Fugitive 'justice' minister run to ground at last

After days of speculation about his precise whereabouts, a prominent member of Scotland’s all-powerful Salmond regime was yesterday tracked down to a tough housing scheme on the southern edge of Edinburgh.

With his enemies closing in, Kenny MacAskill had taken refuge in a school on the Craigmillar estate, and surrounded himself with a human shield of pasty-faced teenagers and their spritely teachers, all primed to express delight at the appearance in their midst of the justice secretary. But while some fed him biscuits and others posed for pictures, no-one seemed at ease.

These days the disquiet around Mr MacAskill is tangible. Fully two years ago, it was his decision to release Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, on compassionate grounds, that sparked worldwide protest. The Libyan had been found guilty by three Scottish judges of the worst terrorist atrocity in British history, killing 270 people when his bomb blew up Pan Am flight 103.

In August 2009, Al-Megrahi was said to have three months to live, before he succumbed to prostate cancer. Instead, until recently at least, he has been able to live out his life playing frisbee in a suburb of Tripoli, his sole duty in respect of his Scots law, the requirement to remain in telephone contact with East Renfrewshire Council, whose officials supervise his release.

No surprise then that in rare sightings, Mr MacAskill has cut an increasingly careworn figure. His recent remarks too to suggest a man who is losing control of events. It was no different at Castlebrae Community High. He was asked, had he been in contact with rebel leaders?

“Well obviously the UK government is speaking to them,” he said, embarking on the ramble of a man on the brink. “We are operating on a variety of fronts. From a media perspective, who goes where, who speaks to what, it’s difficult to fathom matters. That’s why we are waiting for the dust of battle to settle and in the interim to find out what is happening and to communicate through all appropriate routes.”

In a more lucid moment, Mr MacAskill did seek to deflect criticism, by turning the spotlight on those who had “glad-handed” the hated Libyan government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, a reference to the infamous “deal in the desert” struck by Tony Blair, then Labour Prime Minister.

Unfortunately, Mr MacAskill’s charge of duplicity against his Labour enemies has begun to ring hollow in recent months.

In February, documents published in Westminster showed that senior government ministers and officials, including Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, were utterly convinced that they had been told in 2007 by the justice secretary himself, that the Scottish Government was ready to include Al-Megrahi in a prisoner transfer agreement, in return for concessions over firearms legislation and slopping out in prisons.

“There was then a conversation when he (MacAskill) asked for a deal,” Straw told The Times. “He obviously spoke to Salmond.”

Mr Salmond had gone on television himself to counter the claim of seeking a deal, but had found himself unable to call Mr Straw a liar. Would Mr MacAskill say that Mr Straw was a liar?

“I’m not bandying around matters here,” retorted Mr MacAskill, refusing to call Mr Straw a liar. “We stand on our record, north of the border, of having always been open, above board, the one authority that has acted with fairness and transparency throughout.”

In the fog of war, it all made as much sense as a placing a mass murderer, domiciled in Libya, in the care of a Renfrewshire parole officer.

* Pic James Glossop

"I'm not sure the government have it in them"

On the wall of Karyn McCluskey’s office is a photograph. It shows a man of about 30, his head oozing blood and his body slashed with ugly knife wounds. Almost out of frame, a doctor is trying to help, but above the medic's outstretched hand, a livid tattoo cries out his patient’s defiance: “Only God Can Judge Me”.

A brutal portrayal of gang culture? McCluskey grins. “That image epitomises Glasgow to me,” she says. “I had it framed but people still ask me why I have it the office. I am very unusual."

She is unusual not least because of her sudden notoriety. In the wake of three nights of rioting in English cities, an anti-gang regime pioneered by McCluskey and her colleague John Carnachan, of Strathclyde police, has been singled out by David Cameron as a model of success in combating street violence.

The Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV, pronounced “serve”), has exposed 400 gang members to psychological shock therapy to jolt them out of lives of gang crime. In three years, the offending rate among participants has dropped by 46% and even among gang members who have resisted, offences have fallen by a quarter.

