My live chat with BBC while in back of constituent's car
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A bit like St Francis of Assisi - preaching outside to the birds - this wasn’t the first time that I had ended up holding an open air clinic in Sutherland.
Luckily this time, only a few days ago, the balmy weather in Sutherland would have done justice to St Francis’s native Italy.
“Och, just take a wee seat in the back of the car.”
So it was I got in, sat down, and opened my big blue Collins note book and started to take details of the constituent’s problem that I was being asked to help sort out.
Ring ring!! Oh goodness, my mobile. I held it to my ear.
“Jamie Stone? This is the BBC’s ‘You and Yours’ - we are putting you through to the studio in exactly two minutes.
Heavens above! I had remembered during breakfast at the Tongue Hotel (left sagely at the bedroom door; simply the best ever packed breakfast in a bag) - but what with clinics and everything I had temporarily forgotten that I had agreed to do a live interview about Excluded UK, all the people who have not received Government financial help during the pandemic.
“I’m terribly sorry” I said to the surprised driver of the car “But that’s the BBC for me...”
Later it occurred to me that had she put the radio on, then I could have heard myself. But that would have been too much. Let’s just say that the interview in the back of a car was the first of that type - it went ok - and I am deeply grateful to the driver of the car. She knows who she is and, well, she’s from the North Coast. Afterwards we had a good laugh about it.
It did come as a relief to start holding clinics again. It was a long time to be (in my case literally) under the stairs of my home in Tain. Of course I take the sanitiser with me and observe all the rules - but actually meeting constituents face to face again has been a real tonic.
Believe it or not, in this day and age there are a few MPs who don’t bother holding clinics in different parts of their constituencies.
Fair enough if you represent a small central city constituency - one where constituents can easily get to the MP’s office - but it is quite another thing for constituents living in a truly vast constituency such as Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross. It is not easy for everyone to get to my office in Tain - so yours truly gets in the car and gets out and about.
Not that this is in any ways a moan. I just love it - and it is a very good way to use a ‘recess’, a period of time such as right now when the House of Commons does not meet.
In closing I recall my first time on the radio. It was when my brother was a DJ at Moray Firth Radio. Shortly after I was first elected to the then Ross-shire council I was a guest on his show. This is how the interview went.
“I am now joined by my brother James” (he always calls me that) “who has just been elected as a councillor for Tain.”
“James - when we were having a dram last night you said to me that you reckoned that most of your fellow councillors did extremely well out of their expenses...”
It was a live broadcast. The moment stays with me almost thirty four years later.
