Rab McNeil: Why I'll never speak in public

Will we get value for 12p out of Mr Mackay’s enforced tutelage? Doots, that’s what ah hae. Not his fault. Careers officer: “Hello, and what are you rubbish at?” The young Mackay: “Speaking, ken?” Careers officer: “Politics. That’s the career for you. Pick up an application form on the way out.”

To be unfair, I don’t really pay much attention to politics, or news generally (such a lot of nonsense), and consequently have only heard Mr Mackay speak once and briefly. I didn’t notice anything untoward in his delivery but probably factored in unconsciously that it was Holyrood: one learns to make allowances.

I used to have to attend Holyrood every week – a cruel and unusual sentence of community service – and was frequently flabbergasted at the oratorical fare. As revealed in my shocking world exclusive column last week, I feel that folk should not stand for election if they lack eloquence or brain cells.

Lacking both myself, I don’t stand, but plenty do, mumbling away from prepared notes like primary school children reciting Horace. I will be quite candid with you here and confess I’ve never made a public speech in my life.

I have, believe it or not, been invited often to do so, both for moral improvement bodies (the Anti-Cycling League, the Society for the Promotion of Alcohol, the Campaign Against the Countryside) and, more distressingly (because I always turn them down), for the funerals of friends who’ve been harvested by the Lord.

Deep down, I can’t see why anyone would want to listen to me. God knows, it’s bad enough when I write things doon for publication. But it’s not so much the content as the idea that I deserve to command everyone’s attention. Such a conceit.

I don’t even like speaking at large dinner parties and shrivel inside when all eyes turn towards me, not just out of a terror of being judged but from an atavistic fear that the tribe has decided to eat me next.

When I wrote about this years ago, a lady from an organisation like the one tutoring Mr Mackay contacted my then editor and offered to educate me out of my horror of oratory. The editor demurred, prompting the lady to scream down the phone: “But don’t you want Robert to be normal?”

Answer: no. If I was normal, would I be doing this job? Humane and kind critics online suggest that Mr Mackay’s problem is one of elocution rather than vocal projection. They don’t like him saying “husnae” and “widnae”, prompting top patriots to defend his use of Scots, so to say.

I tend to agree with the latter. I use Scots expressions, inter alia, in writing because it increases one’s range of expression and can even give sentences some rhythm, ken? I also use them when I’m at the football, but not when I’m at the bank or in court (both places where I’m referred to as “the accused”).

A reader stopped me in the street recently and, after letting go off my head, said he’d expected me to speak broad Scots, presumably like a peasant in a Walter Scott novel. But I speak Educated Leith, something I regret (the educated, not the Leith).

For that, and many other reasons, I shall never speak in public. The public suffers enough as it is.

“PIPE down!” is the cry, not just to the nation’s leading statesmen in parliament but to purveyors of piped music, or muzak, in bars, restaurants and shops.

I wish Quiet Scotland all the best in their campaign. Quietness has long been an obsession of mine, having as I do a love of silence that the Lord has rewarded with persistent tinnitus.

That said, while I’d prefer to hear only the hubbub of inebriated conversation in pubs and restaurants, I think I’d like light music – preferably classical – in supermarkets. The experience seems soulless without it and, after all, one doesn’t go to the supermarket for conversation, beyond the usual “I’m afraid your card has been declined, sir”.

I hope Quiet Scotland will take on libraries next, these having become the noisiest places outwith football grounds, mainly because they’ve partially turned them into nurseries.

When I was little, there was a separate children’s library upstairs, an august but welcoming place full of old wood, solid tables and beautiful books. And silence. I remember it fondly, a fading memory of civilised days before the racket engulfed us all.

POOR old Jeremy Corbyn. The London Labour leader has not been having a quiet time of it.

A new biography, serialised in one of the mid-market madsheets, paints an appalling picture of him as a football fan who secretly believes the game to be crude and awful; a vegetarian who ate meat with Castro; a proletarian hero who grew up in a 17th-century manor house; a committed intellectual who follows the philosopher Diane Abbott; a lazy agitator; a Remain supporter who hates the EU.

He is, in other words, a man of contradictions. I haven’t read any Marx for weeks but wasn’t that what he was about? Out of the contradictions of capital and labour comes the synthesis of communism, preceded by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a prediction that was nearly right when, as any householder will tell you today, strictly speaking we live under the Dictatorship of the Tradesmen.

Could we live under the Dictatorship of Jeremy? Sadly, or indeed otherwise, it doesn’t look like we’re going to get the chance, if the polls are anything to go by.

I must say I quite like the quiet way he goes about things. But being Prime Minister is a shouty job and not really for him.