The Palestinian protester spotted me near the Signet library on Edinburgh’s Parliament Square. Some old and familiar insults tumbled forth. “When are you going to call out the genocide, Mr McKenna,” he yelled.

There were about a dozen of them, comprising the usual comfortable white folk  desperately seeking a cause to enliven their autumn years.

“Have you nothing to say? Have you nothing to say,” bellowed his chum. “Why won’t you speak to us?” Another chap was wearing his Palestinian Action T-shirt which proclaimed he’d been arrested for supporting the cause. I’m not sure you should have your collar felt for this sort of thing, but I’d have definitely lifted his pal for his bad patter.

“I’ve read all your articles. You’re just part of the media elite and you think we’ve got nothing between our ears,” the chief flag-worrier shouted before delivering a belter. “I’ve got a first-class honours degree in Politics.” Admittedly, my Glasgow University degree’s still waiting for me to complete it. So, hats off to the big man.

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The camera phones soon emerged and I decide the best policy is to say nothing, smile and finish my cigarette. God love them, I’m thinking. This is proper old-fashioned politics in the raw and if you give it out, like I do, you need to take it back. And besides, they were harmless enough and never looked like breaching the boundary beyond which an executive intervention might have been required.

I’m in Edinburgh for STV’s Holyrood leaders’ debate to be held in this most hallowed of the Old Town’s holy places, a classical, 200-year-old architectural masterpiece. It’s the home of the four centuries-old Society of the Writers to His Majesty’s Signet, an anointed guild of lawyers who were entitled to determine who got to use the personal seals of the old Scottish kings.

This place is where the ideas and philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment were disseminated, modified and recorded. My man with the first-class Politics degree........

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