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From wikipedia.org<\/a> \/ \u00a9 Scottish Government<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n John Swinney became leader of the Scottish National Party on May 6th<\/sup> and was sworn into office as First Minister of Scotland two days later.\u00a0 His arrival in the two roles comes during a difficult period for his party.\u00a0 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<\/a> over possible mismanagement of the party\u2019s finances.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then came the sorry saga of Sturgeon\u2019s replacement as party leader and First Minister, Humza Yousaf.\u00a0\u00a0 Yousaf was brave enough to defy the British-establishment line and challenge<\/a> Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s policy of killing huge numbers of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas\u2019s slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023.\u00a0 But in most other respects, he was pretty hapless.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Most notably, he didn\u2019t so much shoot himself in the foot as blow the foot off at the ankle when he ended his party\u2019s alliance with Scotland\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Realising he was going to lose that vote, Yousaf resigned<\/a>.\u00a0 His resignation at least seems principled compared with the behaviour of another First Minister recently. \u00a0Labour\u2019s Vaughan Gething, First Minister of Wales, recently lost a no-confidence vote<\/a> in the Welsh Senedd and blithely refused to quit, dismissing the vote as a \u2018gimmick\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Swinney\u2019s arrival as Yousaf\u2019s replacement happened at an incredibly inopportune time.\u00a0 Barely had he got through the door of Bute House, the First Minister\u2019s 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 4th<\/sup>.\u00a0 The polls say the SNP are going to lose a swathe of seats in the London parliament to Keir Starmer\u2019s Labour Party.\u00a0 Even if Swinney was the best politician in the world, I don\u2019t see what he could do to avoid that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not that I think Scottish voters are enamoured with Labour, who are so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they\u2019ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that\u2019ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years.\u00a0 For instance, they\u2019ve vowed not to revisit<\/a> the terms of the Tories\u2019 Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it\u2019s hobbled British businesses and it\u2019ll thwart their plans to \u2018grow\u2019 the economy; and they won\u2019t countenance raising taxes<\/a>, which makes you wonder how they\u2019re ever going to lift Britain\u2019s public services out of their current, dire state.\u00a0 But I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP\u2019s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they\u2019ll vote for Labour en<\/em> masse<\/em> next month.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For this reason, and because of Swinney\u2019s bespectacled, unexcitable and unshowy demeanour \u2013 he\u2019s often likened to a \u2018bank manager\u2019 or an \u2018accountant\u2019, although I remember one Scottish hack comparing him to \u2018Harry Potter\u2019, which I\u2019m sure didn\u2019t please the famously anti-SNP J.K. Rowling \u2013 there\u2019s been speculation that he\u2019s serving merely as a \u2018caretaker\u2019 leader, steadying the helm until someone of more substance takes over.\u00a0 In particular, many in the Scottish media expect the leadership to soon go to Kate Forbes, who\u2019s currently Deputy First Minister.\u00a0 Famous for his negotiating skills, Swinney managed to talk Forbes out of taking him on in a leadership contest in May.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Anyway, I should say that back in my misspent youth, I crossed paths a few times with John Swinney \u2013 whose youth, I imagine, was somewhat less misspent than mine.\u00a0 When I\u2019d 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.\u00a0 Once we finished school, Roger went to university in Edinburgh and I to university in Aberdeen.\u00a0 I kept in touch with him and on a few weekends came down from Aberdeen to stay in his flat in Edinburgh.\u00a0 My reasons for those visits were not wholly because of friendship.\u00a0 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\u2019s Murrayfield Stadium.\u00a0 I\u2019d get a ticket, arrange to spend the night at Roger\u2019s place, go to see the game in the afternoon and enjoy the post-match festivities in the evening.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n From www.sportspages.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n On February 4th<\/sup>, 1984, I dropped my stuff off at Roger\u2019s and went to Murrayfield to see Scotland play England.\u00a0 Scotland won 18-6.\u00a0 In the Scotsman newspaper, back in those long-ago, pre-Andrew Neil days<\/a> when it was worth reading, Chris Rea<\/a> \u2013 no, not that Chris Rea<\/a> \u2013 opined<\/a>: \u201cThe Scottish forwards\u2026 were immense \u2013 a finely blended unit, alert and supportive. Their breakaways forced England into elementary errors.\u00a0 They foraged with devastating accuracy\u2026\u00a0 Every Scot\u2026 played his part to the full.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When the final whistle blew, I was extremely pleased that Scotland had demolished England, the Auld Enemy.