McCluskey, garrulous and confiding, in defiance of the police stereotype, appears oblivious to prime ministerial praise. On the contrary, she applauds Ian Duncan Smith, who declared this week that the country “cannot arrest its way” out of social breakdown, and she dismissess Cameron’s notion that the riots in England were “criminality pure and simple”.

She says: “You cannot just look at enforcement. For me, this is Cameron’s problem.
“I know he has looked at CIRV but we are just one small part of it. I am proud of what we have done, but I’m proud of our work with the public services. It is all part of the same jigsaw.”
For McCluskey, the roots of gang violence lie insidde chaotic homes in places such as Ruchazie and Easterhouse, vast, ugly housing schemes where Glasgow’s gang culture has been endemic for the 60 years.

Here, she says, young children are cut adrift from opportunity as soon as they are born. “When I speak to kids and they aspire to nothing, I think that is the most crimnal. thing of all. I say, ‘What did you want to be when you were in primary shool?’ They can’t tell me. No astronauts. nothing.

“We need 21st century solutions to a 21st century problem. You need to support young people and kids in families. And give them an aspiration.”

McCluskey, from Falkirk, is a very singular police officer. A lone parent, she has no partner and admits getting pregnant “wasn’t in my career plan.” She is hugely proud of her 11-year-old daughter.

Off duty, she’s training for a half ironman, the most punishing of events, and giggles when she describes the masochistic training regime. She’s been knocked off her bike seven times by white van man and deplores attending the gym because of “all those perfect women looking calm and composed and me sweating like a badger”.

A forensic psychology graduate steeped in US and Scandinavian anti-violence theory, she arrived in Glasgow in 2002, after serving as head of intelligence for the West Mercia force. The difference in environment would have been laughable had it not been so tragic: from the Porsetshire of the Archers to Taggart's Glasgow.

“We’d have three killings in a year in West Mercia,” she says, “in Strathclyde all we got was murder, murder, murder (71 in her first year). I couldn’t grasp the scale of the problem. We’d had 30 years of hard policing, but it hadn’t made a difference”

Over a three-week holiday she wrote a report identifying violence as a disease. “That was a eureka moment,” she recalls. “Once you to talk like that to people, they get it. Violence is like measles: you catch it in the house from your mum and dad, from child abuse, from domestic abuse, and when you go out into the neighbourhood you pass it on. You form a gang, a team, and the violence goes round. You grow older, you get married and the whole cycle starts again.”
These days, with John Carnochan, she is co-director of Strathclyde’s Violence Reduction Unit, formed in 2004 in the wake of her report.

The unit was quickly in the forefront of campaigns against knives and alcohol, but soon afterwards she had a second eureka moment. At a violent crime summit in Boston, she met David Kennedy, the Harvard criminologist who pioneered Operation Ceasefire an initiative that used shock tactics against gang members to combat a soaring murder rate.

McCluskey immediately made the connection between young black Americans in Boston and the people she was dealing with in Glasgow. “Their lack of aspiration, the lives that weren't manageable; they had no communication skills, no empathy. I thought, 'This could work in Scotland.”

CIRV's success is built on a simplest of scenarios, known as a call-in. As many as 200 young men are dragooned into court and lined up to face representatives of communities they have terrorised. Then, under the strict regime of the presiding sheriff, they are harangued by senior police officers, doctors, and convicted murderers before they are finally presented with stark ultimatum. Reform, or your life will be hell.

If they sign a pledge to renounce violence, the men are offered help from social services and community groups.

The call-ins begin with short contribution from the chief constable. As CCTV images of the offenders flash around the court-room wall, he tells the young men that he knows where they live; that he can arrest them any time he likes; that they will all be hunted down if a single one of them commits another offence.

“We catch the feckless and the stupid,” says McCluskey. “You saw it in Manchester and London. We flash up their pictures, we show them their houses. At first they’re all pointing and saying, ‘There’s such and such…’ Then they suddenly realise. I love that look on their faces.”

The witnesses keep coming. A doctor describes the kinds of injuries he has treated, and the condition of the kids who have died. A convicted murderer describes the reality of prison. He asks them, “Who do you think will come to visit you in prison?”. He adds that within ten days of incarceration, a young offender’s best mate will be sleeping with his girl.

