Tales from the Tap End

In the current climate where politics and politicians are held in low esteem, Judy Steel looks back to a less cynical time. She considers herself privileged and proud to have been a political wife and to share from that perspective in events of the latter part of the 20th century and early 21st centuries in which David Steel played a part. The passage of the Abortion Act, the debate on Europe, the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, amongst them, have their colourful, individual stories as well as their serious sides. Steel delves into these, and into encounters in her husband’s constituency in the Scottish Borders where landscape, history and legend are never far away from the modern world. In this setting, she brings up their family, and finds her own unexpected satisfaction in working in the arts. She also evokes her own very sheltered childhood in the war and post-war years, her heady time at Edinburgh University around 1960 when so many colourful characters were on the student scene, and her brief legal career before politics took over. More recently, there has been the pomp and circumstance of great occasions.Steel writes with a light touch, as a storyteller rather than a historian or an analyst. The world of politics that she knew has disappeared, as has much else that she has lived through, but this memoir allows them to live on.