Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

The ‘no’ campaign’s problem was that it sounded like me

Were all Scotland’s credible populist figures in favour of independence? Or were the rest just scared to speak out?

[Getty Images/iStock] 
issue 20 September 2014

Journalistically speaking, it’s been a good year to be Scottish and Jewish. Had I been a Welsh Zoroastrian, say, I doubt I’d have had nearly so much to say.

In recent months, obviously, it’s been the Scottish thing that has really taken off. I used to be marginally Scottish, irrelevantly Scottish; never realising that a period of being helpfully Scottish was just around the corner. I suppose it’s a bit like the presumptions that some bilingual people have, that other people must, must be able to speak other languages really. I think I just assumed that the rest of London’s media knew plenty about Scotland, but tended not to talk about it. But no. They didn’t. At all. Imagine you’d been wearing the same jacket for a decade, and then saw it in Vogue. It’s been like that.

Various worthy types have asked me to sign various open letters, and I gladly have.

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