John Swinney – Blood and Porridge

In this post I’m not going to repeat the three most depraved and revolting jokes I’ve ever heard. But I’ll say when and where I heard them, and from whom.

The first joke concerned a medical tragedy and a hideous crime, both involving children, which’d made headlines in the UK during the 1980s. One night in a pub in Aberdeen, where I was a college student, a friend told a 13-word joke that combined the two cases. The friend was a decent guy who was drunk at the time and he uttered the joke during a moment of reckless bravado. Immediately afterwards, he looked disgusted with himself and spent the rest of the evening in a state of depression. I don’t think I heard him tell an even vaguely risqué joke after that.

I wasn’t as shocked as I might have been because I’d already encountered the joke in written form. Some degenerate had scribbled it on the back of a toilet-door in Aberdeen University’s Queen Mother Library and I’d noticed it whilst ‘on the john’.

The second joke was two words longer – 15 – and I heard it in the context of a supposedly real-life anecdote. Another guy I’d known as a student had, following graduation, gone on a trip to the USA where, one day, he’d ended up at an outdoor music festival. He too was somewhat inebriated. The festival’s compere decided, at one point, to leave the stage and wander among the crowd, sticking his microphone into people’s faces and asking them how they were getting on. He stopped by my old acquaintance and, discovering he was from ‘Scaaat-land’, asked him to tell a ‘Scaaat-tish’ joke. So my acquaintance spewed those 15 words into the microphone, which boomed across the field from the festival’s speakers and left the entire crowd in mortified, disbelieving silence. I’m not sure if I really believe that story happened – but if it did happen, it was quite something.

Incidentally, the same joke appears in William Boyd’s 2009 novel Ordinary Thunderstorms. An unsavoury character tells it to the book’s hero, who responds by tipping him over a bridge and dropping him into the River Thames, where he drowns. To be fair, the character had antagonized him a lot before that, so he wasn’t just reacting to the joke’s depravity.

© Bloomsbury

The third joke I heard in the early 1990s. I was sitting at the counter of an Edinburgh pub when a drunken guy beside me told it. It was a longer and more elaborate joke and featured Freddie Mercury, singer of the rock band Queen, who was famously gay and had died of AIDS a while earlier, and another famous showbusiness personage, also gay, who’s still with us in 2026.

Ooph, I thought, that’s really horrible. I hope I never hear a joke like that again.

Well, I have just encountered a joke like that again. In fact, it’s the same joke, though updated from the 1990s and now about the gay singer George Michael, who passed away in 2016, and his former partner Fadi Fawaz. According to the Daily Record newspaper last week, it was told by Malcolm Offord, leader of the far-right-wing Reform party’s branch in Scotland. In 2018, he included it in a speech he delivered at a Burns Supper held by a rugby club he was a director of. In the kerfuffle following the Daily Record’s report, Offord admitted telling the joke was ‘a mistake’ and denied being homophobic. “I don’t have any issue with homophobia,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of gay friends.”

Nigel Farage, Reform’s Britain-wide leader, has defended Offord, saying, “If we’re going to drum people out of public life for telling a joke at a boozy rugby club dinner that’s amongst friends, we’ll finish up with the dullest group of individuals, looking a bit like, sounding a bit like Keir Starmer.” Less forgiving was John Swinney, leader of the Scottish National Party and currently First Minister of Scotland – the post Offord aspires to take over following the Scottish parliamentary election this May. Swinney said of Offord, “He’s unfit to be leader of any political party, unfit to be a member of the Scottish Parliament with views and attitudes like that… I think we’ve got to be really careful as a country about where we are heading, and Reform have got no part to play in it if they represent views of intolerance, prejudice and hatred of that type.”

What are we to make of this? Should we regard Offord’s faux pas as regrettable, alcohol-fuelled ‘banter’, accept his apology and move on? And are we, as Farage suggests, in danger of becoming too puritanical, of scaring all the interesting people away from public office, of ending up with humourless dullards in power over us? Is society getting – oh God, here we go again – too woke?

It calls to mind the lamentations of Monty Python (1969-74) and Fawlty Towers (1975-79) star John Clleese, who’s spent a good part of the last few years complaining that you can’t tell a good, impactful, close-to-the-bone joke anymore because folk get too offended: “I don’t think we should organize a society around the sensibilities of most easily upset people because then you have a very neurotic society.” Incidentally, the 86-year-old Cleese appears to have thrown in his lot with Rupert Lowe’s party Restore UK, an outfit even further to the right than Farage’s Reform.

