Favourite for Trump EU role made claims over Scots position

● Malloch said he was president of ‘Ancient Scottish Universities Trust’

The frontrunner to become US president Donald Trump’s ambassador to the European Union claims to have served as head of a Scottish educational institution, despite the fact there is no record of its existence, The Scotsman can reveal.

Ted Malloch, a political scientist tipped to secure the Brussels post, wrote in his autobiography that he served as “president of the Ancient Scottish Universities Trust”.

Mr Malloch, one of Mr Trump’s most prominent supporters in Britain, is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen and once helmed its US development arm.

But in his book, Davos, Aspen, & Yale: My Life Behind the Elite Curtain as a Global Sherpa, he suggests his role in Scottish education was far more extensive, with oversight of accounts at not only Aberdeen, but also Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews, where his “charge was to bring them into the 21st century financially”.

However, there is no record of an Ancient Scottish Universities Trust. A spokeswoman for Universities Scotland said it had no knowledge of any organisation by that name.

Mr Malloch, who has joked

0 Ted Malloch is widely tipped to secure an ambassadorship that the UK could become the 51st state of the US, also claimed in the book, published last month, he had been “made a laird” by the Court of the Lord Lyon, Scotland’s official heraldic authority.

However, Elizabeth Roads, Lyon Clerk, said: “This office is not involved in any way with lairds. Lairds are people who own large estates and are called laird by the locals on the estate. You can’t create or grant a lairdship, there is nosuchpower.mrmalloch did petition for a Grant of Arms and received a coat of arms many years ago now, but he was not made a laird. I suspect he may have been confused.”

Mr Malloch did respond to inquiries.

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