Orcadian column, 27/11/25

Like many Scotland football fans, I suspect, there’s a part of me still happily sitting on Cloud 9 a week on after Steve Clarke’s team secured World Cup qualification in quite extraordinary fashion against Denmark at Hampden. It’s a truism for Scottish sports fans that it’s the hope that kills you, yet last Tuesday night’s astonishing climax offered a reminder that it’s the dark moments that make the ‘high’s’ all the sweeter.

The finals will take place next year in venues across the US, Canada and Mexico. As it happens, I was living in Mexico the last time a World Cup was played there in 1986. As a student, I sold my tickets for the final stage matches in Guadalajara to pay for my travel to Mexico City and a ticket for Scotland’s ‘must win’ clash with Uruguay in the Netzahualcoyotl stadium. The mental scars of that excruciating 0-0 draw against a Uruguayan team reduced to ten men after five minutes are with me to this day.

So, Scotland fans will cross the Atlantic next summer in hope but aware of how these things often turn out. Having missed out on World Cup qualification for 28 years, however, it feels unbelievably good to be back.

Needless to say, parliament was abuzz the following morning with Urgent Questions and calls from MSPs for everything from a public holiday to the now customary knighthood for, in this case, Steve Clarke. There certainly seems a case to ease licensing regulations to allow hard-pressed hospitality businesses to benefit and fanzones to be set up.

I managed to catch the second half of the game after the Health Committee adjourned its consideration of Stage 2 amendments on my Assisted Dying bill. Extra meetings have been scheduled to allow the Committee to deal with around 300 amendments. Stage 2 proceedings conclude this week and while exhausting, the Committee deserves enormous credit for its painstaking work over the past month.

Around 70 amendments, lodged by MSPs from all parties, will have been accepted at Stage 2, helping strengthen the bill in various ways. Stage 3 is expected to take place early next year, when further amendments will be considered by all MSPs before a final vote on the amended bill. There is much hard work still ahead, but I remain confident a majority of MSPs support a change in the law to allow more choice for dying Scots at the end of life. It is a change that is long overdue and desperately needed.

After the euphoria at the start of the week, parliamentary business concluded last Thursday afternoon in a more sombre mood with reflections on the latest report published by the Covid-19 inquiry, chaired by Baroness Hallett. Perhaps most notably, none of the findings on ‘decision-making and political governance’ came as much of a surprise.

All four administrations across the UK are criticised for doing ‘too little, too late’, although the fiercest criticism is directed at former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, excoriated for presiding over a ‘toxic and chaotic culture’ in Downing Street and across government.

In Scotland, where mortality rates during the pandemic matched those elsewhere in the UK, Nicola Sturgeon is praised for being a ‘serious and diligent leader’. Even so, Baroness Hallett took the former First Minister to task for side-lining ministers and experts; not minuting key decision-making meetings; and deleting WhatsApp messages that may have shone a light on why certain decisions were taken. For a government with a reputation for being overly-centralised and secretive, this criticism, much like that of Boris Johnson, has an added ring of truth to it.

To what extent this report will offer comfort to those who lost loved ones, businesses or schooling, and those who are still living with the consequences of Covid, it’s hard to say. So too is the question as to whether or not, as a result of this inquiry, we will be better prepared for any future pandemic. Like Scotland’s prospects of making it out of the group stages at next year’s World Cup, it’s difficult to shake off an uneasy feeling that history may well repeat itself. Baroness Hallett is doing all she can to ensure that doesn’t happen.