an option. Sport or the arts are possibilities, but a royal can never risk being second-rate.
So, what about the emergency services? True, the police would probably be a bad idea, and Harry doesn’t have the degree to be a doctor. He could, however, be a fireman. Wouldn’t the world go nuts for that? The fireman prince? It’s dangerous, sure, but not as dangerous as being the only redhead in a crown, sitting on a Scimitar in the deserts of Iraq.
Seriously, Harry, think about it. From what we know of your temperament through ginger stereotypes and made-up stories in the Daily Mail, it would suit you down to the ground. And, best of all, think of the perks. A well-heeled female friend of mine once told me, in all seriousness, that she stopped fancying firemen during the latest strike, because she realised for the first time how little they earned. For a chap worth somewhere in the region of £13 million, this really shouldn’t be a problem.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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