The Herald - The Herald Magazine
WRITING TO REACH YOU
Brian Taylor and David Leask have spent their careers holding power to account. Now they are joining The Herald as columnists. Their aim? The same as it’s always been: to explain and inform
BRIAN Taylor, BBC Scotland’s long-serving political editor, has always had an ambition to write for The Herald. He first started reading the paper when he moved to Glasgow as a teenager and has been a reader and subscriber ever since. Now he’s keen to use his new weekly column, which starts in The Herald today, to carry on doing what he’s always aimed to do as a journalist: find stuff out and tell folk about it.
Brian, who retired from the BBC this week, has been finding stuff out for more than 40 years, although his first attempt at writing was actually poetry (his girlfriend, now wife, thankfully talked him out of it, he says).
He then joined the student newspaper at St Andrews, soon becoming editor, and also worked on the St Andrews Citizen.
“It was the hot summer of 1976 and I was blown away by it,” he says, “The first person I interviewed was Milton Friedman and the second was the Crown Prince of Japan. It got me hooked.”
After graduating, he landed his first fulltime job at the P&J in Aberdeen and wrote about politics almost from the start – and what a time to be doing it: Callaghan was PM, the government was in crisis, the Tories had a new leader in Margaret Thatcher, and there was a referendum on Scottish devolution in 1979 (there would be a few more referendums for Brian to cover later). Brian says those early, exciting days taught him some of the rules, and principles, that have guided him since.
“I was always keen on politics,” he says. “I was aware some people thought politics was just for the politicians themselves, but I’ve never believed that – my experience is there are some politicians who are excellent, some who are experts and could hold down a serious job in the professions but choose to follow a public career, and there are some you wouldn’t send for a message. That’s the result of the electoral roulette wheel we spin. But mostly, they’re well inclined, they’re trying to do their best. What I believed I was doing, from those early days at the P&J, was trying to hold them to account.”
After nearly ten years in newspapers, Brian moved to the BBC as a reporter and quickly sensed that broadcasting might be right for him, even if some of the technology and the jargon took a bit of getting used to. “I was given a screen test,” he says, “and some people would’ve been nervous, but I was the opposite.
“I found it invigorating and stimulating. I loved it. It felt natural to be speaking to the camera rather than taking down notes and transcribing them. And it still does
35 years on. I literally felt in that first screen test, ‘OK, it’s all a bit strange but I think I’m going to be able to do this’.”
Brian’s time at BBC Scotland coincided with momentous change and political events, including the fall of Thatcher, but for Brian there’s always been one underlying theme.
“I covered a lot of Thatcher,” he says, “but throughout my whole time in journalism – which is now 42 years – there’s been this underlying question: the Scottish question. I covered the establishment of the parliament, I covered its first 20 years, but I covered as well the underlying argument about independence, the offer of independence, the attempts by other parties to counter that offer, and that has been the bulwark of my endeavours.”
BRIAN believes it’s right that the Scottish question has dominated much of his work. “It’s the underbelly of Scottish politics,” he says. “It’s always been there. The demand for self-government was not created by the SNP – the sense of a wish that Scotland’s interests should be taken more evidently into account – that wish created the SNP, brought them into being in 1934, brought the suggestion of self-government to the fore with Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and that same sense that Scotland required distinctive treatment all but obliterated the Scottish Conservatives.”
Brian says it’s ironic that two things helped save the Scottish Conservatives from near oblivion after 1997: firstly, the creation of a Scottish Parliament which they utterly opposed and, secondly, holding elections to that parliament under proportional representation, which they also utterly opposed.
“Remember,” he says, “that the origin of the Scots Tories lies at least partly in the Jacobites and in opposition to the union in 1707. Things come around, and have a very, very long history. Someone once said that devolution is like evolution, it just takes longer.”
It is this kind of perspective, that sense of political, social and cultural history and context, that Brian wants to bring to his column in The Herald.
“I want to write about the things that concern people and the things that intrigue and interest people. So it will be the topics of the day, the issues of the day, but I will try always to place them in context: why these announcements are being made. I will be aware at all times of that underbelly of Scottish political life; people’s views on how Scotland should be governed.”
“It’s a big topic,” he says, “and it has consequences – all the parties now recognise that. There’s a fundamental faultline in Scottish public life, and therefore in political life, and it’s whether Scotland should be independent or part of the UK.
You don’t resolve that by sitting down and having a group hug, you have to work at that one and that political fault-line has now created in Scotland a partisan fault-line between the largest party advocating independence, which is the SNP, and the largest party most vigorously advocating the union, which is the Conservatives.
It’s also led to the partial – I stress, partial – eclipse of the Labour party. People say the Scottish question is a secondary issue, and in a way it is, in that it’s not like employment and the criminal justice system and healthcare and education, but it influences, and can determine, all of these things.”
Brian says he will also be applying the principles of objectivity that he always sought to apply at the BBC.
“I give an analytical opinion which is very different from a tendentious opinion,” he says. “I will say that the point that the minister is making today is all very well but it’s a mile apart from what she said seven and a half months ago – let me remind you of what she said. And then I will try to analyse why that has happened.
“What I never do is say, ‘she said this seven and a half months ago, she’s saying a different thing today and what she’s saying today is tosh’. I will never do that. It’s not in me. You’ve got to explain the context. It becomes intuitive.”
Brian also vigorously defends the BBC against the accusations that come around that it is biased one way or another. “I still feel that the BBC, and particularly BBC Scotland, is the finest broadcast news organisation on the planet – I feel that very strongly.
