Wings Over Scotland

To be honest, readers, the peculiar events of yesterday continued to nag at us all day as every news broadcaster in Scotland and beyond leapt eagerly on the ludicrous non-story from the Herald On Sunday’s front page. (It was even the #2 item on BBC Radio Wales, inexplicably).

For such an absolute nothingball of scurrilous sub-gossip to so dominate the entire news media was just too strange to ignore. We cannot remember the last time a low-grade freelancer managed to sell the same story to FOUR major Scottish newspapers – who normally, remember, only want exclusives for their big front-page splashes – let alone a crummy opinion columnist (not even an actual news reporter) who’s only been back in journalism for five minutes after a 15-year break as a failed PR guru.

(Once they’d all run the shoddy hatchet piece, TV and radio then had all the excuse they needed to blare it across the airwaves. “Oh, it’s not us inflating and amplifying this garbage, guv, we’re just reporting what the papers are saying.”)

So in our eternal quest for enlightenment and understanding we thought we’d see if we could find out a bit more about the little-known but recently-revived sleeper assassin with the ironic name: Carlos Alba.

For someone who likes to boast at any opportunity about his track record in journalism (the first words on his Twitter bio are “Former national newspaper editor”, albeit that that’s a lie – he was basically a section editor), Mr Alba is curiously reluctant to share any details about it with anyone.

Both his bio on Carlos Alba Media and his LinkedIn page describe a “20 year career in national newspaper journalism” (which we’ll shortly discover is also something of an ambitious embellishment, unless you consider Dumfries and Galloway to be a nation) but they only actually mention his 10 years on the Sunday Times Scotland.

The closure of the paper in 2010 (of which a colleague at the time has told Wings “He was a terrible editor, hiding in his room when London decided to make us all redundant and showing no leadership at all”) seemed to have drawn his journalism career to a close before his sudden unexplained return to the Herald 10 months ago.

But you have to do some digging to fill in the blanks for the missing 10 years before he joined the STS. We get a little more info from a bio page about his career as a novelist, mentioning “papers in Dumfries and Galloway, Aberdeen and Edinburgh”.

A 2006 piece on the All Media Scotland website identifies the Dumfries and Galloway Standard and the Press & Journal as the publications hinted at, and media industry magazine The Drum, reporting on the formation of his PR firm, put a little more flesh on the bones in 2010 by noting that he’d been education correspondent for the Herald and also chief reporter for the Edinburgh Evening News.

But curiously it left out what by any reasonable assessment would be regarded as his highest position before the STS – that of Political Editor for what at the time was by far Scotland’s biggest-selling paper, the Daily Record.

And it’s interesting to ponder why someone describing their identity with “they/them” pronouns, and thereby placing themselves firmly in what nowadays is called the “LGBTQ+ community”, might not want anyone to know that they held a senior editorial role at the Daily Record at the turn of the millennium.

Because 1999/2000 is the most infamous period in the Record’s history.

The paper was at the very heart of the campaign to stop the recently-elected Labour governments in both London and Edinburgh from repealing the homophobic “Clause 28” legislation introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s administration 12 years earlier.

While there was a broad political consensus in the new Scottish Parliament supporting repeal – with not even the Tories wanting to be seen standing in the way – a small but powerful alliance comprising Catholic religious leaders, businessman Brian Souter and the Daily Record worked doggedly to keep the law in place.

The campaign, as the Scotsman observed in 2005, “was fought almost entirely through the press”, by which it means the Daily Record. The paper was selling around 600,000 copies a day at the time (more than 13 times its current circulation), and pushed first Souter’s campaign, and then his private referendum on the repeal, relentlessly, making a huge contribution to the large “turnout” of 1.27 million votes.

Carlos Alba was no idle passenger in the newsroom during the time. A busy participant in the campaign from beginning to end, for months he penned scores of articles (the below is just a small selection) attacking the repeal and in particular Wendy Alexander, the minister piloting the repeal through Parliament, and generally whipping up hostility to gay people. “Anger” and “fury” were the order of the day.

(Modern-day transactivists, we should take a moment to address here, love to point out the superficial similarities between the campaign and those who are currently fighting gender ideology in schools. It’s a comparison that’s been comprehensively debunked by LGB people who actually lived through Section 28, for example by Joanna Cherry here, by Jo Bartosch here, by Gareth Roberts here, by Julie Bindel here and by Malcolm Clark on a more or less daily basis, so we won’t walk you through it now.)

The Damascene conversion of Carlos Alba from an implacable supporter of Clause 28 to a “they/them” relentlessly and spitefully violating the still-fresh grave of the man who legislated equal marriage in Scotland is perhaps one of the most remarkable in our small nation’s history.

But it’s still not quite as impressive as his rapid journey from failed PR man to small-time columnist to the vanguard of a co-ordinated media smear campaign. We trust his fees from the extraordinary syndication of his powderpuff “story” will supplement the rather meagre earnings of his monthly Herald column until the next time he’s called upon to be useful to someone.