Letter from Scotland - The Edinburgh Reporter

It’s hard to walk in a straight line anywhere in central Edinburgh. Huge crowds, dry, sunny weather, café tables on the pavements, tour parties, slow-moving traffic, buskers, street entertainers with wide circles of on-lookers, all fill the old streets with noise and colour. This is festival city and, so far, things are going well.

The crowds eased a bit when the Oasis fans went home. The band’s re-union concert filled Murrayfield stadium every night for four nights. That’s 70,000 extra people on the streets every night. They rather drowned out the official Festival and very nearly swamped the Fringe and its 3,700 shows.

Festival of hope. A young performer sells his show in traditional fashion on the Royal Mile.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival also got under way this week, dominated by the publication of Nicola Sturgeon’s autobiography “Frankly”. The revelations have come out in dribs and drabs for maximum effect, each one making headlines for a day.

We hear how she misjudged the public mood after Scotland’s wishes were overturned in the Brexit referendum. She imagined people would be so appalled that they would rush to support a second referendum on independence. But in fact they didn’t want her “de facto referendum” at the next election, they wanted stability.

She admits she should have paused the gender recognition legislation which divided the country and divided her own party. “I lost the dressing room”, was the curious phrase she used.

She criticises her mentor Alex Salmond for not paying enough attention to detail during the independence referendum campaign and hints at his excessive drinking. Nevertheless she admits shedding a tear when he died.

There is quite a bit of introspection in the book and complaints about the pressures of being a young women in public life. But what has not come out so far is anything about her relationship with her husband Peter Murrell. This is puzzling since he wasn’t just any man, he was chief executive of the SNP and together they were “the power couple” of the party. He is still facing criminal charges over the £600,000 of party funds that were, apparently, re-directed from the independence campaign and used for general party expenditure.

It strikes me as rather sad to watch Nicola Sturgeon’s transformation from the serious, competent First Minister – and best public performer in Scottish and UK politics – to just another celebrity trying to sell her book and find another role in life. She has left herself, and her party, a little lost. (She swiftly replied to The Edinburgh Reporter at the press huddle after her book festival event that she hopes this will not be the end of her literary career.)

Another literary celebrity looking a little lost in Ayrshire is James David Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy”, a story of hard times in the Appalachian mountains. But being the Vice-President of the United States, he is followed around on his family holiday in Scotland by a fleet of 20 cars and a thousand police officers. He’s expected to visit his boss’s golf resort at Turnberry. I wonder what the “hillbilly” will make of such grandeur and luxury.

Also lost this week was a pod of 23 pilot whales which beached on a remote stretch of coastline in Orkney. They were not discovered for several days, by which time they had all died. About the same time last year 77 pilot whales stranded on a beach on the same Orkney island, Sanday. No one knows why the whales lost their way and came ashore. Is it the increasing industrialisation of the sea ? Is their food source (squid) moving inshore. Has it got anything to do with climate change?

And speaking of climate change. We’ve had another hot, dry week, with temperatures reaching 25C for four days in a row. Here in Edinburgh, festival goers have been pouring out of hot steamy venues and seeking refreshment in outdoor cafés.

Arthur’s Seat fire PHOTO Craig Duncan 11 August 2025

Suddenly on Sunday afternoon, Arthur’s Seat caught fire, with flames and black smoke rising dramatically into the air. The dry gorse bushes made the hill a perfect spot for an urban wildfire. It was started, almost certainly the Fire Brigade said, by human intervention. By that they meant – either deliberately or by a carelessly thrown away cigarette or empty bottle.

And made possible by climate change, the biggest human intervention of all.

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Letter from Scotland – The Edinburgh Reporter

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