Margo’s ego

My enduring memory of Margo MacDonald MSP was of her wasting a quarter page of her newspaper column in the Sunday Mail to rant at some 14-year-old girl for the crime of criticising MacDonald’s column in the previous week’s letter page. If ever a moment encapsulated her, this was it.

Her motives were never “the common people” or any of the other tosh bandied around. 
MacDonald was a rampant egotist obsessed with her own aggrandisement above all else.

Scottish politics has been full of them – but she was largely 
protected from the ire of the fourth estate because she was a fellow journalist – transmogrifying her tiresome Rab C Nesbitt’s Mary Doll antics into “feistiness” rather than the rantings of the pub bore.

Like her husband Jim Sillers, she jumped the SNP ship when it was sinking, and never forgave the party for not merely continuing to sail on without her.

Like Tommy Sheriden and 
socialism, I believe that she’d sooner have seen Scottish 
Nationalism collapse than have the audacity to triumph like never before without her, 
wasting most of her time in Holyrood as an independent showboating her unpassable euthanasia bill no matter how many times it was chucked out, in order to embarrass the SNP government which would be damned no matter what way its members voted.

Margo MacDonald is a loss to her family – she is not a loss to Scotland.

Mark Boyle

Linn Park Gardens

Johnstone