Scotland

Thursday

James Delingpole

Style, wit and pace: Netflix’s Dept. Q reviewed

Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma Rasheed would have her work cut out that’s for sure: the wicked gamekeeper on the grisly toff’s estate who murdered a hen harrier and then blamed its decapitation on an innocent wind turbine; the haggis butcher who misgendered his vegetarian assistant; the Englishman who made a joke on Twitter about a Scotsman going to the chippy and ordering a deep-fried can of Coke… It would get lots of awards, obviously, but I doubt it would do that well in the ratings. As with Slow Horses, this is about enjoying the

Monday

Julian Spalding

Why were the Scots so much better at painting than the English?

This exhibition is awash with luscious brushstrokes, but then that’s to be expected: it’s full of Scottish painting. Before the barren era of conceptual art, which most hope is over, people often observed that the Scots could paint while the English could draw. Why is a bit of mystery, but it was true right through the 18th and 19th centuries and well into the 20th. The Dovecot Studios exhibition opens with John Duncan Fergusson’s portrait of his lover and first muse, Jean Maconochie, painted about 1902. It’s a fabulous eyeful of brush marks. Her pale pink, oval face nestles under her black billowing locks, flanked by two glowing pearls dropping

Lucy Dunn

Ash Regan on the rise of Reform in Scotland, what is a woman and why ‘no-one resigns anymore’

21 min listen

In this special edition of Coffee House Shots, Lucy Dunn speaks to the Holyrood leader of the pro-independence Alba party, Ash Regan. Regan was formerly a member of the SNP and even ran to be the party’s leader after Nicola Sturgeon resigned in 2023. She defected to the late Alex Salmond’s Alba party 18 months ago and ran for party leader after his death. On the podcast, she talks to Lucy about the difference between Alba and the SNP, the threat of Reform in Scotland, the ‘performative’ nature of Scottish politics, the Supreme Court ruling over what is a woman, and why she was right to resign over the Gender Recognition

Thursday

Digby Warde-Aldam

The polarising poet, sculptor and ‘avant-gardener’ who maintained a private militia

Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, ‘avant-gardener’ and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure in the true sense, a limitlessly inventive visionary whose Lanarkshire home and garden remain a site of pilgrimage. To his detractors – notably, a number of vocal Finlay-bashers in the English press – he was a crank, a provincial megalomaniac possessed of artistic, literary and dictatorial pretensions quite out of proportion to his ability. These

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The lunacy of Gillian Mackay’s abortion bill

I had spent my life so far in blissful ignorance of a woman called Gillian Mackay. I mean, I knew she existed – but how she existed and what she did with her existence did not impinge because she was safely sequestered in that booby hatch of methadone, lady-men, corruption and pies which we know as ‘Scotland’ and thus would have no jurisdiction over my life. This is, I grant, a solipsistic attitude to have taken – and I realise that now it has been shattered. A new and unwanted homunculus has slipped into my life, then, and I fear it is time to talk about the smirking, pudding-faced Green

Thursday

Michael Simmons

How the SNP wasted £110 million on PR and spin

No country in the UK receives more public money per head than Scotland. An extra £2,200 is spent on every person living there than in England – and £1,900 more than the UK average. Yet public services north of the border are falling apart. Take education. Scotland spends more per pupil than anywhere else – £1,848 per head compared with £1,543 in England. Yet standards have plummeted while those in England have improved. The latest Pisa rankings show Scottish pupils to be a year behind their English counterparts, despite a testing bias in favour of Scottish children. When it comes to economic affairs, some £2,228 per head is spent on

Thursday

James Heale

Why the SNP can’t lose

What does a party get after nearly two decades in office, collapsing public services, an internal civil war and a £2 million police investigation? Re-election, again – perhaps with an even bigger majority. Last spring, under the hapless Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s grip on power in Scotland finally appeared to be loosening. But eight months on, the nationalists have managed a remarkable turnaround. The party now has a 15-point poll lead and it looks as though John Swinney will remain in Bute House at next year’s Holyrood elections. ‘The caretaker manager has got the job permanently,’ says one rival. The party’s change in fortunes owes less to Swinney’s skill as an

