David J Black

Aspirant President Donald J Trump, who now joins the disparate ranks of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin in condemning the very idea that Scotland should opt for separation from the United Kingdom, has few qualms in telling us what’s good for us. Whether or not one agrees with the underlying sentiment is beside the point.

Interfering in the internal politics of a sovereign nation is a blatant breach of the normal rules of diplomatic protocol – a point enshrined in US foreign policy in 1823, when President Monroe warned the Europeans to keep their hands off the Western hemisphere, or else. The Monroe Doctrine also had a verso – the US obliged itself to play no part in the business of Europe, though admittedly the principle was breached in 1917 and 1941 when American troops did their bit to save our necks. We didn’t really complain too much.

The latest outrageous example of Donald flouting the convention is his lawyer’s crosspatch letter to the US Federal Electoral Commission. This decries the presence of a couple of dozen sofa-surfing Labour volunteers for Kamala as “blatant foreign interference in the 2024 Presidential election in the form of apparent illegal national contributions”. Some suggest that the flat vowels of the Anglo Midlands, a Scotch burr, and the clipped tones of Fabian Oxbridge do not necessarily woo the undecided voters of the Idaho back country, the indwellers of the borough of Queens, or the good folk of the Arizona desert, in which case any sound Republican should be encouraging the sons and daughters of Sir Keir to man the phone banks and tread the sidewalks. After all, didn’t their patriot ancestors kick us out after the “late unpleasantness” of the 1770s, and didn’t we come back later to burn down the White House? Why the heck should they like us?

True, meddlesome foreigners can be irksome, as witnessed in 2013 when the orange Cookie Monster himself, livid at the prospect of 11 offshore wind turbines being distantly visible from his Aberdeenshire golf course, announced that there would be an almighty anti-windmill protest outside the British consulate in New York.

Adverts were placed on Craigslist in the hope that 100 impoverished poets and panhandlers might be persuaded to attend at 20 bucks a head. Few, if any, appeared, and his rent-a-crowd attempt to interfere in the Scottish planning process was abandoned on the pretext that the weather was “miserable” and possibly a bit breezy when in fact it was merely overcast, with a balmy air temperature of 16C. The teflon Don Quixote retreated into his bunker after the Supreme Court unanimously rejected his appeal, and planning consent for the deadly windmills was duly granted.

On the whole, however, you’d think ole Cookie would be a bit grateful to his Caledonian cousins given how well we’ve treated him in the past, as in the case of the 2013 unexplained wealth order which judicial and political Scotland failed to enact in the matter of where all the money came from for the funding of his golf course enterprises. Might his maternal Stornoway connections combined with his Putin back channels have played bigly in these machinations. Probably not, but why spoil a good story?