Hamish Gobson’s diary: the view from across the Uisge
3 March 2023
IN HIS POETIC FEAST of Gaelic-themed nostalgia, Over the Sea to Skye (1926), Alasdair Alpin MacGregor gives a good description of a word which was presumably not much in use in Scotland at the time – hence its presence in his short Glossary – “threep”, as in “to threep”. Today, we might define it as “to sturgeon (non-piscine)”, but in Alasdair Alpin’s day, threeping was not the national pastime it has since become. The word had fallen into desuetude; for example, my Concise Oxford (1951) does not include it.
But while Oxford was moving on, Dreghorn was still threeping away beneath the cloak of its own invisibility. One young Scot, as yet unborn, was destined to come amongst us and give the concept of threeping a new lease on life. This messiah would, in the fullness of time, throw all non-threepers out of the temple, and give inspiration to street threepers too. (“They also serve who stand and threep.”)
Alasdair Alpin’s definition of “threep” is as precise as you’d expect from a Highland scholar who never touched alcohol: “to insist or assert pertinaciously”. Ms Sturgeon’s stock-in-trade was threeping, indeed it was her deep-threeping which defined Scottish politics generally – at least it was after Salmond had spawned and swum back out to sea, leaving her free to stamp her own personal form of repetitiousness on the Holyrood threeping chamber.
By her own account, Sturgeon learned the art of threeping for gain at an early age. In his biography of the woman, Ian Mitchell quotes the Dreghorn threeper in an interview with Alastair Campbell for GQ Magazine in 2015. That was the year after the independence referendum and threeping seemed to be the way to get what you want. The new First Minister told the ex-spin doctor: “One of my earliest memories was a tantrum at Littlewoods in Ayr. I was about four and I wanted a Cilla Black album and my parents said no, and my grandad came along and bought it for me.”
But one tantrum does not a threeper make. You need to keep at it all the time, with “pertinacity”. Some folk can even threep in their sleep. According to my friend, Jim Sillars, it was Alex “mentor” Salmond who taught Sturgeon to threep “in per-pet-ui-tee”, rather in the way that Coca-Cola taught the world to sing “in per-fect har-mo-nee”.
Apparently, the art came naturally to her. Sturgeon pushed the tantrum envelope and matured into a world-class threeper. One takes one’s bunnet off to her. Many great men have done the same. My old friend from the Barvikha jacuzzi club, Vladimir Putin, can threep with the best of them. No matter that his way of threeping is to bomb schools, hospitals and innocent civilians – a threep’s a threep for a’ that. But you have to keep at it, pertinaciously. Never give a listener an even break.
As First Minister, Sturgeon was able to unleash Scotland’s “inner threeper”. Soon her Party was gaining the lion’s share of MPs in elections, and almost the maximum number of MSPs that Donald Dewar’s corrupt voting system allows. Threeping became the national signature tone in political discourse. That is where “whataboutism” comes from, along with many other infectious diseases of the brain which can be caught from mentally unhygienic intellectual slum-dwellers.
But those heady days are over and Sturgeon has cashed her cheque (she hopes!). She is now “The Solitary Threeper”. All the under-threepers have deserted her, and she threeps alone. As William Wordsworth put it in a different context, she breaks the silence of the seas, in the furthest Hebrides, “threeping and singing by herself”. But has the art died with the artist? Apparently not.
Of Ms Sturgeon’s three possible successors, Kate Forbes does not strike me as a natural threeper, but I am sure power will change that if it seems likely to yield a Cilla Black LP for a particularly convincing performance at First Threeper’s Questions.
Hammurabi Yousaf, the author of the threeper’s charter, the Hate Crime Act, has committed himself to keeping the threeping tradition alive. In the leadership race, he blasted out of the blocks with a threep about Kate Forbes’s view on threep-free marriage. We can only hope that the sage of Babylon has as much success with the threeping tradition as he did when, as Minister for Transport four years ago, he vowed to keep the ferry-building tradition alive on the lower Euphrates.
My own view of the leadership contenders is that the only true threeper in the contest is Ash Regan. I do not know anything about her views on marriage beyond the fact that, unlike Ms Sturgeon, she changed her surname when she got married. Before then, photographic evidence (see left) suggests she was Ash Dieback. Be that as it may, Ms Regan’s endless references to “50%+1” as a criterion for breaking up the United Kingdom seems profoundly threeperish. I shall return to this theme with a vengeance if she ever gets within a sniff of real power.
For the moment all I will say is that campaigning for Scottish independence in places like Littlewoods in Ayr, and throwing a tantrum when Lord Reed and four of his learned mates threaten to take you out in the street and give you a constitutional leathering, is just the sort of behaviour which you would expect from a serious threeper. How much worse does it get when you put him, her, it or them in Holyrood and pay him, her, it or them £157,861 per annum, plus expenses, pension contributions, foreign travel, tips, gratuities, share of party fund privatisations, etc?
The only problem with the Littlewoods approach is that you get the leathering and the street, but not the independence. That was First Threeper Sturgeon’s tragedy, and one hopes that with Ms Regan it will not be repeated as farce.
Perhaps that is something all threepers have to learn before they reach full political maturity. Rather like nuclear weapons or Borat’s jokes, they only work once. Sturgeon never learned that lesson, and it cost her the keys to Bute House. Now she’s been busted down to private and left rudderless in Uddingston, simply because she over-threeped her pertinacity—as Alasdair Alpin might have put it in one of his more poetic but less literate moods.
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Hamish Gobson lives on the Hebridean isle of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) and features in Nicola Sturgeon: the Years of Ascent (1970-2007) – A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament (Ian Mitchell, 2022) – available on Amazon.co.uk and also reviewed here by Tom Gallagher.
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Photo of Ash supporting more trees…
