Champion of ‘auld alliance’ with France
LORD Brodie, 6 , promotes strong relations between Scotland and France as head of the Franco-Scottish Society.
He is the son of a senior Church of Scotland minister who took a law degree at Edinburgh University and became an advocate.
His rise to Scotland’s senior court took him through various advisory roles in Whitehall.
He is married with three children, and lists interests including fencing and walking, and protecting the civic grandeur of the Scottish capital, where he lives.
The Franco-Scottish Society says it exists to ‘foster contacts between the French and the Scots and to develop their traditional friendship enshrined – since at least 12 5 – in the Auld Alliance’.
Historically the Auld Alliance was aimed against England. The last Scottish monarch to pursue it, before her execution by Elizabeth I, was Mary Queen of Scots, whose recently established statue in Linlithgow near Edinburgh was financed with the help of the Franco-Scottish Society.
The Society, founded in 18 5, describes its mission as to ‘increase and disseminate in Scotland knowledge of France and the French way of life, with particular reference to its economic, social, political, historical and cultural institutions and developments’.
Honorary presidents of the society, founded in 1 85, include the French ambassador to Britain, Catherine Colonna, and Sir David Edward, a Scottish judge who also served as a judge of the Luxembourgbased EU Court of Justice.