A bereaved mother makes the most powerful intervention of all. “It doesn't matter how crap their mums have been to them, they still love their them,” says McCluskey. “The mother says: ‘I lost my son and I'll never get over it. I go into his bedroom every single day. You boys might not care, you think you’ll live for ever - but this is what it like.’

“I thought Scots wouldn’t be able to show their emotions like the black guys in Boston. But it was exactly the same. They are shattered by it. You can see them sobbing.”

How does she react? “I’m sobbing too,” she says. “If you stopped being moved by this, then you need to go. I am zealot about his. It’s a big part of my life. John and I are relentless."
If it sounds like a story of unbounded hope, it is not, and McCluskey acknowledges as much. After seven years of the VRU, still, every six hours in Glasgow, someone receives a grievous knife injury. And, after falling to 41 in 2010, the murder rate had risen to 59 this summer, when the latest annual statistics were issued. In 2009, Strathclyde Police area, containing 43% of the population, had 55% of Scotland’s murders. Glasgow’s old, unwanted title, “the murder capital of Europe” is hard to shake off.

Locally and nationally, politicians will have to be “brave, resilient and aspirational” warns McCluskey. The national prognosis is not good.

“I’m not sure the government have it in them yet,” says McCluskey. “The bravery might be wavering a bit and the resilience is important - you can’t do it overnight. It has to go beyond the political imperative, the four-year government.

“They need some verbs in their sentences, some doing words. You can talk about changing things all you like, but you need to do things and shift your spend to those who need it most, even in a recession. That means some tough choices for them. Transferring money to difficult families is not going to please middle England. But you absolutely have to do it, because it will make middle England safer too.”

Pregnant and still living on the run

The Scotsman, 4 September 2000

There's a gloominess about the haar lingering over the deserted coast road. It's early and certainly too dreich for the great and the good of Carnoustie to be taking the air. But for Liz McColgan, at ease in the foyer to her gym, it's already been a good morning. The damp breeze cooled her on her first five-mile run of the day, which she finished long before we begin to talk at nine o'clock.

Injury may have ruled her out of Olympic Games qualification, but McColgan is sticking by her gruelling marathon training schedule, three full-pace sessions every week, and a daily routine to prepare her for the next two years of running. There are Commonwealth Games to look forward to in 2002, and she feels there are three, maybe five 26-milers inside her before she retires.

It would be a punishing regime for anyone. For a woman who is five-and-half months pregnant with her third child it is almost unbelievable. You say so and almost by way of mitigation she offers: "This is the only pregnancy I've trained through like this. I'm surprised. Normally when you get to four months you feel..." she grips her stomach and makes a sickly sound "... and you can't keep the sessions going. But I'm actually doing hard sessions which I can't believe I'm capable of doing."

It all seems so typical of the McColgan image: the fierce commitment to family, spliced with that single-mindedness which so unsettles some observers.

That competitiveness though is the mark of a major athlete, who despite her talent has had to cope with disappointments which arrive in four-year cycles. Just remember: there she was, smiling with the British team in the opening parade at Atlanta in 1996, all hope and glorious medal expectation. That was before an insect bite prevented her running. Four years earlier she was laid low by anaemia.

This time around, a second operation on a toe injury disrupted her schedule and made it impossible to achieve a qualifying time within the limits set for the British team. Her fate seems especially cruel. After all, as she says herself: "Sydney was going to be the one where it happened. The temperature would be right, the course was perfect - it's quite tough and would have suited me - but it's out of my hands. I can't do anything about it now."

There's no bitterness she says, though her foot feels better and she believes she could compete. But she admits it was the disappointment which prompted her decision with husband Peter to have another child. They already have Eilish, ten, and Martin, ten months.

"We want more children, and we thought we can't sit and dwell on what can or can't be.
"I felt I could give myself six months where I didn't over-stretch myself and just gradually build up my strength. So we thought, 'What the heck', and that's when we decided. By the time I have this child, my foot will have been through a lot of training."

