The Dream Shall Never Die: 100 Days that Changed Scotland Forever

скачать книгу бесплатно


They could play a key role in the campaign and the future of the country. We go to Ondine, one of the best fish restaurants in Scotland, run by celebrity chef Roy Brett. I judge my Muslim friends could use a good feed before the onset of Ramadan.

Day Fifteen: Thursday 26 June

My chiropodist treated my toenails – and gave me some useful insights.

I’ve known Leslie Grant for a long time (he used to look after my mum’s feet too). Leslie chats with his patients and his hill-rambling pals.

Both groups are heavily underrated political communities – perhaps not right up there with taxi drivers, but in a position to have lots of conversations.

Leslie confirms what I suspected: there is movement for YES up in them thar hills, but among his corn-ravaged pensioners of Falkirk things are not looking quite so promising.

FMQs has an end-of-term atmosphere and is generally acknowledged as a good send-off for the troops.

Day Sixteen: Friday 27 June

Meet Morgan Carberry again – and invite her to sing at Edinburgh Castle for the Chinese.

The American Fulbright scholar still faces getting her marching orders from the country.

I have agreed to intervene in her case with the aptly named Home Office Minister James Brokenshire, but have suggested to her that some publicity might help her cause. Indeed it might be the only thing that could help her cause short of immediate independence and a rational immigration policy.

Since it may well be a valedictory performance, she has agreed to sing a song or two for a Chinese investment group organised around the energy giant Petrochina.

The evening goes superbly well and by the end of it memorandums of understanding for £5 billion sterling have been signed and sealed (although it is fair to say that if there is many a slip between cup and lip there is also a difference between signing an MOU and delivering hard investment). Nonetheless a very good night’s work.

Morgan, whose singing in the New Club was beautiful, but who has a big voice for a small room, is in her true element in the Great Hall of the castle and steals the show with an impromptu performance which leaves ne’er a dry ee in the house.

Day Seventeen: Saturday 28 June

A warm reaction for me today – and a cool one for Cameron.

We are both in Stirling for Armed Forces Day, a Gordon Brown notion as part of his reinforcement of Britishness campaign of a few years back. This year, the Tory government, aided and abetted by their Labour allies in Stirling Council, decide to hold it in Stirling on the same weekend as the Bannockburn celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Robert Bruce’s famous victory.

My young advisers (and some of the not so young ones) are very wary of Bannockburn, since they believe it offers the ‘wrong image’ for modern Scottish nationalism. I disagree.

You would have to have a dead soul not to be inspired by the stand taken by Bruce and his army – and foolish indeed not to see the analogies with the current political struggle.

Bruce had first tried to reach an accommodation with Edward Longshanks to become his vassal king and then, when forced into open rebellion, had avoided pitched battle knowing that, castle by castle, town by town, victory would be his and Scotland’s. However, his headstrong younger brother had created a position where the showdown took place on midsummer’s day 1314.

I had tried to reach an accommodation with Cameron, tried to move the Parliament and the country forward, power by power, competence by competence. However, my inability to get traction after the 2011 election on a devo max proposal from enough people and organisations across civic society in Scotland created the circumstances where a showdown would take place on 18 September 2014.

Like Bruce, we are engaged with a force of awesome power. Like Bruce, we are faced with a pitched battle not completely of our choosing, and like Bruce, we have to gamble to win the day.

In any event, on Armed Forces Day the UK government’s best-laid schemes gang agley. Cameron’s all too blatant attempts to play politics rebound pretty badly.

Although the military crowd reaction is not unanimously favourable towards me it is still positive: indeed warm. The reaction to Cameron is decidedly cool.

Why should it not be, since they are predominantly a crowd of working-class Scottish families on a day out and Cameron is a Tory toff on a day trip?

Meanwhile at Bannockburn, where the organisation is struggling with the surge of the great crowd which has turned up, the reaction towards me is both unanimous and hugely favourable.

Dougie McLean in concert tops the day off nicely.

Day Eighteen: Sunday 29 June

Great reception on my home turf when Moira drags me down to a local garden centre.

We just got back home in the very wee sma’ hours.

The Sunday Herald has run a very nice piece on Morgan, with a superb photograph that well depicts this vibrant and talented woman who is about to be kicked out of our country. If a picture tells a thousand words then this picture summarises what is wrong with the lunatic UK immigration policy.

To one of Moira’s favourite garden centres, White Lodge, near Turriff, where she has decided to invest more funds in her favourite hobby. It is not often that I have any time to spend on her interests, so I take it all in good part, even when we manage to drop the car keys in one of the plant carts and spend half an hour or more looking for them!

Again I am interested in the crowd reaction, which is according me rock-star status. Elvis Presley’s ancestors came from nearby Lonmay and the Commonwealth Games baton has been touring locally, but by and large Turriff is not normally known for flashmob events like today. Especially at the garden centre.

I have always been popular in my own area and particularly in Turriff. There is however a degree of evidence piling up – for example, Kilmarnock College, Armed Forces Day – where crowd reaction tells me that something is on the move.

Whatever is happening it is not being fully recorded in most polls which, after moving in our favour, have broadly stabilised. That does not make the change unreal, just unrecorded or still to come.

Day Nineteen: Monday 30 June

Back to Bute House for Royal Week. I’ve tracked down one of my old professors for help with some historical rough justice.

I’ve asked Bruce Lenman for a quick opinion on the Appin trial. There is a petition before the Parliament – from a Campbell no less – asking for a Royal pardon for James Stewart.

Devotees of Robert Louis Stevenson will recall that Alan Breck Stuart (who bore a king’s name) may or may not have shot the Red Fox at Appin. What did happen for certain in historical terms is that his stepfather James Stuart was strung up by a majority Campbell jury with a Chief of the Clan Campbell on the bench just to make sure that there was no mistake.

Cases such as this are usually turned down, for fear of opening a can of worms and setting a difficult precedent. However, I have decided to make a check or two with Frank Mulholland, the astute Lord Advocate, before we decide on this one.

It is not often in life that you get the chance to right what seems a clear historical wrong. Hence I have asked my old history prof for an informed opinion.

On the subject of history, the Scotsman seems grievously disappointed that the Bannockburn event was sold out and decided that the key story was the queues to get in.