From wikipedia.org / © Paul Boxley

Well, in my view, we’re never going to stop hearing sick, horrible and downright racist / misogynist / homophobic / transphobic / etc. jokes. For as long as the urge to be ‘edgy’ persists in the human psyche, such jokes will continue to be told in pubs and clubs, on sports terraces, in Internet forums, on WhatsApp and other messaging platforms, in countless situations where people interact. But anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to spout a joke of that sort in public – supposedly 200 people attended Offord’s Burns Supper – shouldn’t be presenting themselves as a politician qualified to take over the highest political office in Scotland. Especially when as holder of that office you’ll be representing, and making decisions that affect, the group of people your joke cruelly mocked.

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer my political leaders to be dull – and serious, and sensible. I remember British Prime Ministers like Labour’s Jim Callaghan and the Conservatives’ John Major, both rather grey and uninteresting, but whom I felt a lot safer having in Number 10, Downing Street than, say, an alleged laugh-a-minute ‘personality’ like Boris Johnson. Between Callaghan and Major, of course, Britain was subjected to the 11-year reign of Margaret Thatcher, who had many qualities – mainly negative qualities, in my opinion – but being a barrel of laughs who told good jokes wasn’t one of them.

Offord must have thought he was on safe ground with his joke because he was at a well-lubricated rugby club event, not what you’d expect to be the most politically correct of gatherings. But according to the Daily Record, even his rugby-loving audience was unimpressed. One witness said, “I was sitting next to a gay man and it was clearly an extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant experience for him… At the time I thought it pretty awful and indeed that was the feeling in the room. Even for a rugby club it was a crude, bad taste and insulting spectacle… I don’t know who in their right mind would say something like that.”

Even some of the usual suspects in Scotland’s mostly right-wing, Unionist media have turned on Offord because of this. Scottish Times columnist Alex Massie penned a piece entitled Reform may already regret its choice of leader in Scotland, whilst Scottish journalist Stephen Daisley, who frequently writes for the very right-wing Spectator, messaged, “Malcolm Offord is single-handedly wrecking Reform’s chances in the Scottish parliament. Can the Holyrood campaign be salvaged?”

I haven’t heard any reaction yet from Chris Deerin, who’s somehow the Scotland editor at the supposedly left-leaning New Statesman. When Offord became Scottish Reform leader, Deerin tweeted, “Malcolm Offord is a seriously great get for Reform. Very smart, ambitious for Scotland, excellent communicator, properly Scottish, experience of government, hugely successful in business – working class boy made good. Ooft.” (‘Ooft’, of course, was my first thought when I heard that joke.) And in a couple of New Statesman articles Deerin penned about Offord, he talked breathlessly about the wealthy politician’s ‘gilded life’ and particularly admired his “vintage, open-top Jaguar sports car, Bond-esque in its sleek lines and growling power,” in which Offord “roared off into the countryside.”

Alas, despite everything, I don’t think Offord will be roaring off into the countryside, never to be seen or heard of again. There are too many people who’ll rally to his cause rather than reject it after this furore. That’s because they believe the line, fed to them endlessly by Britain’s right-wing media and pundits, that everything is too puritanically woke now, that you can’t crack a joke about gays or women or religious or ethnic minorities without the roof falling on your head, that you “can’t say those things nowadays”. The irony is that you can say those things nowadays, and totally get away with them, at least if you’re a British politician.

Nigel Farage has recently courted controversy over the personalized messages he’s sent as Cameo videos – one of several lucrative side-projects he has in addition to being Reform party leader and a Member of Parliament. A Guardian investigation found that the messages included ones “supporting a convicted rioter, repeating extremist slogans, and endorsing a neo-Nazi event” and where he “referenced antisemitic conspiracy theories, and made misogynistic remarks about leftwing politicians, including a comment about the US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s breasts.”

Previously, Farage was in hot water because of allegations made by over 30 people who’d known him during his schooldays. According to their accounts, the teenaged Farage was quite the dedicated follower of fascism – among other things, singing Hitler Youth songs and growling “Hitler was right” and “Gas them” at Jewish pupils. He’s variously responded to these allegations by calling them ‘fantasies’, saying he can’t remember saying such stuff or dismissing it as – there’s that word again – ‘banter’.

Not that this has dented Farage’s popularity much. His party is still leading in British opinion polls.

