A comfortably British Scot

Donald Dewar once said to me, ‘I can’t stand your journalism, but I like your novels.’ It was perhaps characteristic of him that he put it in that order, the disapproval first. It wasn’t just that he was given to speaking his mind, or that he was capable, as his friend, Fiona Ross, one of the contributors to this memorial volume of essays, remarks, ‘of spectacular rudeness’. It was rather that, like so many of us Scots brought up in the Presbyterian tradition, he was more comfortable criticising than praising.

His political career was a long one, and for most of it he was condemned to wander in the waste land of opposition. This was frustrating and I suspect he often felt it was an essay in failure. Yet it was in what were for him the bleak years that he made the first of his two great contributions to the political and public life of Scotland; he kept the Labour party on the rails.