It’s driven by a huge and collective desire to find stuff out and tell folk about it. The BBC is also, and always has been, despite the jibing to the contrary from some sources, passionately committed to independent and analytical coverage of politics. I was never, for a scintilla of a second, asked to tailor or alter a piece – it didn’t even occur, it’s not part of the nature of the BBC. So I leave the Beeb with my admiration for the organisation still there.” Brian is also delighted to be joining The Herald.
“The Herald is a paper I’ve read and subscribed to since my parents moved to Glasgow when I was 17 and I’ve been a reader ever since,” he says.
“I like the fact that it’s an ancient paper with a modern outlook – it has that sense of history and therefore a sense of context. The Herald is also passionate about Scotland but has a global outlook as well. It’s got a culture and intelligence to it and, in my zone of politics, it likes an open but informed discourse, not slapping out random views. Above all, it’s a news operation and it’s about getting out the facts and telling truth to power. I like all of that.”
DAVID LEASK
FOR a man whose career has been spent working with words – in Russian, Spanish and Italian as well as in English – it’s no surprise that terms such as ‘deracinated’ flow freely from David
Leask’s lips. A university-trained linguist who worked initially as a news translator before moving into a career at the sharp end of journalism, the 52-year-old is using the word (it means to be uprooted) to describe a childhood which saw him “brought up all over the place,” as he puts it. “I’ve moved around in my life endlessly,” he says, “to such an extent that I don’t really feel at home anywhere”.
There is a starting point, of course. There always is, and his is Kirkwall in Orkney. By his own admission, he’s a sort of Northern Isles cliché. “I don’t think there is any non-Orcadian in my blood. I’m an Orcadian going back hundreds of years.”
Now freelance, Leask wrote for The Herald in two spells, most recently between 2010 and 2019.
His ambit covered everything from campaigns to crime, investigations, to the environment, politics and social issues. Readers will know him as a Chief Reporter whose intelligence, drive and perspicacity made him one of the leading lights in journalism.
But the slight outsider element provided by that Orcadian background and the peripatetic childhood have given him an added edge, he thinks. He says: “It makes it that much harder for people to pigeonhole you and accuse you of some sort of a bias … I often describe myself as deracinated person and that’s quite useful in journalism. If you go about meeting people in Glasgow or
Edinburgh, they can’t place you by class, geographical location, religion. That’s quite useful.”
It’s particularly helpful in the west of Scotland, where sectarianism remains an ill. Moreover, “it gives you a slightly different perspective on national identity as well, which becomes far more complex if you’re from a north and island background. People from those backgrounds tend to be more comfortable with multiple layers of identity, and that’s something I’ve inherited.
“You don’t have to worry so much about who you are in the same way that sometimes people on the mainland do.”
His knowledge of and passion for tongues other than English offers another uncommon perspective. He studied languages at Glasgow University – his main subject was Russian – and worked as a translator in the 1990s, initially overseas.
That impressive skillset and the worldview it fostered are a key driver of his interests and of his approach to his work.
“We often think of languages as things that separate people whereas in reality it’s something which unites us, especially in Europe when so many of our languages are so very similar,” he says.
“In Scotland and in the UK there is a deficit of language understanding, and what that usually means is a huge deficit in cross-cultural understanding, because languages are a way of connecting to other places and other people. If you don’t have that, it’s much harder to connect and to understand.”
The point of learning a language, he thinks, is to re-wire your brain in such a way as to allow you – or force you – to see something from someone else’s point of view.
He goes as far as to draw a line between what he calls “the politics of nationalist populism in the United Kingdom” and the problems associated with a society trapped in what linguists call ‘The Golden Cage’, a monoculture for monoglots. “I suspect Britain’s retreat from studying languages is one of the causes of Brexit,” he adds.
CONTENTIOUS? Maybe. But polemic and soapbox oratory aren’t Leask’s style. In his latest incarnation as a columnist on The Herald he sees himself more as an analyst, a facilitator for the views of those he characterises as being smarter than him – people such the experts we have come to rely on so heavily in the pandemic and which have become a fixture of the daily briefings and interviews.
“We have a lot of opinion [in Scotland] and opinion is great – I’m not going to knock people who have opinions,” he says. “But what we have in Scotland that’s a huge advantage is a layer of our society which is really well informed. We have a huge university sector with huge science and technology sectors.
“We have a lot of expertise locked up in our public bodies, in our local and national government, in our business. People who really know what they’re about. And sometimes these people can find it quite difficult to explain what it is they do to the rest of us because it’s so complicated.” Which is where he comes in.
Over his 20 years in journalism, David Leask has worked on many big stories, but among the ones he’s proudest of and which he has enjoyed writing the most are those concerning a defiantly unsexy topic: Scottish Limited Partnerships, legal investment vehicles implicated in massive, wide-scale money-laundering and fraud. By his estimation, his stories on them run into the hundreds. But that tenacity and that ability to shine a light on a complex subject goes to the heart of what makes him tick.
“Quite often in journalism people are rewarded for telling stories people want to hear,” he says.
“Sometimes I feel that telling the stories people don’t want to hear is where you want to be – to really challenge people with things they don’t want to know about, and sometimes won’t have the time or energy to engage with, but which we still have to push forward as journalists because they’re just so important.”
There isn’t much in journalism, then, that David Leask hasn’t tried his hand at over the last two decades – with the exception of that storied staple of the newspaper world, the football match report.
It’s not that he doesn’t like the game – he loves it, and this despite being an Aberdeen fan – it’s just that, well, you can’t do everything, can you?
I covered a lot of Thatcher but the underlying theme was always the Scottish question