She's laughing at herself now, perhaps knowing that she sounds, even by her standards, a trifle focused. "So when I have had the child I'll be able to get right back in and not worry about any more children for a couple of years!"

At 35, it's improbable even McColgan could win Olympic gold now. With a third child on the way why not simply retire?

"That would be the easy option, to put my feet up. But that's not me. I've got other things to do, not for anyone else but your myself. I don't see the point in throwing in the towel just because your biggest dream has been taken away from you.

"I've trained but I haven't raced for two years and I feel I'm two years short in my career. I still feel mentally strong. If the mind's willing and the body's able, age isn't a problem."

It been a lifetime's work already. The facts of the young Liz Lynch's early career are well known. Brought up on a council estate, she was thrown into athletics by a PE master with a yen for cross-country and a membership at Dundee Harriers. At the club she met her mentor, coach Harry Bennett, who instilled a competitive philosophy which has shaped her life.

More than that, Bennett cajoled Liz's parents to take their daughter out of a jute mill and send her to America. He funded the journey; he even picked her Mormon college, because he understood his protege would require the support such a restricted environment could provide.

There's a shine in her eyes when McColgan talks about Bennett. Though he died while she was a student, he had already fitted her for the long haul. By the time Eilish was born she was a Commonwealth 10,000m champion. Within another year she had added a world crown, a world record and was ready to step up in distance. The marathon, the greatest of all challenges, is an extraordinary event, requiring a fanatical level of preparation for the most unpredictable results. It is a roller coaster, she admits, and not everyone enjoys the ride. How does she feel on the morning of the race?

"I just wish I wasn't there! It's like D-Day and you really have a feeling of dread.

"The worst thing is you know you're going to hurt, it's going to be tough. So many emotions are going through your mind, it's very hard to deal with. One of the thoughts is 'Why do I do it?' But it's not until you've run the race, good or bad, that you realise why you're there - the enjoyment of it. But the worst side of it is at the start."

As a teenager, Bennett had thrown books at her, to help her attune to the sport. One she enjoyed was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, though these days she has worked out her own version.

"When you're running, you've got to keep yourself as relaxed as possible so you've got to concentrate on your breathing. I tend to go into myself: I listen to my body and my muscles, and I try to relax myself when I'm running.

"When I'm focused and when I'm right up there, I haven't got time to think of things about me. Normally all I hear is a buzz ... you just run through it. On the track I don't hear anything."
It's not the thought of a gold medal which drives her through the silence, nor the prospect of fame. It's a belief that she can do better.

The closest she came to her perfect race, she reckons, was in Tokyo.

"We had Eilish with us, and she had really bad ear problems. I'd just arrived in Japan and I was up walking the floor with her all night, a three-month old baby. Then I took my period on the morning of the race, so it was all doom and gloom.

"I thought, 'Well I don't care, I'll just go and run flat out'. I honestly thought I'd run badly. But I thought, 'Stuff it, I'm just going to go from start to finish'.

"I remember running 10,000m in about 31 minutes and I thought I'd die a death. But I just kept going. I was surprised. In the end, I took two minutes off my personal best for the half-marathon and a good chunk off the world record."

Results like that are built on a fierce asceticism, and it's not surprising that she deplores drug cheats. There's a bit of history too - after all she was denied Olympic gold in 1988 only by Olga Bondarenko, from a since-discredited Soviet team.

These days, McColgan supports proposals to bring in blood testing and though sympathetic to some of those enmeshed in the current drug-taking scandal, she frowns on what one might charitably call a careless approach to food supplements.

"There's so much stuff on the market now," she tells you. "For me, before I consume anything, I sit down and read the label and I phone up to check. Some blame has to fall on the athletes."
Then there's Linford Christie. He failed a drugs test at the Seoul Olympics, a result later overturned because the sprinter said he had taken ginseng. Last year in Dortmund, he was found to be 100 times over the limit for Nandrolone.

"That's a different story altogether," she says. "He was extremely high. Goodness knows how he was that high. It's not for me to say he's not taking it or he is taking it, but at the end of the day he's been involved twice and you know ... it's a very hard subject to approach.