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

The maudlin, magical world of Celtic Connections

Is it possible to find a common thread running through the finest Scottish music? If pushed, one might identify a quality of ecstatic melancholy, a rapturous yet fateful romanticism, in everything from the Incredible String Band to the Cocteau Twins, the Blue Nile to Frightened Rabbit, Simple Minds to Mogwai. The Jesus & Mary Chain have a song called ‘Happy When It Rains’, which seems about right. There were moments during the launch event for Celtic Connections, Glasgow’s annual and much-valued winter celebration of roots music from Scotland and far beyond, when this bittersweet admixture of moods was thrillingly conjured up. At other times, it simply felt a little contained,

Wednesday

Diana Hendry

I love Edinburgh. I’m not sure it loves me

This year I shall have lived in Edinburgh for a quarter of a century. I fell in love with the city on the 23 bus travelling from the New Town to the Old Town. There was so much architecture. Gothic and Georgian, medieval, baronial. So many turrets and finials, tollbooths and towers. I was drunk on the stuff. Add pomp – a Royal Mile, a castle, a palace. Then the libraries, art galleries, museums. And that’s before you get to bookshops and Edinburgh’s proud moniker, the first Unesco City of Literature. What other city has a railway station (Waverley) named after a novel or a high street (Princes Street) with

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The dangers of the ADHD ‘industry’

Nothing left Sir: Rod Liddle is right to ascribe the establishment’s desire to suppress the truth in relation to grooming gangs to its fundamentally anti-working class mindset (‘We demand a right to truth’, 11 January). But he’s characteristically wrong to attribute this to ‘liberalism’. The contemporary left’s identity-politics agenda is born from the opposite: the postmodernist-derived idea that reality can be radically reconstructed through control of what is, and is not, communicated. Its various fantasies – and the public-sector interests that depend upon them – necessarily involve suppressing our powers of rational cognition. Culture-control leftism has been able quite brilliantly to simultaneously pass itself off as a manifestation of ‘progressive

Wednesday

Euan McColm

The gross hypocrisy of the SNP

If there’s one thing the SNP truly excels at, it’s maintaining double standards. The extraordinary case of the Scottish government and the missing legal advice makes clear just how hypocritical the SNP is when it comes to conduct in public life. Scottish nationalists are swift to condemn opponents at the slightest whiff of impropriety but, as this matter demonstrates, when it comes to their own morality, they’re more easy-going. Back in 2021, then first minister Nicola Sturgeon was cleared of breaching the Scottish parliament’s ministerial code over her involvement in the case of complaints made by female civil servants against her predecessor, the late Alex Salmond. Inevitably, opposition parties demanded

Friday

Damian Thompson

Sale of the century: why is the Kirk selling off hundreds of churches so cheaply?

27 min listen

In this week’s Spectator, William Finlater reveals that some of the Church of Scotland’s most precious architectural heritage is being flogged off quickly, cheaply and discreetly. Most western denominations are being forced to close churches, but the fire sale of hundreds of Scottish churches is unprecedented in British history. In this episode of Holy Smoke, Damian talks to William about the Kirk’s apparently panicky reaction to losing half its members since 2000, and asks new Spectator editor Michael Gove – once a Church of Scotland Sunday School teacher – why his former denomination is staring into the abyss. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons. 

Wednesday

William Finlator

The tragedy of Scotland’s church sell-off

‘We are not a heritage society,’ insisted the Rev David Cameron, Convener of the Assembly Trustees of the Church of Scotland. Speaking to the BBC in January, Mr Cameron claimed the Church has a ‘surplus of buildings and large property’, and that there is a need ‘to address our estate’. A church or kirk is usually the most historically important building in any given town or village In other words, the Church of Scotland is selling off its churches. Not just one or two here or there, but a lot, and for cut-price rates. Of course, the Church insists that the move is ‘painful but essential’, aping the language of