From wikipedia.org / © Roger Harris

Elsewhere, Robert Jenrick, formerly the Conservatives’ Shadow Justice Secretary and now a defector to Reform, caused outrage last year when he said a 90-minute visit to the Handsworth part of Birmingham was “as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country” and one where he didn’t encounter “another white face“. And earlier this month, the Conservatives’ Nick Timothy, who’s inherited Jenrick’s role as Shadow Justice Secretary, described an open Iftar event in Trafalgar Square as “an act of domination… not welcome in our public places and shared institutions… straight from the Islamist playbook.” In previous years open Iftar events had been held in the square without anyone objecting, as had other religions’ celebrations such as Chanukah, Vaisakhi and Diwali. And it had also hosted Christian events like mass prayers and Good Friday passion plays.

Rather than discipline them, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch backed both Jenrick and Timothy. The latter case inspired the double-barreled, hard-right-wing rabble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon to crow on social media about how, just two years ago, a Conservative Member of Parliament making Timothy’s anti-Islamic comments would have been expelled from the party. But not in 2026.

Yes, call me old-fashioned… But I prefer the good old days when not only were British mainstream politicians grey and dull, but if they’d spouted anything blatantly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, or Islamophobic, they’d immediately have been out on their ear.

July 10, 2024July 31, 2024

Rishi sunk, Liz trussed, Penny dropped

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

Now the dust has settled after the British general election on July 4^th, it’s time to offer my tuppence worth about the result. This saw the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, brought to power for the first time in 14 years. It also saw the Conservative Party, under Rishi Sunak, take an ignominious and well-deserved humping and get booted out of government. They shed 244 seats in the Westminster parliament and ended up with just 121.

But first… A message for viewers in Scotland.

As (a) someone who’s believed for a long time that Scotland would ultimately be better off as an independent nation rather than as a region of Britain, and (b) a total pessimist, I wasn’t surprised at the dire election result for the Scottish National Party, where it ceded many seats in Scotland to Labour and went from having 43 seats to having a mere nine. As I said in a post a few weeks ago about the SNP’s new leader John Swinney – what a baptism in fire he’s had – “I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.”

The SNP having so few Scottish seats in parliament and Labour having so many – they’ve now got 37 in Scotland – isn’t something that thrills me. Scotland has lost some decent SNP representatives in London, for example, Alison Thewliss, John Nicholson, Tommy Shepherd and Alwyn Smith. To be fair, I have no idea what they were like as constituency MPs, but they impressed me with their capabilities and eloquence when I saw them speak in parliament.

Also, I’m old enough to remember the 1980s and 1990s – a period of almost continuous Conservative rule from London – when the Scottish seats were also packed with Labour MPs and, the joke went, in Glasgow you could stick a red rosette on a monkey and it’d get voted into Westminster. The old Scottish Labour contingent contained several heavyweights like John Smith, Donald Dewar, Alistair Darling, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown, and also a few mavericks like the admirable Dennis Canavan and the gruesome George Galloway. But the majority of those MPs were, for want of a better word, turnips.

As I wrote on this blog a few years ago: “I’m thinking of such specimens as Lanark and Hamilton East’s one-time Labour MP Jimmy Hood, who once declared he’d oppose Scottish independence even if it made the Scottish people better off – the fact that as an MP he was busy claiming £1000-a-month second-home expenses in London no doubt had something to do with his keenness to keep Westminster running the show. And Midlothian’s David Hamilton, who in 2015 did his bit for the battle against sexism by describing Nicola Sturgeon (and her hairstyle) as ‘the wee lassie with a tin helmet on’. And Glasgow South West’s Ian Davidson, who charmingly predicted that after 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence the debate would carry on only ‘in the sense there is a large number of wounded still to be bayoneted’. This shower became known as the ‘low-flying Jimmies’ because of their lack of ambition in anything other than being cannon-fodder for Labour at Westminster and enjoying all the perks that came with being MPs. And with numpties like these populating the Westminster opposition benches during the 1980s and 1990s, it’s no surprise Mrs Thatcher’s Tories had a free run to do whatever they liked in Scotland.”

It’s possible the new crop of Scottish Labour MPs will be more distinguished than their predecessors, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s especially since the two most famous ones are the self-important Douglas Alexander and Blair McDougall, head of the ‘no’ campaign before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, who famously reassured worried Scottish voters that Boris Johnson had no chance of ever becoming British prime minister: “I think that Boris Johnson’s a clown… he’s not even an MP let alone Prime Minister at the moment.”