"There are people who are blatantly doing it, and others who are not. It's very harsh when they get banned, but I'd rather see a stronger stance."

That's for the future, and McColgan is realistic enough to anticipate the days when competitive athletics are behind her. Already, through her health club, she is involved in the rehabilitation of patients discharged from organ transplant and heart operations.

"When I see the progression and enthusiasm they find for their lives again, it gives me as much enjoyment as running London or winning medals. That's where I'll be when I stop running altogether."

Some television work would appeal, she admits, but she was once told by a PR company she would need elocution lessons.

"I just said, 'Yeah, stuff that. I'm happy being a Scot'. If people don't like my accent or don't accept me like I am, too bad. Why hide what you are? So I turned my back on that right away."

She's had the problem before. After Eilish was born she told Woman magazine she hoped eventually for four to six children. The front cover from March 1992 is on display in the health club. There she is, smiling with her darling daughter, the picture embellished with the slogan: "Liz McColgan - my race to have 46 children". In the real world, before even her third child arrives, she will have to sit at home and watch an Olympic marathon. She'll be "very agitated", she admits.

"It would be easy to sit back and say I'd have won it. I wouldn't do that. It's when you see girls you know, who aren't any better than you, that you realise you could be out there competing, that's the annoying thing. At the end of the day, I'm sitting in Carnoustie with my feet on a chair watching it and they're out there doing the work. But there's no comparison."

'She sang the songs, as the songs should be sung'

Ottilie Patterson, the singer who became Britain’s greatest exponent of the blues, has died in Ayr aged 79, after living for four years in a local nursing home.

Patterson, who at the height of her powers was compared with Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, sang with the Chris Barber Band in the 1950s and 1960s, gigging with some of the giants of jazz and blues. She married Barber in 1959, and though they divorced in 1981, they remained friends, even performing together after he remarried.

“She was a most excellent singer and a lovely person,” Barber said last night. “The world will be poorer without her.”

Patterson was born in Comber, Co Down, the daughter of an Ulsterman and his Latvian wife (Ottilie is a Latvian form of Matthilde). She trained to be an art teacher, but as a student sang with local Belfast bands.

In 1954, during a school holiday, she travelled to England, to visit Humphry Lyttelton’s club in Central London, where she asked if she could sing with the band.

“Humph always said no,” recalled Barber, “but Beryl Bryden, another larger-than-life singer, told Ottilie she should go and see us.”

Patterson did so, arriving at the London Jazz Centre on Greek Street in Soho, when the Chris Barber Band was playing — though the band leader and trombonist was at home unwell.

“At the end of the evening, the others were packing the instruments up when Johnny Parker, the piano player, started playing,” Barber recalled. “Ottilie got up on stage and started singing, whereupon, in true Hollywood musical fashion, the rest of the band got their instruments out of their cases and began to play.”

In a quick succession of gigs, Patterson proved her star quality, but Barber was unable at first to persuade her to give up her teaching career in Ulster. However, by the time he formally wrote inviting her to join the band, she had changed her mind. Patterson answered in a telegram: “I’m coming, if I have to ride the rods [jump the train].”

Patterson recorded a series of albums under her own name and loved music of all types, but it was her command of the blues that was magical, Barber recalled.

“Blues is a mixture of musics; the metre of the singing, the way the words are accented is all part of it,” he said. “Ordinary black people reacted to her singing with so much excitement, it was almost embarrassing.”

In 1959, Ottilie gave one of the greatest performances of her life when she was invited on to the stage at Smitty’s Corner in Chicago to sing with Muddy Waters’s band. “The reaction she got from the people was exceptionally moving,” recalled Barber.

“She sang in a way that meant something to the audience, and they responded to her as if she was from Mississippi. She sang the songs, as the songs should be sung.”

Patterson received the same respsonse on her final American tour, when, in the summer of 1962, she sang at President John F Kennedy’s First International Jazz Festival in Washington. After another show-stopping performance, she was approached by the Staples Singers, the most accomplished of American Gospel groups, and invited to record with them.

