Leading Scottish columnist respected across politics
IAN BELL, who has died aged 59, was regarded by many as Scotland’s preeminent newspaper columnist, his admirers ranging from staunch Unionists to the Scottish First Minister and SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon.
Bell was the journalistic standard-bearer of the nationalist Left north of the border but his formidable talent was recognised further afield, notably in 1997 when he won the Orwell Prize for political writing.
There is little doubt that Bell would have been much better known had he become a stalwart of television and radio discussion programmes. His encyclopaedic knowledge, as well as a caustic wit, would have undoubtedly made him a regular. But a stammer, which could be pronounced at times, kept him off the airwaves.
His sudden death came shortly after that of his great friend and soul-mate, the author Willie McIlvanney, who was the subject of one of Bell’s last columns for The
Herald. His final column was a scathing denunciation of Hilary Benn’s widely admired Commons speech in support of air strikes against Isil in Syria. It did not impress Bell, who attacked the shadow foreign secretary’s “flimsy, culpable rhetoric”, adding: “You don’t have to go back to Cicero to find phrase-makers playing fast and loose with the truth: that’s politics. Benn did something else: in place of argument, he gave the Commons gallery emotion, otherwise known as ‘passion’. ”
Ian Bell was born on January 7 1956, and brought up on an Edinburgh council estate. His great-grandfather was John Connolly, brother of James, the socialist and trade unionist executed by the British Army for his role in the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Dublin, and it was nationalism, albeit of the Scottish variety, that was often the dominant feature of Bell’s writing. A prizewinning English pupil at Portobello High School, he went on to read English at Edinburgh University.
He landed his first job as a sub-editor on The Scotsman, then in its heyday as Scotland’s newspaper of record. But it was as a columnist that Bell quickly made his mark.
For all fiercely held views he had a wide and catholic array of friends of every political persuasion, and was often to be found at the centre of a diverse company in the bar of Jinglin’ Geordie’s public house – then The Scotsman’s favourite watering hole in the Old Town’s Fleshmarket Close. The always varied fortunes of Hibernian Football Club, Bell’s longtime passion, were frequently top of the barroom agenda.
In a career that spanned more than 30 years, Bell commuted back and forth from east to west several times – leaving The
Scotsman for The Herald and then back again, before settling in later years for the Glasgow papers for which he was a regular columnist until his death. He also edited the short-lived Scottish edition of The
Observer and worked briefly subsequently for the now defunct daily Business am in Edinburgh.
It might strike some as ironic that one of his most prolific periods, during which he won the Orwell Prize, came when as an unashamed Left-wing nationalist writer he was the principal columnist for The
Scotsman, then under the direction of publisher Andrew Neil and editor Martin Clarke, now editor of Mail Online. He followed Clarke to what was a lucrative, but short-lived, spell at the Daily Record in Glasgow.
Thereafter, he returned to the Herald newspapers, contributing columns to both as well as sketches on proceedings at the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood.
Ian Bell was also a successful author, writing three acclaimed biographies, two of Bob Dylan and one of Robert Louis Stephenson.
In latter years he lived in the Borders. He is survived by his wife, Mandy, and his son, Sean, also a journalist.