‘What, old monkey-face!’ said my husband with unnecessary lack of gallantry. He was referring to the 18th Duchess of Alba, who held 40 titles of nobility and died in 2014. She was a bit out of his league, but it is true that her bone structure came to give her face a simian air.
As usual my husband had got it all wrong. Alex Salmond did not name his new party after the Spanish dukedom of Alba that gave the world the Dutch-clobbering 3rd Duke in the 16th century. That duke’s followers were called Albistas, which might come in handy as a label for the Salmond group.
The new party’s name is that of Scotland in Irish and Gaelic. The BBC has had a Gaelic television channel called Alba since 2008. It would be lovely if Scottish nationalists spoke Gaelic, as founders of modern Israel revived Hebrew.
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