Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland’s long-serving political editor, has always had an ambition to write for The Herald. He first started reading the paper when he moved to Glasgow as a teenager and has been a reader and subscriber ever since. Now he’s keen to use his new weekly column, which starts in The Herald today, to carry on doing what he’s always aimed to do as a journalist: find stuff out and tell folk about it.

Brian, who retired from the BBC this week, has been finding stuff out for more than 40 years, although his first attempt at writing was actually poetry (his girlfriend, now wife, thankfully talked him out of it, he says). He then joined the student newspaper at St Andrews, soon becoming editor, and also worked on the St Andrews Citizen. “It was the hot summer of 1976 and I was blown away by it,” he says, “The first person I interviewed was Milton Friedman and the second was the Crown Prince of Japan. It got me hooked.”

After graduating, he landed his first full-time job at the P&J in Aberdeen and wrote about politics almost from the start – and what a time to be doing it: Callaghan was PM, the government was in crisis, the Tories had a new leader in Margaret Thatcher, and there was a referendum on Scottish devolution in 1979 (there would be a few more referendums for Brian to cover later). Brian says those early, exciting days taught him some of the rules, and principles, that have guided him since.

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“I was always keen on politics,” he says. “I was aware some people thought politics was just for the politicians themselves, but I’ve never believed that – my experience is there are some politicians who are excellent, some who are experts and could hold down a serious job in the professions but choose to follow a public career, and there are some you wouldn’t send for a message. That’s the result of the electoral roulette wheel we spin. But mostly, they’re well inclined, they’re trying to do their best. What I believed I was doing, from those early days at the P&J, was trying to hold them to account.”

After nearly ten years in newspapers, Brian moved to the BBC as a reporter and quickly sensed that broadcasting might be right for him, even if some of the technology and the jargon took a bit of getting used to. “I was given a screen test,” he says, “and some people would’ve been nervous, but I was the opposite. I found it invigorating and stimulating. I loved it. It felt natural to be speaking to the camera rather than taking down notes and transcribing them. And it still does 35 years on. I literally felt in that first screen test, ‘OK, it’s all a bit strange but I think I’m going to be able to do this’.”

Brian’s time at BBC Scotland coincided with momentous change and political events, including the fall of Thatcher, but for Brian there’s always been one underlying theme. “I covered a lot of Thatcher,” he says, “but throughout my whole time in journalism – which is now 42 years – there’s been this underlying question: the Scottish question. I covered the establishment of the parliament, I covered its first 20 years, but I covered as well the underlying argument about independence, the offer of independence, the attempts by other parties to counter that offer, and that has been the bulwark of my endeavours.”

Brian believes it’s right that the Scottish question has dominated much of his work. “It’s the underbelly of Scottish politics,” he says. “It’s always been there. The demand for self-government was not created by the SNP – the sense of a wish that Scotland’s interests should be taken more evidently into account – that wish created the SNP, brought them into being in 1934, brought the suggestion of self-government to the fore with Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and that same sense that Scotland required distinctive treatment all but obliterated the Scottish Conservatives.”

The Herald: Donald Dewar, George Robertson, and John Home Robertson in 1979Donald Dewar, George Robertson, and John Home Robertson in 1979

Brian says it’s ironic that two things helped save the Scottish Conservatives from near oblivion after 1997: firstly, the creation of a Scottish Parliament which they utterly opposed and, secondly, holding elections to that parliament under proportional representation, which they also utterly opposed. “Remember,” he says, “that the origin of the Scots Tories lies at least partly in the Jacobites and in opposition to the union in 1707. Things come around, and have a very, very long history. Someone once said that devolution is like evolution, it just takes longer.”

It is this kind of perspective, that sense of political, social and cultural history and context, that Brian wants to bring to his column in The Herald. “I want to write about the things that concern people and the things that intrigue and interest people. So it will be the topics of the day, the issues of the day, but I will try always to place them in context: why these announcements are being made. I will be aware at all times of that underbelly of Scottish political life; people’s views on how Scotland should be governed.”

“It’s a big topic,” he says, “and it has consequences – all the parties now recognise that. There’s a fundamental fault-line in Scottish public life, and therefore in political life, and it’s whether Scotland should be independent or part of the UK. You don’t resolve that by sitting down and having a group hug, you have to work at that one and that political fault-line has now created in Scotland a partisan fault-line between the largest party advocating independence, which is the SNP, and the largest party most vigorously advocating the union, which is the Conservatives. It’s also led to the partial – I stress, partial – eclipse of the Labour party. People say the Scottish question is a secondary issue, and in a way it is, in that it’s not like employment and the criminal justice system and healthcare and education, but it influences, and can determine, all of these things.”

Brian says he will also be applying the principles of objectivity that he always sought to apply at the BBC. “I give an analytical opinion which is very different from a tendentious opinion,” he says. “I will say that the point that the minister is making today is all very well but it’s a mile apart from what she said seven and a half months ago – let me remind you of what she said. And then I will try to analyse why that has happened. What I never do is say, ‘she said this seven and a half months ago, she’s saying a different thing today and what she’s saying today is tosh’. I will never do that. It’s not in me. You’ve got to explain the context. It becomes intuitive.”

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Brian also vigorously defends the BBC against the accusations that come around that it is biased one way or another. “I still feel that the BBC, and particularly BBC Scotland, is the finest broadcast news organisation on the planet – I feel that very strongly. It’s driven by a huge and collective desire to find stuff out and tell folk about it. The BBC is also, and always has been, despite the jibing to the contrary from some sources, passionately committed to independent and analytical coverage of politics. I was never, for a scintilla of a second, asked to tailor or alter a piece – it didn’t even occur, it’s not part of the nature of the BBC. So I leave the Beeb with my admiration for the organisation still there.”

Brian is also delighted to be joining The Herald. “The Herald is a paper I’ve read and subscribed to since my parents moved to Glasgow when I was 17 and I’ve been a reader ever since,” he says. “I like the fact that it’s an ancient paper with a modern outlook – it has that sense of history and therefore a sense of context. The Herald is also passionate about Scotland but has a global outlook as well. It’s got a culture and intelligence to it and, in my zone of politics, it likes an open but informed discourse, not slapping out random views. Above all, it’s a news operation and it’s about getting out the facts and telling truth to power. I like all of that.”

Brian Taylor’s column runs in The Herald every Saturday.

Taylor's likes

My favourite film: Night at the Opera, starring the Marx Brothers. Their chaotic humour sums up my world view.

My favourite book

The Heart of Midlothian, by Sir Walter Scott. A work of genius – with widespread use of the Scots language.

My favourite album

Meddle, by Pink Floyd. With Cruel Sister, by Pentangle, a close second.

My favourite TV show

Scot Squad, if contemporary. Steptoe and Son, if historic.