The INSUFFERABLE Citizen Kane
He’s the darling of the Yes campaign, a self-aggrandising pop-song philosopher whose breathtaking pomposity is matched only by his disdain for those who support the Union...
AFEW days ago, the musician, writer, consultant, theorist and activist Pat Kane made an illstarred appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme, where there was probably not time to give him the fulsome description he favours for himself. There was nothing about his upper second-class honours MA from Glasgow University, his former rectorship of same, his founding editorship of the Sunday Herald, writings for the Guardian, books, blog or life membership of what he likes to call the Scotterati.
Suffice it to say he was on the radio in his capacity as an ‘advisor’ for Yes Scotland. And all was going swimmingly for the first minute or so of the piece on social justice in Scotland until, inevitably, Mr Kane was forced to allow someone else to speak.
Thereafter the Nationalist bile poured forth. When anchorwoman Mishal Husain made a perfectly valid and obvious point, Mr Kane dismissed it with feigned incredulity as ‘a silly statement’.
Writer Graeme Archer, giving the Unionist side of the argument, was repeatedly interrupted and shouted down by Mr Kane, who kept calling him George. On being reminded a second time that his name was Graeme, Mr Kane responded rudely that it did not really matter.
‘You’re a generic voice,’ the one-time singer with Eighties pop duo Hue and Cry told his opponent. And in little over five minutes of ill-tempered hectoring, Mr Kane presented a case for independence which was so chippy, charmless and insular that surely even Alex Salmond would have cringed.
Only Scotland shared an appetite for social justice with ‘normal, mainstream’ European countries, he claimed, while the rest of the UK was so out of kilter as to be ‘ bizarre’. Under independence, he claimed, Scotland could ‘inspire’ the rest of the UK to seek and find its social conscience.
Many of those listening south of the Border will have found 50-year- old Mr Kane’s moral arrogance breathtaking in the extreme. North of the Border, however, such contortions have become almost routine for one of the most shrill and sanctimonious voices in the independence debate.
He does, of course, face stiff competition in that regard. His ex-wife Joan McAlpine MSP, the journalist-turnedSNP-shouter, gives him as good a run for his money as anyone.
For a quarter of a century, Mr Kane has lectured anyone who would listen on his vision of an independent Scotland, citing for all he is worth those philosophers, poets, post modernists and futurologists with whom we might not expect a working-class boy from Lanarkshire commutersville to be conversant.
Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate Mr Kane’s dedication to the cause of impressing his audience with the contents of his bookshelves. He once described American philosopher Noam Chomsky as ‘ a reliable Chardonnay in the wine rack of geopolitical punditry’.
Intelligent, well-read, cultured… there are clearly no flies on Mr Kane. But is his near-fanatical brand of nationalism eating away at his perspective, both on himself and on the country he seeks to liberate?
Describing his anticipated reaction to a No vote in September, Mr Kane declares: ‘It will be a heart blow and a head blow. I would need to reconstruct a large part of myself.’
A Scotland remaining in the UK, he predicts, ‘will be a depressed place for quite a while. I think there will be a leak of optimism, idealism, passion and energy’.
This bereaved attitude belongs to a man who has never known an independent Scotland, nor seen a single poll which indicates that splitting from the UK is the will of most Scottish people.
As one commentator pointed out this week: ‘There can be a No majority only if more people have voted No than voted Yes, and very clearly those people won’t be depressed at all.’
But Mr Kane refers, surely, to the depression which will set in among people such as him, the Scotterati, the intellectuals, the thinkers, the artists and creators itching to form the new Enlightenment in a ‘ free’ Scotland. We must conclude he means a slump will ensue because the more clever and moral people will have lost.
The superiority complex which many critics attribute to Mr Kane is born, perhaps, from an early dose of the opposite ailment. In that most instructive Radio 4 debate, Graeme Archer did not get far with the story of his previous addresses in Glasgow’s Maryhill and London’s Hackney before a furious Mr Kane broke in: ‘I’ve lived in Coatbridge. Don’t call the class card on me!’
Born the eldest son of British Rail clerk John Kane, who passed away in 2007, young Pat did well enough at St Ambrose High School in Coatbridge to be accepted for Glasgow University in 1981. By the time he graduated in 1985, Hue and Cry, the band he formed with his younger brother Greg, had a record deal.
Within a couple of years, their single Labour of Love was in the top 10. It was, in Mr Kane’s words, a ‘coded anti-Thatcherite anthem’ which became a soundtrack to the General Election of 1987. From the very start, there was no doubting the singer’s socialist credentials.
His father, a big Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett fan, always wished he could have been a singer and pushed his son to become one. But what Pat Kane really burned to be, more than a pop star, was an opinion former.
By 1988, he had landed a weekly column in The Scotsman, entitled – what else? – Citizen Kane. Two years later, he won election as the rector of the university from which he had graduated only five years earlier, defeating Labour MP Tony Benn in t he process.
He was only 26 years old and already fading fast from the consciousness of the record-buying public, but evidently there were now others besides himself who took Mr Kane seriously in more learned spheres of life.
Iain Martin, editor of the Glasgow University Guardian at the time, was not one of them. He recalls that one of Mr Kane’s first acts was to offer the student paper a regular opinion column.
‘Our hearts sank at the suggestion,’ Mr Martin wrote later. ‘I don’t want to knock another writer’s work, but the columns were terribly pretentious, involving as they did references to assorted sociologists and Marxist theorists.’
