Ian Bell: Scottish journalist whose nationalist writing won him the George Orwell Prize

In “Politics and the English Language” George Orwell identified insincerity as the greatest enemy of clear writing. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” This may be the secret to the lasting quality of Ian Bell’s journalism, which won him the George Orwell Prize in 1997: that there was never a gap between what he wrote and what he genuinely believed in, which was the establishment of a Scottish republic grounded in democratic socialism.

Orwell might just as readily have identified imprecision and insufficient research as further enemies of political journalism. No one who worked with Ian Bell, whether on The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, during his brief tabloid excursion on the left-leaning Daily Record or on the Scottish edition of The Observer, was ever able to isolate an assertion that was not backed up by a reliably cross-checked citation, or simply by reference to Bell’s encyclopaedic knowledge, which extended from politics, music and literature to the fortunes, present and historical, of Hibernian FC.

Ian Bell was born not far from the club’s Easter Road ground in Edinburgh in 1956. His father was a railway fireman who later worked for the Post Office. His mother worked for Edinburgh Council. Bell grew up on a council estate, which helped to instil a strong sense of social justice, and its absence; and he was the grandson of John Connolly, brother of the James Connolly who in the wake of the failed Easter Rising of 1916 was tied to a chair and shot. That family memory instilled a nationalist spirit, albeit applied to Scotland and her long, troubled relationship with the imperial neighbour and landlord.

Orwell’s essay appears in a collection called Shooting an Elephant, and elephants, whether sharing one’s bed or simply in the room, have often been adduced as a metaphor for England’s role in Scotland’s life. Bell didn’t have much truck with easy imagery. His main concerns always centred on the ways in which a ruling class’s manipulation of political and social language blurred and obscured the terms of debate. He might well have accepted the cuttlefish or the many-armed octopus as acceptable images for the cartoonist, but his own forte was analytical journalism and polemic.

He enjoyed a highly successful schooling at Portobello High School (but also controversial: he was disciplined for unfurling a Viet Cong banner), and went on to read English at the University of Edinburgh. His first job was as a graduate trainee on The Scotsman, which was then the Scottish newspaper of record, but was quickly identified as an effective writer and natural columnist. Bell was more than once persuaded to cross the country to work for the Glasgow Herald, a paper which had always welcomed political contention in its columns, but he gravitated back east – and in the later 1990s, he became the principal political columnist at The Scotsman. That in itself was a tribute to his powers, given that the paper’s management, and its editor, Andrew Neil, scarcely shared his democratic nationalism.

Bell enjoyed a brief period as editor of the Scottish Observer and explored other news platforms as they evolved. His time at the Daily Record showed that he did not trim his prose style to his presumed audience, but simply wrote as he spoke, with well-prepared conviction and with a sturdy prejudice against rhetoric. Only a speech impediment prevented him from becoming a laceratingly good broadcast journalist.

At the end of the 1990s he was persuaded to join the recently established Sunday Herald, which became the only Scottish newspaper (before the launch of the self-explanatory National) to back the Yes campaign in the independence referendum. Among those who paid tribute to Bell on his sudden death was the SNP First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, while editors at the Sunday Herald spoke admiringly about “Bell o’clock”, the moment in the week when his column was discussed and the week’s news priorities seemed to fall into place.

Living in the Borders, where language and storytelling are regarded with a very particular seriousness, allowed him in later years to maintain an interest in literature. He wrote a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom he identified strongly, and a two-decker study of Bob Dylan, Once Upon a Time and Time Out of Mind, in which the Border ballads, the stories of Chekhov and the vagaries of civil rights in the US all played key parts. Typically, Bell avoided all the easy clichés of Dylan biography, showing that, just as its creator insisted, Blood on the Tracks wasn’t so much a break-up album as a carefully constructed literary and musical palimpsest.

Bell’s early death leaves a gap in Scottish journalism at a moment when north British matters have never been more firmly on the UK agenda. He is survived by his mother and father, brother Alan, sister Eileen, wife Mandy, and by their son, Sean, who continues the family craft.

Ian Bell, journalist and author: born Edinburgh 7 January 1956; married Mandy (one son); died Coldingham, Berwickshire 10 December 2015.