Person of the Week
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Profile by Barbara Millar
Page turner
Richard Wild
Life of George
My starring role
SR Extra
Essays for the weekend
The impatient
society
Gerry Hassan’s analysis of Scottish politics as the Holyrood election approaches
Click here
Throwing stones
at a statue
David McVey on a remarkable meeting between Joseph Conrad and Neil Munro
Click here
One of our
national games
At the start of cricket’s World Cup,
R D Kernohan on one side that won’t be
taking part
Click here
The Cafe
Many thanks to Kenneth Roy (SR, 16 February) for his brilliant work on the hospice. I have followed his clear and incisive articles on this issue (and many others) and agree entirely with his analysis. A truly shocking way for a public body to behave and I fear personal issues may be at work here in not recognising the obvious advantage in funding St Margaret’s (I prefer to hope that more sinister motives are not involved).
Professor Stephen Tierney
I am very glad that SR does the good work of exposing the scandals that our ‘elite’ would rather we do not know. Yet I find the reporting thereon curiously out of context.
As an instance, in the reports anent Blawarthill Kenneth Roy opines that the minister should replace the health board. With one party governance of that territory for the last 50 years and the recent arrival of the present government party into a position of power, the SNP has not had time to build up a nomenclatura that would enable them to people such a replacement with safe pairs of hands and so your call, though superficially attractive, is Panglossian.
Randall Foggie
Kenneth Roy replies: I did not suggest the replacement of the entire health board, only of its chairman. To be described as Panglossian, though flattering, is a career first.
Leading article
The two parallel
lives of a disgraced
Scottish politician
Kenneth Roy
Last weekend, as I read the press assassination of the former Labour MP Jim Devine – the ‘disgraced’ former Labour MP as he will inevitably be known until the day he dies – I thought of a little incident on the afternoon of Jimmy Reid’s funeral.
A group of speakers and organisers gathered in the late summer sunshine. The chief among us, David Scott, produced a Cuban cigar – the sort Jimmy liked.
‘Jim Devine handed me this,’ he said, ‘in honour of Jimmy.’
‘Jim won’t be needing that where he’s going,’ said a second member of the group.
‘He’s a scapegoat,’ said a third.
Although I knew little of Jim Devine – I had scarcely heard of him except as a dim figure charged with an expenses fiddle – the coverage of his conviction at Southwark Crown Court has made me aware of a wider view of his character. False accounting – the official reason for his humiliation – now feels almost like a pretext for a larger indictment.
Mr Devine stands accused by his judges in the media of ‘pestering’ a constituent for sex by claiming that he had cancer, sexually harassing a member of his staff, giving his office manager a £2,000 Christmas bonus and then demanding it back because he needed the money, putting the blame for his expenses irregularities on someone else, serial womanising, excessive drinking and gambling, chronic bullying, and absenting himself from his parliamentary duties in order to support Celtic Football Club. I list these clauses of the indictment in no particular order of gravity.
Yet it was not difficult yesterday to find support for the idea that the first
Jim Devine – the working-class hero of 2005 – and the second Jim Devine – the monster of 2011 – are surprisingly closely related.
The politician of principle who opposed the Iraq war can also be the office bully. The tenacious fighter for the health service can also be a petty
fraudster faking invoices for stationery. It is the human factor.
It is possible that his virtues were exaggerated in 2005, when he was a person to be reckoned with, and his faults exaggerated in 2011, when he is down and out and fit only to be kicked.
It is possible that some of the allegations made against him by former associates are untrue or only partially true.
It is possible that the experience of being an MP, of the Westminster hothouse, of the ‘best club in London’, went to his head and that urges and excesses in his personality, controlled before, could be held in check no longer. Many people, not all bad, are destroyed by that place, by its conspiratorial atmosphere, its heady sense of the unpredictable and exciting, its proximity to power, its many bars, its attractive women.
It is even possible that, with some difficulty, the two Jim Devines can actually be reconciled: that he is merely an extreme example of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of living. The sentimentalist who brings a cigar to the funeral of a man he revered can also be a sexual predator. The politician of principle who opposed the Iraq war can also be the office bully. The tenacious fighter for the health service can also be a petty fraudster faking invoices for stationery. It is the human factor.
If my years as a reporter in the criminal courts taught me anything, it was the rather obvious truth that there is little to choose between the robed figure on the bench, who retires to his chambers for a consoling glass of sherry, and the wretched one in the dock, facing months if not years in prison. Both look approximately the same when they face themselves in the mirror. Each is wearing a mask.
