The Scotland in which I, and, no doubt, many of you grew up was not a particularly diverse or enlightened place. It was — in a few unhappy ways still is — a starkly homogenous society that didn’t take kindly to change, or difference. The main division, certainly in the…

Twenty years ago this month, voters overwhelmingly backed the creation of a Scottish parliament. It’s been a bumpy ride… As the autumn visitor approaches the Scottish Parliament down the dark, narrow channel of the Canongate, tortured by Edinburgh’s bone-blasting wind and laser-guided rain, he might pull up his jacket collar…

It wasn’t always chauffeur-driven limos, fawning crowds at the Glasgow Hydro and a mansion in Charlotte Square. Only 20 years ago, the SNP was a very different and considerably less glamorous beast. …

When Andrew Wilson and his new bride Anna jetted off on honeymoon earlier this month, the SNP’s future looked bright. Perhaps not as bright as the Jamaican sun for which the happy couple were headed, but the party was widely expected to do well in the general election that would…

Trump’s triumphed, Britain’s Brexiting, Le Pen’s close enough to being la presidente that she’s going on Andrew Marr. The three most powerful words in politics are Take Back Control. The world is engaged in one of its cyclical bouts of disaggregation, having bumped up against the reality, yet again, that…

Like most people lucky or arrogant or unhinged enough to make a living ranting at strangers about random subjects, I get asked to go on television now and again. When I was a younger man and still held before me the vague notion that I might amount to something more…

I’m not saying Lenin wasn’t a clever and able man. Indeed, he ‘had such big brains they pushed his hair out’, according to one of his friends. His CV would have, at the very least, a strong ‘Previous Experience’ section: ‘immiserated and impoverished one’s country; birthed a regime of world-historical-level…

I stumbled across Nick Clegg recently — almost literally, as it happens — signing copies of his autobiography in a corner of a regional Waterstones. There was a decent turnout, and Clegg looked fit and well. He was dressed down in that preppy English privately-educated way — suede boots, neatly-ironed…

A Tory MP was asked this week how long it would be before Brexit could be judged either a success or a failure. ‘We won’t know that for about 50 years, I think,’ was the unsmiling reply. A modern-day Zhou Enlai. In a way, the Brexiters can afford to wait…