Scottish crime author Val McDermid is wrong for criticising activists who led the 2023 protests against main sponsor Baillie Gifford, which led to the company’s withdrawal of its funding from the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

In an interview with The Herald, she criticises those who participated in the protests, viewing them as virtue signallers guilty of “staggering” levels of hypocrisy. She thinks they were often more interested in personal publicity than in the issues themselves. She suggests they sometimes didn’t really know what they were talking about, that they simply jumped on a bandwagon, that Baillie Gifford were unfairly pilloried as a result.

There’s a lot there I disagree with, but there’s one point on which I find myself in accord with Ms McDermid. “There is no such thing as a clean sponsor,” she says. “If you dig deep, everybody who sponsors an arts event has got something in the cupboard that you would be uncomfortable with.”

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Which surely cuts to the very heart of the matter and, I believe, undercuts Ms McDermid’s argument. Because if there are no clean sponsors in the world of arts funding then surely you have a prima facie case proving that none of them – not “unfairly pilloried” Baillie Gifford, not BP, not the Sackler family nor any of those other deep-pocketed corporate backers of the arts – was ever in it for reasons of genuine altruism but instead for........

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