The last days of the Tartan Raj

Andrew Neil says the English should stop worrying about the invading Jocks: the northern grip on the nation’s politics, media and business is being irrevocably weakened by the dumbing down of the Scottish education system

They gathered to praise Robin Cook in the forbidding Presbyterian aisles of Edinburgh’s St Giles’ Cathedral last Friday but the mourners — dominated by the good and the great of Scotland — should also have had heavy hearts for another reason: the setting of the sun on the Scottish Raj, which over the past three decades produced such a substantial tartan tinge into the upper echelons of British life.

Of the six Scots who were the real heavy-hitters in the modern Labour ascendancy —John Smith, Donald Dewar, George Robertson, Derry Irvine, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown — three are now dead, two have quit, and only the Chancellor remains. True, when Tony Blair (a Scot-lite himself) finally turns to making his fortune on the international speaking circuit, the subsequent Brown administration will be liberally sprinkled with Scots; but the recent extraordinary proliferation of Scots in the top posts throughout British public life — in business, the media, quangos but above all in national politics — is coming to an end.