Home again

Scotland likes to think of itself as one of the world’s nicer nations. Small certainly, but rich in history and romantic landscapes and with none of the pejoratives — snobbish, bullying, hypocritical, class-bound — that over the centuries have attached themselves to its larger neighbour, England. As a semi-autonomous part of the United Kingdom since 1997, Scotland has amplified its political voice. The Scottish National Party, which at least in theory seeks independence, has dislodged the Labour Party from government in Edinburgh and emblems of separate nationhood are no longer confined to the kilted dolls of tourist shops. The Scottish flag, known as the Saltire, now flies from many more buildings than the Union Jack and can be found fluttering in the gardens of modest houses and painted on the sides of railway trains.

As flags go, it’s plain and rather handsome: a diagonal white cross — the cross of St Andrew — on a deep blue background, without any fussy stars or representations of wheels, lions or dragons. Unlike the Union flag, of which it forms a part, the saltire suggests no history of bombast or conquest: resonant with lost causes, particularly in football, it’s a simple and likeable flag for a people who like to think they never did anyone any harm (Scotland’s considerable role in the British Empire having long been forgotten or distorted from exploiter to exploited). The sight of it waved by the crowd at Tripoli airport, welcoming Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi home to Libya, sent ripples of unease through Scotland. For the first time, the country was being liked by the wrong kind of foreigner. Not misty-eyed Americans remembering that their granny came from Inverness, but jubilant supporters of a man who, in the eyes of Scottish law, blew up the Pan Am Jumbo over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, murdering the 259 people on board and another 11 on the ground who were hit by the falling wreckage. In other words, the Saltire was celebrating a terrorist, and not just any old terrorist but a man who, if we believe the court’s verdict in early 2001, caused a toll of American civilian life that wasn’t surpassed until September 11 in the same year.

I was in Edinburgh when, on August 20, al-Megrahi was released from his Scottish prison and sent home. People were at first surprised and bemused that the decision caused such widespread outrage. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, David Cameron, the FBI director, Robert Mueller — all of them were quick to condemn al-Megrahi’s release as a shameful mistake. Cameron called it “a very bad decision”. Clinton said it was “absolutely wrong”. Gordon Brown, after a long and intriguing silence, admitted that the scenes in Tripoli had “repulsed” him though made no criticism of the decision itself. Again and again, television news shows played the tape of the Saltire-waving crowd in Libya.

It was a shock for a small country to find itself so reproved, but nobody I met was prepared to trust any official word they read or heard about the cause of the reproof. Every politician seemed to be telling less than the truth. Could it really be that Scotland’s secretary for justice, Kenny MacAskill, freed al-Megrahi purely for the compassionate reason that he was close to death from prostrate cancer? Weren’t London and Washington consulted? Had no deal been done with Libya, where Britain and the United States of America have burgeoning economic interests? Was Clinton sincerely outraged or was she playing an anti-terrorist card to appease Americans who feel the Obama regime is far too liberal and ‘soft’? Why would Brown’s Labour government in London say nothing when Brown’s party in Scotland was prepared to state that, if it had been in power, al-Megrahi would have been left to die in prison? Writing in Glasgow’s Herald, the columnist Iain Macwhirter found “cock-up and conspiracy here in equal measure and enough suspicion to keep journalists and lawyers in business for many years”.

The awkward fact is that in Britain many people consider al-Megrahi to be the victim of a stitch-up. Ever since his trial ended, growing numbers of lawyers, parliamentarians and journalists have come to believe in his innocence: a scapegoat, or at worst a pawn in a much more complicated story than his trial would have us believe. One consequence of al-Megrahi’s repatriation was that he gave up his latest appeal against conviction, which would almost certainly have heard how his trial invented some vital pieces of evidence and allowed the suppression of British and American intelligence documents that contradicted the prosecution’s case. The embarrassment in London and Washington, and to the reputation of the Scottish legal establishment, would have been severe.

That has been avoided. With al-Megrahi’s appeal abandoned and al-Megrahi soon to be dead, we may never know the truth. What Scotland has discovered instead is the downside of greater autonomy. The Scottish government has insisted publicly that al-Megrahi’s future was purely a legal question, to be determined by Scottish law, but the Scottish National Party may also have wanted to demonstrate that Scotland was an embryonic state with an embryonic foreign policy (presently a ‘reserved power’ controlled in London). What it didn’t expect to be was unpopular with America’s still saintly president. Letters from angry Americans fill the letters pages of Scottish newspapers; there’s now even talk of an American boycott on imports of Scotch. You might say that Scotland’s sweet blue flag was bound at some point to lose its innocence and come of age, but nobody, surely, could have expected that to happen on a hot night in northern Africa.

On holiday in the US in August, I discovered what could be the world’s worst Indian restaurant. We were in Portland, Maine, on our last night before we caught the plane home from Boston. Where to eat? We had eaten very well. The Maine coast contains more lobster than any other stretch of the sea and the side of every road is dotted with lobster restaurants and lobster shacks. And if, like me, you don’t particularly care for lobster and have never understood its top position on menus as the king of foods, then there were tides of haddock, steak, ice cream and blueberries. What perversity, therefore, to go in search of aloo gobi, rogan josh and biryani — but, being British, we’d begun to crave them. Chicken tikka masala was, after all, invented in one of Britain’s many thousands of Indian restaurants and the notion that it has replaced fish and chips as the favourite national dish isn’t entirely a myth.

The guidebook to Portland listed three Indian places. We ruled out two of them quite unscientifically: we didn’t fancy their names (something like ‘A Passage to India’ and ‘Mumbai Nights’). The third looked promising, and it was closer to our hotel. The sign outside and the menus inside incorporated the figure of old Air India’s bowing maharaja and the walls were covered in Mughal-style pictures. The menu had lots of old favourites. Only the food itself was unfamiliar. The first sign that all wouldn’t be well came with the arrival at the table of some chopped onion doused in ketchup and a mysterious liquid, as brown and runny as bad English gravy, which may have been posing as chutney. Then came the chicken, the spinach, the okra, the peas and the ‘lamb biryani’ (in fact, some over-boiled rice splashed with mutton stew). Remarkably, none of them contained a trace of spice. I’m not talking of chillies here, though they most certainly didn’t have those. I mean not a trace of a cardamom or turmeric, cumin or tamarind, coriander or fenugreek, or even of that old British standby, ‘curry powder’.

It was the blandest food I have ever eaten. You could have bottled it and fed it to three-month-old babies. A conventional truth about America is how successfully, relative to Europe, it converts migrants into fully-fledged Americans. On the evidence of our meal in Portland, the same rapid adjustment applies to Indian cuisine. This was food that had saluted the flag and fallen on its knees at the Statue of Liberty, pledging to leave all its bad old habits behind.