From wikipedia.org / © Lauren Hurley

Nor does it inspire confidence that new PM Keir Starmer has made Edinburgh Labour MP Ian Murray Secretary of State for Scotland. Murray is more hardline-Unionist than many of the Tories. When his predecessor as Scottish Secretary, Tory posho Alister Jack, was asked if a Conservative government would ever allow another referendum on Scottish independence, he mused that support for independence would have to be running at about 60% in opinion polls. When Murray was asked if there were any circumstances in which he’d allow a referendum, he curtly replied: “None whatsoever.”

Not that I think Labour’s hegemony in Scotland this time will last as long as it did previously (when it had the bulk of Scottish MPs until 2015). For one thing, the party situation and voting situation are now much too volatile. Scotland today has six parties competing in a first-past-the-post electoral system – Labour, the SNP, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and, unfortunately, Nigel Farage’s far-right-wing Reform Party. (I didn’t include Alex Salmond’s Alba Party in that list because they lost their deposit in every seat they contested.) And Labour’s share of the vote in Scotland last week was just 5.3% ahead of that of the SNP, so their position is hardly unassailable.

Anyway, onto the results for Britain generally. While I was delighted to see the Tories pulverized – and they thoroughly deserved to be pulverized, having presided over one of the most disastrous periods of government in British history, one that brought us austerity, Brexit, Prime Minister Boris ‘party during lockdown’ Johnson and Prime Minister Liz ‘crash the economy’ Truss – I have to say I’m worried. Starmer’s Labour Party won the lion’s share of the seats in parliament, but the votes cast for them were not that many – they received 9,731,363 votes, 33.8% of the total cast. That number is lower than those won by Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, the much-maligned Jeremy Corbyn, who managed 10,269,051 votes in 2019 and 12,877,918 votes in 2017. What saved Labour’s bacon this time was a low turn-out and the presence of Farage’s Reform Party, luring right-wing voters away from the Tories. If you add up the right-wing votes, those cast for the Conservative and Reform parties, they exceed Labour’s figures by more than a million votes and more than three percent of the vote-share.

Which is concerning, as I don’t think Starmer’s government is going to be popular for very long. Again, as I wrote last month, his party was “so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years. For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state.”

Meanwhile, looking at what’s left of the Tory Party, I see that its surviving MPs include that self-promoting, hard-right-wing trio Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch. As MPs, and with Rishi Sunak on his way out, they’ll be able to run for the party leadership. I can see one of them winning, swinging the Tories even further to the right and cutting a deal with Farage before the next election, probably in 2029. Farage is the favourite British politician of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, so I’m sure lots of foreign money would mysteriously arrive to ‘grease’ such an arrangement.

© BBC

Oh well. You have to take your pleasures when you can, and there was much to enjoy on election night, when various Tory politicians I didn’t like lost their seats. I shed no tears, for instance, when Penny Mordaunt got the boot in Portsmouth. Another self-promoter, she’s always annoyed me with her jolly-hockey-sticks brand of patriotism and it confounded me how, for a while last year, she was hero-worshipped for carrying a big sword, whilst wrapped in patterned blue wallpaper, at a ridiculous Ruritanian ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Mind you, she was talked about as potential future leadership material, and was a moderate by Tory standards, so she might have prevented the party from veering off into Farage-land if she’d kept her seat.

I was also tremendously cheered by the departures of that preposterous, top-hatted, Victorian undertaker Jacob Rees-Mogg in Somerset; the braying, bearded bovver-boy Jonathan Gullis in Stoke; the middle-finger-raising Andrea Jenkyns in Yorkshire; the absurdly-coiffured Boris-Johnson cosplayer Michael Fabricant in Lichfield; and Liam Fox, Grant Shapps, Thérèse Coffey, Johnny Mercer, Gilliam Keegan… Oh, how I laughed.

Incidentally, on the non-Tory front, it was also fun to see the afore-mentioned gruesomeness that is George Galloway usurped from his seat in Rochdale, just four months after he’d won it in a by-election.

Obviously, the best result was the one that ended Liz Truss’s tenure as MP for South West Norfolk. The shortest-lasting Prime Minister ever – she managed only 44 days in office, easily beating the previous record set in 1827 by George Canning (who at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM) – Truss has spent her time since showing not one ounce of contrition for her brief but disastrous reign, during which her plan to bring in massive tax cuts and pay for them by increasing government borrowing resulted in the pound plummeting, banks and building societies pulling 40% of their mortgage products off the market, and 30 billion pounds getting added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, effectively doubling it. Far from it. Truss has been blaming everyone but herself. She’s even accused a beastly ‘anti-growth coalition’ and woke ‘deep state’ of sabotaging her premiership. Meanwhile, she’s also been ingratiating herself with the American far-right and cheerleading for Donald Trump. I do hope July 4^th’s result terminates her political career, as her industrial-scale arrogance, incompetence and lack of self-awareness are getting a bit terrifying.

