Alex Salmond inquiry: When will someone move into the swathes of unoccupied moral high ground in Scotland? – Alexander McCall Smith

The row currently preoccupying Holyrood is a complicated one – an understatement, one might say, especially if one has been trying to follow it in its slow progress through the courts and before the parliamentary inquiry that has been considering the issue.

Scotland's Highlands are, in fact, Moral Highlands and there are large areas available for immediate occupation, according to Alexander McCall Smith (Picture: Jane Barlow/PA)

I am not one of those who have been doing that – I suspect that very few people, other than those with a professional interest in following such things, have been able to master the ins-and-outs of this Shakespearean conflict between former colleagues.

Who has had the energy to do this?

So spectacular has this falling-out been that we shall probably need a new word to describe it. The ‘gate’ suffix has probably been overdone – Watergate passed easily into the language as a handy way of referring to a dark period in American politics – although how innocent and small-scale it appears by the standards of recent years.

Mr Nixon seemed a wonderful pantomime villain at the time, with his scowl and his colourful friends. He also had a tape recorder that proved to be equipped with a handy erase button. He deleted a lot of expletives in the course of his career, and gave the language the expression “expletive deleted”. Today, of course, nobody bothers with that. Expletives are, if anything, inserted, in order to establish that one is not out of touch with the contemporary demotic, which is full of expletives.

I have actually stayed in the Watergate Hotel in Washington. It has a special burglars’ suite that you can stay in – at a considerable premium. I chose not to. I did not find the hotel at all interesting, but I was conscious of the fact that I was on linguistically hallowed turf. Watergate gave us the opportunity to label every vaguely scandalous crisis as a gate of some sort.

There are -gates everywhere: in the rural part of Argyll where I spend a lot of time, there was a lengthy disagreement over a particular road gate, and whether it should be kept open or shut. The issue became almost as complex as the issue currently concerning the Holyrood committee, even if the stakes were, perhaps, slightly less significant.

The causes of the dispute became lost in the mists of time, and indeed at one point the gate itself was lost – only to be recovered from a nearby field. It was all very enjoyable and inevitably the whole affair became widely known – at least to me – as gate-gate.

Of course, the most famous of such disputes preceded all talk of gates: that was the fictional one in Gabriel Chevalier’s novel, Clochemerle. The casus belli there was the siting of a public convenience (there’s a coy term for you) near the local church, an issue so vivid that the word Clochmerle has now gone into the French language to describe any intense local dispute about a small matter.

This current stramash, indeed stooshie (stooshiegate would be a good name for what is going on), seems to be another gate, joining all the other gates that accumulate in the process of political life. Everybody’s politics seems full of gates – it’s not just Scotland’s.

Westminster politics has had its fair share of gates (remember Profumogate?) and indeed had the distinction of having a castle in the Cummings affair (or gate). Some people, indeed, are so surrounded with these issues that they become a gate in themselves. One thing is certain: we have a gate here in Edinburgh, even if people have yet to decide just what sort of gate it is and who left it open.

And I suppose there is a certain perverse pride to be felt when one’s own rows become loud and colourful enough to be reported in the press elsewhere.

Yet in this landscape of recrimination, of allegation and counter-allegation of the sort that politicians bandy about with such regularity, some rather interesting saliences emerge. And one of these in this case is the issue of forgetting. Is it possible to forget something important? Of course it is, and we should remind ourselves of that.

People can forget when things happened, how they happened, and whether they happened at all. There is a case for caution in pointing the finger at others for forgetting things, because even if we have good memories, to forget is completely human.

Indeed, I find it astonishing how much other people actually remember because my memory is highly selective. Like most, I remember some things with complete clarity – often things of no significance at all – while forgetting vast swathes of the personal past.

Public political spats often involve struggles for the moral high ground. This is particularly interesting. Scotland is a small country geographically, but the fact of the matter is that we have a large amount of high ground – and much of this is indeed moral high ground!

It is not for no reason that we talk about the Highlands – what we fail to say, in our modesty, is that those are, in fact, Moral Highlands – and we have plenty of them. Our Parliament, in its modern incarnation, has spent a lot of time proclaiming its occupancy of the moral high ground – sometimes to the annoyance of others who lay claim to that particular territory.

That has led to continuing disputes over legislative proposals that touch upon private convictions, philosophical or religious.

Sometimes ground has even had to be ceded and acknowledgement made of the fact that there are different visions of the good, and that reasonable people may disagree – and should be allowed to disagree with one another. Classically, the view from the moral high ground is one of fertile plains of complete acceptance of the prevailing orthodoxy (as dictated by the occupants of the moral high ground).

Today in Scotland there is a great deal of surplus commercial property going cheaply, but there are also considerable chunks of moral high ground available for immediate occupation. There are clear opportunities to occupy this moral high ground at very reasonable rates. The application process is utterly transparent – so much so, that it is difficult to see what it is. Applications should be made by e-mail, but then, preferably, deleted.

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