IT’S my understanding that some of the erstwhile SNP troops at Westminster were more than a little surprised to find themselves there nine years ago.
IT is a peculiarity of politics that our government got the bit between its teeth over a policy which at best attracted national indifference and at worst outright hostility, and is now contemplating a law which most people support but over which the government has aye been hesitant.
EVERY time she was the subject of a budget report, some commentator – almost always a bloke – felt obliged to tell us: “the first female Chancellor in 800 years!”
BLAME The Bible. Or, more precisely, the blood-and-thunder dauds of the Old Testament. From Exodus to Isaiah and several points in between, the era in which these chapters were penned were of one opinion ...
FEW people have thought the sudden death of Alex Salmond to be anything other than a loss to Scotland...
SO, it’s the weekend of Labour’s first hundred days. A wholly artificial marker perhaps, and what the late, great Alistair Cooke described as “a foolish custom imported from America” in one of his legendary radio broadcasts ...
IT was a speech at another October Tory conference, way back when the leader was Michael Howard. You remember, the chap Ann Widdecombe said had “something of the night about him”.
YOU might think of them as the odd couple. Kezia Dugdale, erstwhile Labour leader in Scotland, former director of the John Smith Centre and now a professor at Glasgow University’s Centre for Public Policy. A woman who has co-written a new paper on whither devolution and independence with a certain Stephen Noon.
CONVENIENTLY for some, Mohamed Al Fayed, erstwhile owner of Harrods (and a Scottish castle) is now dead. Which may have prompted a number of women to come forward to speak ill of him ...
THE 2014 campaign began in 2012 for me. That summer, I accepted an invitation to speak at a pro-independence rally held round the bandstand in Princes Street Gardens ...
