Roseanna and the Queen. There’s a strange connection between these two slightly lofty, distant, elegant women, gleefully set at loggerheads last week by a leaked Home Office email and a panting male press core. Although the Environment Minister is young enough to be her daughter, Australian enough (by upbringing) to have the manners of Phil the Greek, and “common” enough to have worked as a lawyer all her non-parliamentary life, Roseanna Cunningham, like the Queen, is a powerful female presence. Neither woman is exactly clubbable, but both command attention.
The prospect of one attempting to sabotage the safety of the other appears to have titillated the excitable gentlemen of the Scottish press in the manner of an upmarket mud-wrestling competition. Or perhaps, subliminally, as a rerun of the last cross-border battle when an independent-minded Scotswoman was vanquished by a vigorous English Elizabeth. Add to this heady mix, Ms Cunningham’s well known opposition to monarchy and a feminist republican plot of Fawkesian dimensions appears to be unfolding.
Until you read the details.
The local planning authority – the Cairngorms National Park – wanted to publicise some of the paths around Balmoral. No-one locally had big objections, but the Scottish Environment Minister had to notify the Home Office (about to upgrade Britain’s security threat to severe) who erupted in barely contained fury. Ms Cunningham backed down but the email exchange found its way into the public domain via Labour’s favoured Scottish organ, the Daily Record, and Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray whose ill judged advertising of Balmoral’s accessibility to terrorists has earned him little but brickbats.
Ironically Mr Gray has done a great disservice to the Land Reform legislation he helped draft as Justice Minister in the 1990s, because if anyone thought they understood Scotland’s right to roam policy, they must be fairly confused now.
Balmoralgate’s only point of contention was whether particular paths should be designated a “core path network” – an attempt to coax wary city-lubbers out of cars by advertising precise routes where no angry landowners or scowling famers will be encountered.
But the paths themselves are still walkable, indeed all of Scotland is still walkable. All that needs to be applied is common sense -- as it’s aye been.
A point well made by the former factor of the Queen’s Balmoral Estate, Peter Ord, whose submission to the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) in 2008 is surprisingly constructive.
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