“Ottilie was so scared, she couldn’t do it,” recalled Barber. “Mavis Staples was the absolute marker for gospel singing — Ottilie said ‘I can’t compete with that’.”

That reticence and her reluctance to travel hampered Patterson’s career. She was also self-conscious about her looks. On one occasion, a make-up girl on a TV show told her: “I thought you must be a singer, because you wouldn’t be here for your face.”

Barber said: “People in showbusiness are harsh. She felt like she was meant to look like someone."

Though she and Barber moved to Ulster in 1972, he continued to tour and almost inevitiably, they began to drift apart.

Following the divorce, Patterson moved to St Albans with her mother, and then north to Scotland, where her sister lived in Ayr.

Troubled by epilepsy from chilhood, she also suffered from depression, which intensified as she aged. She died ten days ago in Ayr and was buried in Co Down on Tuesday.

God and Wittgenstein before Reese Witherspoon

If it weren’t for the Sunday telephone calls from Reese Witherspoon’s people, Sang Cha, once a high-flying Hollywood agent, might not be where he is today.

Where he is, precisely, is in the draughty manse adjoining St Mungo’s Parish Church in Alloa, a chilly, 14-room cavern he shares with Wittgenstein, his border collie pup. It is an unpromising setting in a tough little industrial town, and the contrast with his past life could hardly be more vivid. Ten years ago this newly ordained Church of Scotland minister was immersed in a world of scripts and casting couches, working 80-hour weeks and bending to the whims of stars such as Witherspoon, Juliette Lewis and Sandra Bullock.

“The hours I didn’t mind but church was important to me,” he explained yesterday. “I got paged twice on a Sunday, which has always been a special day for me. There was a casting call in NYC, for Sweet Home Alabama, with Reese Witherspoon. Something happened and I had to deal with it on a Sunday. That was breaking point.”

In this corner of Clackmannanshire they refer to Mr Cha’s epiphany as the biggest conversion since St Paul took the road to Damascus. Even the Reverend himself sounds a little perplexed by his change in circumstances and admits to feelings of “fear and awe” at the prospect of the future.

His trepidation is understandable. In its Victorian pomp, 700 communicants squeezed into St Mungo’s pews, and his predecessors in the pulpit have included five Moderators of the Church of Scotland. These days attendances have dipped below 100, and the church is at crisis point.

Mr Cha, 34, said he is steeled for the fight. His weapons are a PhD in theology, an engaging preaching style, a sense of humour and the wiles of his Tinseltown past, which he will rely on to woo the lapsed Presbyterians of the Forth Valley.

At 21, at the William Morris Agency on Wilshire Boulevard, he endeared himself to the legendary John Burnham, the agency’s head of motion pictures, by smoothing the feathers of a ruffled Sean Penn.

He soon found himself booking restaurants and buying cigars for A-list film stars and hotshot producers.

“When you are on a desk as an assistant to Burnham, you have to figure things out, like how to get your clients into Spago or how you can get hold of a box of Cohibas at short notice,” he said.

“You have to be an operator. That skill set I picked up will be invaluable in Alloa, making something out of pretty much anything. Making things happen, that’s part of churchmanship.”

Mr Cha was born in Seoul, a third generation Presbyterian, whose grandparents had been converted by John Ross, the Scottish missionary who translated the Old Testament into Korean. His family moved to New Jersey on America’s East Coast when he was 8.

He went on to study business at the University of Pennsylvania, and on graduation moved to California and into the movie business After three years he had tired of the fleshpots of Beverly Hills and signed up for Americorps, a national community service organisation. Not for the last time, Mr Cha found himself at a crossroads, awaiting a posting.

“I was thinking Hawaii, they sent me to Alaska,”

There, in Anchorage, he worked in a prison, teaching basic English to inmates who could barely read, and worked at an after-school club.

“During that time I seriously reflected on what is happening to us as people, and I knew I had to do something,” he said. That something was a divinity degree at the University of Cambridge, and a further theology degree in Edinburgh.

