I spent a rewarding few hours last week with Susan Aitken, leader of Glasgow City Council. She’d initially been slightly wary, I felt, and this was perfectly understandable. I’d criticised her administration on several occasions and rebuked her personally for some comments she’d made during the city’s bin strike in 2022.

Yet, having been in her company socially several years before her elevation to the city’s most important job, I knew that she was more than capable of looking after herself. Nor was she slow to dish it out, when necessary. Thus, last year, she gently – but firmly – chastised me on social media for wrongly apportioning blame to her administration about the state of a building which hadn’t occurred on her watch.

I found her to be very engaging and, unlike some politicians I’d previously interviewed, spoke with refreshing candour and honesty about the problems facing Glasgow while providing several very valid points about the uniquely complex suite of social and cultural challenges the city deals with on a daily basis.

In one exchange, she questioned the motivation of some elected Holyrood Labour MSPs who were “doing down Glasgow” (though not all of them). She also had a wee go at the press. When you have a platform to knock, criticise, lambast and abjure hither as well as yon, you can’t very well complain when a politician gives you some of it back.

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