\u00a0 So pleased that, on my way back to Roger\u2019s 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.\u00a0 It probably didn\u2019t help that I\u2019d already done a pub crawl of Rose Street in the late morning and early afternoon, on my way to<\/em> Murrayfield.\u00a0 Anyway, the result was that I was well-refreshed when I returned to the flat.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Roger had told me he was entertaining some Edinburgh University mates that evening, with the intention of going to a party later on. \u00a0I was welcome to join them.\u00a0 So, at about seven o\u2019clock, I trotted into Roger\u2019s living room, plonked myself on the sofa in the midst of some people I hadn\u2019t met before and, trying to be sociable, joined in the conversation.\u00a0 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, \u201cAre you drunk<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Shocked that someone in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, should be a wee bit inebriated after Scotland had trounced England at rugby.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But I can\u2019t have been that<\/em> 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\u2019s mate John was a decent-enough, if sober, bloke.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thereafter, I encountered John Swinney a couple of times in Edinburgh, briefly, while I was in Roger\u2019s company.\u00a0 The last time was a summer or two later, during the Edinburgh Festival, when Teviot Row, the Edinburgh University students\u2019 union building, had been turned into a venue and the pair of them were working there as bouncers.\u00a0 What a pity Oxford University\u2019s notorious Bullingdon Club<\/a> didn\u2019t arrange a field-trip to Edinburgh at the time and try to subject Teviot Row to their yobbish antics\u2026\u00a0 I would have paid good money to see John Swinney eject Boris Johnson from the premises.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I lost touch with Roger for a while after that, but bumped into him again in the late 1980s after I\u2019d moved to Edinburgh.\u00a0 He kindly fixed me up with a part-time job at the (now-long-gone) Greyfriars Bookshop at the bottom of George IV Bridge.\u00a0 At some point I asked how John Swinney was getting on and Roger told me he was ascending in the ranks of the SNP.\u00a0 Later, when I mentioned his name to some mates from Aberdeen who were heavily into the cause of Scottish independence, they reported they\u2019d seen him deliver a speech at an SNP conference and were greatly impressed by him.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I completely lost touch with Roger Small in the 1990s \u2013 he took off for Australia \u2013 and, several years ago, wondering what\u2019d happened to him, I tried Googling him.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t find him, but learnt something about his mother, Christian Small, who\u2019d passed away in 2016 at the age of 90.\u00a0 Christian had been an immensely-talented amateur painter, but according to a friend she was \u2018extraordinarily diffident about her work\u2019 and needed \u2018a great deal of persuasion\u2019 to allow her paintings to appear in local exhibitions.\u00a0 Because of her modesty, presumably, it didn\u2019t really dawn on people \u2013 family and friends alike \u2013 how good an artist she\u2019d been until after her death.\u00a0 However, in 2018 and 2019, some events<\/a> were held to commemorate her and her art, including exhibitions and the launch of a book called Inside & Out<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 The book featured her paintings interspersed with verse written by another friend, the poet and actress Gerda Stevenson.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One of those events was attended by John Swinney, who by then was Deputy First Minister of Scotland.\u00a0 On Twitter, he remarked<\/a> that Christian Small had been the mother \u2018of my dear university friend Roger.\u2019\u00a0 So, I\u2019m glad he still remembers his old mate and still holds him in high regard.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Scotland Street Press<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Though he\u2019s made his name as a cautious type \u2013 too cautious for some people\u2019s tastes, which has led to them questioning his political acumen \u2013 it\u2019s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about John Swinney as a person.\u00a0 For example, the former Scottish Labour Party leader Jim Murphy once commented<\/a>: \u201cThere\u2019s nobody in Scotland who doesn\u2019t like John Swinney.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thus, I\u2019m pleased that Swinney now holds the highest political office in his country.\u00a0 He struck me as a decent guy and it\u2019s good to see decency rewarded.\u00a0 Unfortunately, politics isn\u2019t an arena where being decent always works in your favour.\u00a0 I suspect he has his work cut out for him \u2013 especially if the polls prove to be right and his party takes a pounding in the general election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From wikipedia.org \/ \u00a9 Scottish Government John Swinney became leader of the Scottish National Party on May 6th and was sworn into office as First Minister of Scotland two days later.\u00a0 His arrival in the two roles comes during a difficult period for his party.\u00a0 First, the SNP has had to endure the … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/S-vs-E-1984-300x233.jpg\")
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