Mr Cha was happy in Edinburgh but when the vacancy in Alloa came up, he heard God calling. He was appointed to the post by a presbytery vote of 133 to one. He jokes: “What does it say in Corinthians? ‘I will flush out the unbeliever among you’.”

Humour will serve him well. The fear, too, will keep him sharp, he thinks.

“People say fear is a bad thing, but sometimes it hones and clarifies a purpose of who we are,” he said. “I am aware of the size of the task ahead. If I don’t as a leader rally the troops and turn the ship around with the help of the parish, there will be no more St Mungo’s. Everybody knows that. It is the most interesting fight in town. That’s why I joined it.”

* How good is the photo by Tom Maine? Superb

Arthur Smith's sober look at celebrity

Ten years ago at the Edinburgh fringe, a group of stand-ups and journalists were glumly discussing the imminent demise from alcoholism of the comedian Arthur Smith, when a strangely familiar cadaver walked into the bar.

“Arthur?” said a voice in disbelief. Smith held his thin arms wide and proclaimed to the disbelievers: “I have arisen, but the jokes remain the same.”

This year, alive, well and on the wagon, Smith returns to the Edinburgh for a new show - “maybe my 25th” - which is built around the drinking habit that nearly killed him. The title speaks for itself: Arthur Smith’s Pissed-up Chat Show.

The format will be familiar to television viewers of Parkinson, Wogan, Norton et al, but the rules will be radically different from mainstream on-the-couch entertainment. Smith, 56, the host, will be stone cold sober (as he must be, one drink could kill him). His interviewees will be breathalysed to make sure they are drunk.

The compere already has some of his guests lined up, and has been surprised at the very positive reaction he has received from his friends in comedy.

“It’s an excuse for them to be drunk I suppose,” said Smith. “People generally are quite drunk when they go on late night chat shows in Edinburgh. Normally they would try to be sensible. In this show, they’ve no need to be. In fact it would be disappointing if they were sensible.”

The show features stand-up mixed with with facts and figures about alcohol and its consequences, before Smith leads his audience into the main event: his celebrity drunk.

He said: “I figure that if someone starts on a long rambling drunken story I can interrupt and give a commentary: ‘You’ll notice the drunk here is doing the classic manooeuvre of embarking on a long-winded, boring story, repetitive and without any punchline...’ before turning back to the guest, and saying, ‘Please, carry on.’

“Drunk pople often say more interesting things than they do when they’re sober, or chained up by a PR girl. In vino veritas, I refer you to Pliny the Elder.”

After a lifetime on the razzle, Smith almost died of acute necrotising pancreatitis (“when you have the necrotising in the middle you are in real trouble - my pancreas was consuiming itself”). He was seriously ill for four months. Now a diabetic, he looks askance at his drunken past.

There’s a comic path running through all this, which appears to lead to the moral high ground. Smith admits as much.

“When I first quit,” said, “I thought, ‘how stupid is drinking?’ It’s such a dangerous thing, yet it's treated like our jolly friend. I used to go out at midnight and look at the drunks weaving up the road near my house, and thought ‘Jesus, they look so strange’. People absue it so badly. I’ve so many friends who have fallen foul of booze.

"But I wouldn’t want to adopt a moralistic tone. Everyone’s funnier when you've had a drink. If there was no drink there would be no stand up."

Not all of Smith’s fringe shows have been hits. Sod, the follow up to his hit show An Evening With Gary Lineker, caused at least part of his audience to fall asleep. Another production - the title eludes him - was meant to be staged halfway up the Pentland Hills, south of the city. The buses bringing the audience were unable to climb up the dirt track and the show had to be performed instead in a nearby beer garden.

This year’s offering at least has a certain commercial logic. Edinburgh boasts more bars and restaurant per head than city in Britain, and has a legendary drinking culture. With it’s broad-minded fringe audience the box office should be good, or at least that how it seems to the unbefuddled comedian.

"Edinburgh’s like a little cocoon during the festival - it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t matter,” he said. “Audiences are genuinely up for something, they’re a pretty sophisticated bunch."

They have to be sophisticated for this? “No. Yes. They’re sort of open, aren’t they? Goodness knows what the show will be like, to be honest. It might be terrible.”