Saturday

Stephen Daisley

Salmond’s critics can’t ignore his lasting legacy

When he lost his Gordon seat in the 2017 general election, Alex Salmond told his count and those watching – friend and foe – that ‘you’ve not seen the last o’ my bonnet and me’. The line comes from Sir Walter Scott’s Bonnie Dundee, an ode to John Graham, the 1st Viscount Dundee, who led the 1689 Jacobite uprising to restore James VII and the House of Stuart. Quoting the lyric was pure Salmond. Not only was he fond of weaving poetry into his public statements – an art sadly lost to most political rhetoricians – it reflected his self-mythologising as a modern-day Scottish rebel against the British establishment. Salmond

Iain Macwhirter

Alex Salmond was an unstoppable force of nature

It is hard to believe that I will no longer wake up on Monday mornings to the sound of Alex Salmond on the phone, either berating me for my latest offence against journalism or telling me what I should be saying about the most recent political scandal. The former SNP leader and First Minister of Scotland was of the old school: combative and relentless, always on the phone, never stopping, never at rest, a 24/7 politician. We always said he would never cease promoting the cause of Scottish independence while he still had breath in his body. He didn’t. Alex Salmond died in North Macedonia, shortly after giving a speech.

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley

Is Scottish Labour really back?

Labour’s first conference from government in 14 years might not be taking place against an ideal backdrop, with the Prime Minister and other ministers under scrutiny for accepting designer clobber and other goodies from party donors, but there is an unlikely glimmer of hope in the form of Anas Sarwar. Unlikely, that is, because Sarwar is leader of Scottish Labour and for almost a decade that great clunking juggernaut of electoral inevitability had sputtered to a halt and begun to rust. Reduced to just one seat north of the border and in a distant third place at Holyrood, the Scottish party had become an ominous lesson in how thoroughly Labour

Tuesday

Maggie Fergusson

Imperfections in wood can make for the loveliest carvings

I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter of a century on, while friends’ MDF shelving droops like cables between telegraph poles, ours remains beautifully strong and straight. Callum Robinson would understand why this matters. A master woodcarver and cabinetmaker, plying his trade from a workshop in Scotland (location vague – ‘in a forest beside a loch nestled in the Scottish hills’), he

Tuesday

Helen Carr

Margaret Tudor – queen, regent and hapless intermediary

The history of princesses and queens has become well-trodden ground in the women’s history genre, particularly the Tudors. Linda Porter’s The Thistle and the Rose, a life of Margaret Tudor, queen consort to James IV and mother of James V, provides a refreshing change in subject. Margaret has had to share the stage with some of the most famous names and voices of the 16th century: Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York; Henry VIII and his wives; and, of course, her namesake, Margaret Beaufort, the formidable Tudor matriarch who deftly helped place her son, the victor of Bosworth, on the throne. Margaret Tudor, though less considered in popular

Tuesday

Genevieve Gaunt

Echoes of Tom Brown’s School Days: Rabbits, by Hugo Rifkind, reviewed

The year is 1993 and 16-year-old Tommo has been moved from a day state school of 2,000 pupils in brown blazers that ‘when it rained… smelled of shit’ to Eskmount, an elite Scottish boarding school, where boys wear kilts and put their ‘cocks on your shoulder’ when you’re working in the library (easier in a kilt) and routinely hang ‘smaller kids in duvets… out the window’. The horseshoe effect in schooling terms: the more expensive, the more savage. Hugo Rifkind’s Rabbits opens with a bang: ‘When the shotgun went off under Johnnie Burchill’s brother’s chin, word had it, the top of his head came off like the top of a

Monday

Catriona Stewart

The Scottish Tories need a better election strategy

It is no surprise that the Scottish Conservative manifesto launch was centred on independence. While Scotland’s Tories talk about the SNP’s obsession with the subject, they are a little less happy to mention their own preoccupation with separatism. It’s rather more awkward for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party to admit that, without independence on the table, their role in Scotland becomes a little less clear. While they may rail against the topic, the Scottish Tories need the SNP – so they can put independence front and centre of their campaign to give them a bogeyman to pretend to fight Opening his party’s manifesto launch in Edinburgh with some light