Even his friends admit Mike Russell is a bit of a shrieking ninny. The SNP president is enjoyably pompous and thin-skinned, with a fluting voice which in moments of stress or excitement can become almost glass-shatteringly shrill. He is a man of culture – and he is likely to tell you so – and carries himself with the air of a meditative intellectual who has reluctantly come down the mountain to improve the lot of hoi polloi.
When I started out in journalism about 25 years ago, Russell was already a character drawn in thick lines. He was then the party’s bearded, cigar-sucking chief executive, who ruled over a small but committed team in a tiny HQ above a pawn shop in central Edinburgh. This was an era of regular electoral drubbings and daily media contempt, and it must have been hard to get out of bed at times absent the stubborn belief that you were an individual of destiny.
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