Where were you when you realised Trump’s run for presidency wasn’t just a joke?
For me it was January 2016 during an interview with David McCallum. The Scots-born actor, best known as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from UNCLE and playing Dr Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard in 20 seasons of NCIS, had a crime novel to plug.
He’d long lived in America and I thought he’d enjoy finding out that, according to a cousin in my family, we were distant relations. It’s probably not true, and useful only as a bit of an icebreaker instead of asking about the weather, but in retrospect, it might have soured the rest of our conversation. Maybe he could tell I was less excited by being a distant cousin of a man from The Man from UNCLE and more that, through McCallum’s ex wife Jill Ireland meeting her next husband when visiting the current on the set of The Great Escape, my family
tree, at a stretch, connected to Charles Bronson.
McCallum’s book was called Once a Crooked Man, which quite quickly led the conversation to crooked politics. McCallum claimed to have left the UK in the 1960s because he felt it was turning socialist and, to prove that he was correct, asked how many Conservative MPs there currently were in Scotland. At the time there was one. “I rest my case,” he said.
But there was only one Labour MP at that time too, thanks to the SNP wave that followed the failed independence referendum.
“The SNP are pretty far to the left as I remember,” remembered McCallum. Although that’s the thing with the SNP – beyond their headline bid for freedom it’s hard to pin down exactly where they stand. And we know now that, as we were speaking a decade ago, SNP chief executive Peter Murrell was busy embezzling hundreds of thousands of pounds of party funds. So if not socialist, certainly partly champagne socialist: among Murrell’s purchases were three bottle openers, three bottle stoppers and a champagne bucket.
