Being assaulted nearly put me on trial

Way back in the late 1990s, I spent a lot of time in court. What happened, see, was that in the wee small hours of a drunken Edinburgh morning, my friend Jonny and I took a shortcut home through the disused railway tunnel that runs under Holyrood Park. I’d been through it many times, being enraptured with the magic of abandoned urban spaces and, perhaps more to the point, stupid, but never before had it contained a gang of pissed-up youths on a rampage. This time it did, and they put us in hospital.

Various arrests followed pretty swiftly. Scottish papers were interested, what with my father being in the Cabinet, and I still remember the special joy of walking into a pub not long afterwards — mouth stitched up, nose askew — and finding a bunch of my friends passing around a copy of the Evening News with the headline ‘15-year-old girl arrested for Rifkind assault’.

A few weeks later I got a weird call from a journalist. ‘We’ve heard you were the victim of a gay-bashing,’ he said. ‘A what?’ I said. ‘A gay-bashing,’ he said. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘No.’

At the time, I couldn’t figure out the logic. What kind of dumbarsed criminal, I wondered, reckons he’ll get an easier time with the law if he pretends that a run-of-the-mill mugging was actually a hate crime? Later, though, a friendly policeman explained that it was more likely a trick of lawyers. Let a (relatively) high-profile victim know that a court case might be embarrassing, the thinking presumably was, and he’ll be less likely to want there to be one.

Even this, of course, was a fairly daft strategy. Maybe it hadn’t filtered through to the Edinburgh legal and criminal fraternities, but this was a time of tight T-shirts and gender-bending revolution.