ABSTRACT
Sheena Wellington sang Robert Burns’ ‘For a’ that’ and the Presiding-Officer’s wife, Judy Steel, subversively distributed its republican text to all the MSPs, so that they could, at first quaveringly, then ‘wi’ the haill voice’, roar out in the Royal Presence:
Mrs Ewing was spinning, but such arts were as old as the nation. The old parliament wasn’t prorogued; it was closed down, or swallowed by the Union Parliament in Westminster, without the Act of Union even being regarded (out of Scotland) as a fundamental law. In April 1945 when Dr Robert MacIntyre had been elected as the first Scottish Nationalist MP at a by-election for Motherwell-my mother voted for him, and I made my political debut at the polling station in a pram-the Anglo-Scot patrician Sir
Harold Nicolson considered him an awkward spectre at the feast of allied triumph, ‘a sad nuisance’. We were in a different Union, and an almost unrecognisable world.