* Arthur Smith’s Pissed-up Chat Show, Pleasance Somewhere

Does God want more than Devo Max?

In the wake of SNP’s apparently miraculous majority in the Holyrood election, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland  has acknowledged that God works in mysterious ways and instructed its officers to investigate the consequences of  independence for the Kirk.

The inquiry was outlined yesterday by the Rev Dr Douglas Gay, the commissioner whose proposal was endorsed in Edinburgh.  It will report to a future assembly, spelling  out the constitutional challenge of full independence, and providing a road-map for the church’s new role.

Politicians and economists may fret about the consequences of Scotland going it alone, but, said Dr Gay, the church had equal cause for concerns about the future.   The Bible is its foundation, but the Act of Union and the Articles Declaratory are its biggest  buttresses, helping to enshrine  its  unique position in national life.

To make matters worse for those who dislike radical change, Dr Gay, an SNP member,  was inclined to believe the Lord does not favour “Devo-Max (a few more peers for the Scottish Parliament), but  more inclined to confederalism (equal powers for equal nations). If He does, the constitutional implications for the Church of Scotland are immense.

“A confederal solution  would recognise  that an independent Scotland should be in structured relationships with other states,” said Dr Gay,   “The Union of the Crowns would carry on.  The Queen would send her annual  letter to the General Assembly, but it might no longer say  that ‘I pledge to uphold the Presbyterian nature of Scotland’, because that belongs to the Treaty of Union, and not to the Union of the Crowns.”

The Kirk’s standing as a national institution would be undermined in other ways  by a  new constitutional settlement. In the 1707, at the time of the union,  Presbyterianism was a truly national religion, its values invading every corner of Scottish life.  That had changed completely, said  Dr Gay, a lecturer in practical theology at Glasgow University. 

 “Scottish society was remade in the 19^th century by large scale immigration from Ireland,” he said. “If you only characterise Scotland as Presbyterian  you also miss out the other religious traditions. The future has to be one in which we are all recognised.

“The Kirk is described as  ‘a’ National Church not ‘the’ national church in the Articles Declaratory. That is a very important distinction. Whatever the recognition of the Church of Scotland within a future constitutional settlement, it can’t be one of  privilege.”

Dr Gay’s approach requires substantial shifting of the Kirk’s mental furniture.  Much of its ceremonial is tied up in its status, acknowledged by Queen, through the Lord High Commissioner, who passes her letter into general assembly as  its opening ceremony.  “These are interesting moments, they  disclose something  about the relationship between church and state,” said Dr Gay.

On issues such as the morality of nuclear weapons,  the Church position already coincides with SNP policy, opposing the Trident base at Faslane.   This could prove significant in building support for independence,  said Dr Gay.

 “If the Kirk continues to suggest that the favoured option is to get rid of nuclear weapons, and there is one party in Scotland offering people a means to do that, it is clearly going to have an effect on the climate of opinion in Scotland, and patterns of political support,” he said.

The Church been in the vanguard of political debate about Scotland’s future. Home Rule, championed by the Labour Party in the 1940s, became a cornerstone of Kirk discussion from 1947.  In the 1980s, the General Assembly became a proving ground for the devolutionary ideas that flowered in the 1990s.  For many in the Kirk, it was fitting that when the Scottish Parliament first met, it did so in the Assembly Hall.   

Dr Gay conceded however, that many Church members harboured a deep-rooted hostility to nationalism, dating back to the struggles against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.  

“ This is a theological and ethical suspicion of nationalism; for some people it is a very toxic word and idea,” he said. “Any theological consideration of it has to address those very toxic things. The Church will make a great contribution to this debate.  Instinctively we are continually guided to respect  each other, by love thy neighbour – these are the key ethical that lie behind our stance on political issues.”  

Ian Galloway, the convenor of the Church and Society Council said it was essential that the Kirk addressed in its deliberations the possibility of independence.

“The worst thing for the church would be to be unprepared for constitutional change,” he said. “Whatever the outcome, we have to work through the implications.”