The retirement of Rebus

No place for him in Scotland’s new McCop megaforce

Here is an intro to get all Scottish Nationalists fuming about London media bias: Alex Salmond is abolishing John Rebus. Well, all right — this recalcitrant Scots detective never actually existed in the first place. And even in fiction, he’s been drawing his generous public-sector pension for some time now.

But if Scotland’s First Minister reads crime novels, he will know that many of the successful ones depend as much on place as on character and plot — Conan ­Doyle’s clattering Victorian London, Morse’s Oxford, and a Rebus Edinburgh that keeps tourist board officials awake at night.

In Mr Salmond’s new model Scotland, Rebus would never have been born. His employer, Lothian and Borders Police, constantly mentioned in the novels, is about to be closed down. In a Bill now going through the Scottish Parliament, he and all his colleagues are being merged into a new, single, pan-Scottish megaforce. Inspector Rebus, being a bolshy sort of character, will probably find himself posted to Dingwall in a job swap with Hamish Macbeth. And Edinburgh — Edinburgh, home of Miss Jean Brodie, Alexander McCall Smith and Sir Malcolm Rifkind — Edinburgh could find itself being policed by Taggart.

The exquisite and growing paradox of Scottish devolution, at least as practised by the SNP, is that it is making Scotland more centralised than before, and taking local public services further away from democratic control than they have ever been in the past. Under the Thatcher jackboot, elected regional councils ran the police and a wide range of other services. Even now, each of Scotland’s eight forces is accountable to police boards composed entirely of elected councillors — 146 of them, many from parties other than the SNP.