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Dawson

Finally, I was pleased to see the Green Party win four seats – just one seat less than Farage’s mob, who secured five. Does this mean the British media, including the BBC, will now be giving them nearly as much coverage as they give Farage? Don’t bet your life savings on it.

June 26, 2024June 26, 2024

An honest John

John Swinney became leader of the Scottish National Party on May 6^th and was sworn into office as First Minister of Scotland two days later. His arrival in the two roles comes during a difficult period for his party. First, the SNP has had to endure the spectacle of its once-mightily-respected, once-seemingly-unassailable former boss Nicola Sturgeon, who served as First Minister from 2014 to 2023, mired in a scandal whereby her husband, Peter Murrell, has been investigated and arrested over possible mismanagement of the party’s finances.

Then came the sorry saga of Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader and First Minister, Humza Yousaf. Yousaf was brave enough to defy the British-establishment line and challenge Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of killing huge numbers of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023. But in most other respects, he was pretty hapless.

Most notably, he didn’t so much shoot himself in the foot as blow the foot off at the ankle when he ended his party’s alliance with Scotland’s other pro-independence party, the Scottish Greens. The Greens were so outraged they made it clear that they would vote against Yousaf in a no-confidence vote in the Scottish Parliament. Realising he was going to lose that vote, Yousaf resigned. His resignation at least seems principled compared with the behaviour of another First Minister recently. Labour’s Vaughan Gething, First Minister of Wales, recently lost a no-confidence vote in the Welsh Senedd and blithely refused to quit, dismissing the vote as a ‘gimmick’.

Swinney’s arrival as Yousaf’s replacement happened at an incredibly inopportune time. Barely had he got through the door of Bute House, the First Minister’s official residence in Edinburgh, than Rishi Sunak, British Prime Minister and a politician so clodhopping he makes Humza Yousaf look like a smooth operator, announced a general election for July 4^th. The polls say the SNP are going to lose a swathe of seats in the London parliament to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. Even if Swinney was the best politician in the world, I don’t see what he could do to avoid that.

Not that I think Scottish voters are enamoured with Labour, who are so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years. For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state. But I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.

For this reason, and because of Swinney’s bespectacled, unexcitable and unshowy demeanour – he’s often likened to a ‘bank manager’ or an ‘accountant’, although I remember one Scottish hack comparing him to ‘Harry Potter’, which I’m sure didn’t please the famously anti-SNP J.K. Rowling – there’s been speculation that he’s serving merely as a ‘caretaker’ leader, steadying the helm until someone of more substance takes over. In particular, many in the Scottish media expect the leadership to soon go to Kate Forbes, who’s currently Deputy First Minister. Famous for his negotiating skills, Swinney managed to talk Forbes out of taking him on in a leadership contest in May.

Anyway, I should say that back in my misspent youth, I crossed paths a few times with John Swinney – whose youth, I imagine, was somewhat less misspent than mine. When I’d been a pupil at Peebles High School in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of my best pals was a guy called Roger Small. Once we finished school, Roger went to university in Edinburgh and I to university in Aberdeen. I kept in touch with him and on a few weekends came down from Aberdeen to stay in his flat in Edinburgh. My reasons for those visits were not wholly because of friendship. They coincided with the Five Nations Rugby championship, as it was then, which was held every spring and saw two Scottish home-games played at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium. I’d get a ticket, arrange to spend the night at Roger’s place, go to see the game in the afternoon and enjoy the post-match festivities in the evening.

From www.sportspages.com

On February 4^th, 1984, I dropped my stuff off at Roger’s and went to Murrayfield to see Scotland play England. Scotland won 18-6. In the Scotsman newspaper, back in those long-ago, pre-Andrew Neil days when it was worth reading, Chris Rea – no, not that Chris Rea – opined: “The Scottish forwards… were immense – a finely blended unit, alert and supportive. Their breakaways forced England into elementary errors. They foraged with devastating accuracy… Every Scot… played his part to the full.”