The student newspaper’s solution was both comical and cruel. An editorial decision was taken to change one key name per Kane column, thus sabotaging the entire piece. So, in the week Mr Kane namedropped George Orwell scholar Raymond Williams, he
appeared in the paper as Kenneth Williams. And in the week he referenced the futurist writer Alvin Toffler, the name appeared as Alvin Stardust.
After that, to the best of Mr Martin’s recollection, no further Pat Kane columns were submitted to the paper. But plenty were submitted elsewhere.
During the 1990s, Mr Kane and his girlfriend Joan McAlpine, later his wife, became one of the golden couples of the political Left in Scotland. Each had platforms in the media for their views. Both had showbiz connections and lived in some style in Glasgow’s West End. They were the fashionistas of their time and place.
Even now, 12 years after their separation, an atmosphere of mutual admiration persists. Earlier this year, when the Mail revealed Miss McAlpine had paid £1,800 from her parliamentary expenses to the unsuspecting wife of a former SNP worker with whom she’d had an affair, Mr Kane sprang to her defence on his beloved Twitter, where he has two accounts.
Miss McAlpine’s relationship with Mark McLachlan prompted his divorce from his wife Jane, to whom she had paid money before Mrs McLachlan became aware of her husband’s infidelity.
The SNP list MSP’s behaviour was seen by many as not just deeply crass but an inappropriate use of taxpayers’ money, although the Holyrood corporate body fell short of finding her guilty of a parliamentary breach.
On the issue of private education, however, Mr Kane is less gallant towards his ex. Asked recently why, if he cares so much about inequality, his two daughters were educated privately, Mr Kane responded by dropping SNP politician Miss McAlpine in it, saying: ‘I have an answer to this which is quite clear – you should ask my ex-wife about that. The clue is in the ex.’ So was he implying they split over ideological differences about their children’s education? Mr Kane later clarified, stating that the matter was a ‘ private grief ’ and the decision ‘wasn’t entirely under my control’.
By the time the couple split, they
‘People like Pat leave themselves open to ridicule’
had certainly moved up in the world in property terms. Home was now a luxury dwelling in Glasgow’s North Kelvinside, which had been the last abode of the late Donald Dewar, who died in 2000.
From there, Mr Kane’s odyssey through the intellectual galaxies continued apace. In this breathless extract from his online biography, he tells in the third person of journalistic adventures circa 1997-1998: ‘Pat was given editorial control over two pages in the Saturday edition of the Herald newspaper, which he used to drive a think-tank called ‘E2’ (shorthand for the Second [Scottish] Enlightenment) and an essayist slot (modelled on the New Yorker, but dealing with Scottish themes) called “Scotgeist”.
‘In tandem with art director Roy Petrie, Kane ran voices and thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, Manuel Castells, Paul Romer, Richard Dawkins and many others, using i nnovative l ayouts and typography…’
To his credit, he did enjoy the critique of his grandiose projects by one Herald executive, who declared: ‘That’s journalism for the 31st century, never mind the 21st.’
Meanwhile, for all the frequent loftiness of his tone, Mr Kane does retain the sneaking admiration of one or two in media circles. Kevin McKenna, who held senior executive roles at both the Herald and Sunday Herald, says: ‘I like him. He sticks his neck out with philosophy and literature and Chomsky and that kind of thing and anybody from Coatbridge, where he’s from, who is seen to embrace that sort of culture is immediately asking for trouble.
‘He’ll be aware of some people thinking that he might be a bit pompous or a bit self-regarding, or maybe takes himself a bit too seriously. I think he knows that, and just ploughs on. He thinks: “This is the route I’m on and I don’t really care what you think.” And why is it a bad idea for a working-class boy from Coatbridge to want to gain access to the great philosophers and even quote them. Shouldn’t more of us be like that?’
But is the trouble not that Mr Kane appears to be at least as interested in intellectual elitism as he is in socialism, and the two do not readily mix? Does all this self-satisfied talk of Scotterati and Second Enlightenments not hint just a little t oo strongly at the kind of ego- caressing exclusivity t hat socialism abhors? is a fine line, perhaps, between encouraging intellectual flair and appearing bumptious and overbearing. Even Mr McKenna concedes: ‘ People like Pat might just go over it from time to time and leave themselves open to ridicule and scorn.’
Certainly there is evidence that Mr Kane is aware that he may not always do himself or his arguments justice. Hours after his Radio 4 showdown with Graeme Archer, he tweeted to the writer: ‘ sorry 4 my shoutiness this AM – there’s a debate abt Scots social-justice identity 2b had, & we didn’t have it. Next time... From Pat Kane.’
Now dividing his time between Glasgow and London, Mr Kane has a new partner – writer, ‘ ideas entrepreneur’ and ‘psychosocial therapist’ Indra Adnan, director of an organisation called the Soft Power Network.
An independent Scotland, incidentally, would have huge reserves of ‘soft power’ across the globe, according to Mr Kane.
Meanwhile, a revived Hue and Cry, that musical side-project which has punctuated Mr Kane’s adult life, is on the road again.
But while at one time they opened for Madonna at Wembley Stadium, the big finale of their Remote Full Band Tour will be at Airdrie Town Hall on November 15.
By then, of course, the independence referendum will have been won and lost by one side or the other. And Citizen Kane, that most wordy of 21st-century Coatbridge philosophers, may indeed be in a dark place.