There is a crime against
humanity on our doorstep.
It is time to name it
The Cafe
Those trams again
If you want to run away
and never be seen again,
don’t come here
Gerard Rochford
The July poem
Young Scot
of the Year
The winner of this year’s SR/Arnold Kemp Award is Jamie Brown.
He was educated at Whitehill secondary school in the east end of Glasgow and during his time there he became the chairman of the Glasgow-wids pupils’ council.
At the age of 16 he was appointed a board director at the Glasgow Anti-Racist Alliance, promoting equality and encouraging youth participation across the charity.
He was then selected by the UN Children’s Fund to become its youth representative. In 2005, during the G8 Gleneagles summit, he co-chaired the young people’s alternative summit. This engaged 16 young people from different countries to produce a list of idea to improve our world, which were then given to the G8 leaders.
He was awarded Unicef’s 60th anniversary award by Lord Attenborough, for the promotion of children’s rights and youth empowerment.
In 2008, he volunteered as an English teacher at a high school in Romania before setting off to explore the rest of Europe. The following year he attended the University of Vienna’s summer programme which aims to educate future leaders. He graduated with a diploma in European studies with highest distinction.
Despite being in his final year of a degree in community education at Strathclyde University, Jamie still finds time and energy to volunteer at Glasgow museums. He is involved in planning and delivering the ‘Let Glasgow Flourish’ project.
The Young Scot of the Year award is given annually in memory of one of Scotland’s greatest post-war journalists, a former editor of the Herald.
David Torrance
Writing a biography is an all-consuming process. On one level it’s a mammoth logistical job, assembling a myriad of facts from several different sources; deciding which ones are relevant and in what order to present them. On another level the biographer has to assume the role of an armchair psychologist, interpreting the subject’s behaviour in the context of their family background, character and goals.
All of this was true of my newly-published tome on the first minister, ‘Salmond: Against the Odds’. First, let me explain the title. I had wanted to call it ‘The Gambler: A Biography of Alex Salmond’, but this was deemed ‘pejorative’ by my cautious publisher, Birlinn, probably correctly. Determined to retain an allusion to Salmond’s love of gambling, we settled upon ‘Against the Odds’. After all, he was never certain to become first minister of Scotland, and did so against considerable political, personal and electoral odds.
Naturally, a biographer craves a positive critical reaction to their efforts. Beyond generous private praise, however, this has been rather lukewarm. Harry Reid in the Herald praised the book’s thoroughness but felt I had failed to identify Salmond’s ‘inner fire’ (although he conceded this would have been difficult) and under-rated his many achievements (although Harry did not go on to list them). He also felt that I had dwelled a little too much on my subject’s childhood and university career, which was probably fair enough.
Professor James Mitchell, meanwhile, concluded in the Times that I did ‘not grapple’ adequately with how Salmond became such a popular leader of the SNP, while ‘discussion of his nationalism’ was ‘underdeveloped’. Finally, he reckoned my ‘speculation on the nature of [Salmond’s] marriage is odd to anyone who knows the couple’. The only ‘speculation’ I offer is that Alex and Moira love each other deeply, which occasionally manifests itself in a playful manner; I remain mystified as to why that might appear ‘odd’.
‘Understanding these activists is key to understanding Alex Salmond himself,’ concluded Mitchell, the implication being that I don’t. This is a fair point, although in my defence I was attempting to write a biography of Alex Salmond rather than the SNP’s grassroots. The subtext of Mitchell’s article was, I suspect, that he could have written a much better book, a fact I’m not arrogant enough to dispute. A biographer has to possess a thick skin, although I don’t mind admitting that I continue to lose sleep over the appearance of future reviews.
Although his tone was that of a disappointed schoolmaster rather than an angry politician, it was still acutely intimidating..
It is inevitable that a biography, particularly a political life, will not satisfy everyone. It is also inevitable that errors will emerge as anoraks devour their copies. I’ve been informed, for example, that Stewart Stevenson drove Salmond during the 1997 general election rather than the 1999 Scottish parliamentary election; the Welsh poet R S Thomas was not ‘blind since birth’; Tam Dalyell was not questioned by a precocious Salmond at Linlithgow Academy, and so on. Errors, however minor, should make any respectable biographer flinch.
The Dalyell anecdote was corrected by none other than the first minister himself. In what must count as one of the most surreal moments of my life, he called me a few weeks ago as I waited outside Lambeth Palace for a glimpse of the Pope. He had been alerted to a story Scotland on Sunday was planning to run about the suicide of his maternal grandfather (included in the book), and he wasn’t happy. The conversation lasted about nine minutes, during which I held my ground, explaining that I couldn’t credibly leave out an obviously sensitive episode in Salmond’s family history. Although his tone was that of a disappointed schoolmaster rather than an angry politician, it was still acutely intimidating. It is a curious experience for a biographer to be grilled by his subject. It ought to have been, I remember thinking, the other way round.
The more interesting reaction to the book has been from SNP activists, many of whom saw the book for the first time at the SNP conference in Perth a couple of weeks ago. My publisher was slightly taken aback to hear comments along the lines of: ‘What’s an effing Tory doing writing a book about Alex?’ This I found depressing, although not altogether surprising. First of all, the ‘Tory’ tag springs more from an obsession with pigeonholing journalists’ perceived alliances rather than my voting record, while the notion that I couldn’t possibly be impartial enough to write about a Nationalist politician isn’t worthy of comment.
Others at conference, it has to be said, were rather upbeat about the whole thing, driven by a natural curiosity to learn more about the man who leads them. There were also light-hearted moments. My namesake, Cllr David Torrance, an SNP representative on Fife Council, told me he’d had to assure several friends and colleagues that he hadn’t written a biography of Salmond, while in turn I’ve had to convince a few media colleagues that I’ve not been ranked 12th on the Mid-Scotland and Fife SNP list for next May’s Holyrood elections. Cllr Torrance, as the Sunday Post noted, now has a copy of the book inscribed to ‘the other David Torrance’.
There is a serious point in all of this: there was a large, Alex Salmond-sized, gap in the Scottish biographical literature and I’ve attempted to fill it. This was always going to annoy some and delight others, but it needed to be written. There will be other attempts. Salmond is known to have already begun work on his own memoirs, which will of course contain information (if not insights, for Salmond is not particularly introspective) I could never have discovered, while I hope – whatever the result of next May’s elections – to pen a ‘revised and updated’ paperback edition should market conditions allow. Still, I’m proud to have written the first, whatever its shortcomings, both perceived and real.
