ALEX Salmond has long pledged not to wear a kilt until the day of Scotland's independence, but today his knees can be revealed as another politician's pledge broken.
The SNP leader has worked hard to shed his party of its former kilted image, but the grainy, photographic evidence from L and M kiltmaker in Ayr is that he has given in to his self-imposed national dress ban ahead of the Dressed to Kilt event in New York on Monday.
Mr Salmond is visiting the US for Tartan Week and will be wearing the new Robert Burns tartan at the charity fashion event, also being attended by Jack McConnell, two years on from the first minister's infamous donning of a short, pinstriped number.
The SNP leader said: "I knew I'd have to wear a kilt for the first time in my adult life. Robert Burns was my Scot of the millennium and so when I heard there was a new Robert Burns tartan, I could think of no better tartan to wear."
Mr Salmond will join two ministers, George Reid, the presiding officer, and five other MSPs as they promote Scotland for the Tartan Week events in the US.
Dressed to Kilt is scheduled to star Sir Sean Connery, despite the nationalist actor's recent assertion that Mr McConnell's overseas promotion is "a joke" and that he intended to have nothing more to do with it.
The Scottish visitors will attend a variety of events in New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, and Wisconsin. Several will go to the Friends of Scotland congressional lunch on Capitol Hill in Washington, where legislators voted nine years ago to make April 6 a national celebration of America's Scottish heritage.
Mr McConnell will celebrate part of that heritage with a lecture next Thursday at Princeton University, where John Witherspoon, who came from Gifford in East Lothian and was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, was its sixth president.
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