When the final whistle blew, I was extremely pleased that Scotland had demolished England, the Auld Enemy. So pleased that, on my way back to Roger’s flat, I indulged in a wee, celebratory pub-crawl along Rose Street, taking in such hostelries as the Auld Hundred, the Kenilworth and the Abbotsford. It probably didn’t help that I’d already done a pub crawl of Rose Street in the late morning and early afternoon, on my way to Murrayfield. Anyway, the result was that I was well-refreshed when I returned to the flat.

Roger had told me he was entertaining some Edinburgh University mates that evening, with the intention of going to a party later on. I was welcome to join them. So, at about seven o’clock, I trotted into Roger’s living room, plonked myself on the sofa in the midst of some people I hadn’t met before and, trying to be sociable, joined in the conversation. After a few minutes, a tall, lean, slightly intense-looking young man sitting on the sofa beside me turned his head towards me and asked incredulously, “Are you drunk?”

Ladies and gentlemen, meet John Swinney, future leader of the Scottish National Party, an outfit dedicated to the cause of Scottish independence, to freeing Scotland from the shackles of political rule from London, capital of England. Shocked that someone in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, should be a wee bit inebriated after Scotland had trounced England at rugby.

But I can’t have been that inebriated because I managed to accompany Roger, John and friends to the party that night and managed to participate in the conversation enough to form the opinion that Roger’s mate John was a decent-enough, if sober, bloke. It turned out that the party was being held by someone from Peebles, the town where Roger and I had attended school, so I knew some of the folk there. Actually, it amuses me to think that the future First Minister of Scotland was once at a party rubbing shoulders with such well-kent Peebles eccentrics as the late Andrew Cleghorn.

Thereafter, I encountered John Swinney a couple of times in Edinburgh, briefly, while I was in Roger’s company. The last time was a summer or two later, during the Edinburgh Festival, when Teviot Row, the Edinburgh University students’ union building, had been turned into a venue and the pair of them were working there as bouncers. What a pity Oxford University’s notorious Bullingdon Club didn’t arrange a field-trip to Edinburgh at the time and try to subject Teviot Row to their yobbish antics… I would have paid good money to see John Swinney eject Boris Johnson from the premises.

I lost touch with Roger for a while after that, but bumped into him again in the late 1980s after I’d moved to Edinburgh. He kindly fixed me up with a part-time job at the (now-long-gone) Greyfriars Bookshop at the bottom of George IV Bridge. At some point I asked how John Swinney was getting on and Roger told me he was ascending in the ranks of the SNP. Later, when I mentioned his name to some mates from Aberdeen who were heavily into the cause of Scottish independence, they reported they’d seen him deliver a speech at an SNP conference and were greatly impressed by him.

I completely lost touch with Roger Small in the 1990s – he took off for Australia – and, several years ago, wondering what’d happened to him, I tried Googling him. I didn’t find him, but learnt something about his mother, Christian Small, who’d passed away in 2016 at the age of 90. Christian had been an immensely-talented amateur painter, but according to a friend she was ‘extraordinarily diffident about her work’ and needed ‘a great deal of persuasion’ to allow her paintings to appear in local exhibitions. Because of her modesty, presumably, it didn’t really dawn on people – family and friends alike – how good an artist she’d been until after her death. However, in 2018 and 2019, some events were held to commemorate her and her art, including exhibitions and the launch of a book called Inside & Out. The book featured her paintings interspersed with verse written by another friend, the poet and actress Gerda Stevenson.

One of those events was attended by John Swinney, who by then was Deputy First Minister of Scotland. On Twitter, he remarked that Christian Small had been the mother ‘of my dear university friend Roger.’ So, I’m glad he still remembers his old mate and still holds him in high regard.

Though he’s made his name as a cautious type – too cautious for some people’s tastes, which has led to them questioning his political acumen – it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about John Swinney as a person. For example, the former Scottish Labour Party leader Jim Murphy once commented: “There’s nobody in Scotland who doesn’t like John Swinney.” I recall my old English teacher, Ian Jenkins, who served in the Scottish Parliament for four years as the Liberal Democrat representative for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, speaking highly of him too.

Thus, I’m pleased that Swinney now holds the highest political office in his country. He struck me as a decent guy and it’s good to see decency rewarded. Unfortunately, politics isn’t an arena where being decent always works in your favour. I suspect he has his work cut out for him – especially if the polls prove to be right and his party takes a pounding in the general election.

Tag: John Swinney

You can’t say those things nowadays… unless you’re a politician

Rishi sunk, Liz trussed, Penny dropped

An honest John