JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: Consequences? When you’re a millionaire old ham with homes on two

If I had to choose a Scot who represented my polar opposite it would be hard to see past the actor Alan Cumming.

I am afraid the American version of The Traitors, which he hosts, is a no-go for me because we are so different that he is unwatchable.

But I discovered this week that we do have something in common: we are both frightened men.

The 60-year-old revealed it was ‘scary’ to live in Donald Trump’s America which is why he plans to spend more time in Scotland.

I have long felt it is scary to live in the SNP’s Scotland.

Indeed, as the Scottish parliamentary election approaches with no sign of power changing hands, I am filled with dread and foreboding.

If I had Mr Cumming’s money, spending more time away from Scotland would do wonders for my nerves.

The actor may wonder, as I do, just how crazy and ­craven the US President has to become before people finally get his number – why, in his case, the normal rules of ­politics seem not to apply.

I wonder exactly the same thing about his beloved SNP.

But here is the key difference. Trump has only three years left to wreak his chaos. The clock is ticking on his Presidency and, with cool heads and fingers crossed, there’s a reasonable chance we’ll ride it out.

In the SNP’s Scotland there is no clock. Time becomes abstract. They have presided over unremitting national decline for a generation and still, come May, will more than likely be rewarded with the call of ‘More, please!’ from voters.

Who is to say that one generation of rule won’t become two or more? Who can confidently predict the threshold at which even supporters of Scottish independence might twig to the appalling damage that has been wreaked on their country?

Mr Cumming told Kaye Adams on her How to be 60 podcast: ‘I wanted to be in a country where I feel my values are more aligned with the actual values of the government and the people.’

He said of the US: ‘It’s scary to live there right now, especially being well known and outspoken.’

This is the same chap who, on being sworn in as a US citizen in 2008, declared: ‘I love New York. My life is here.’

The same one, too, who on being named in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2009, stated that he was ‘very proud to be British’.

And the same one again who handed back his OBE in 2023, claiming he no longer wanted to be associated with the ‘toxicity’ of the British Empire.

He is one of those transatlantic luvvies who, it was often said, would do anything for his country except live there.

His star turn on the Scottish independence campaign trail in 2014 is as good an example as any.

‘Vote yes!’ urged the naturalised New Yorker with the burgeoning stateside property portfolio during a flying visit to Glasgow in September that year.

Was he staying for the rest of the campaign?

No, he had a Broadway show to star in back home the following night.

‘I literally flew in for 24 hours because I feel so passionately about it,’ he said.

I remember feeling pretty passionate about it myself.

The difference being that I, as a resident of Glasgow rather than a day tripper, would have to live with the consequences of the vote.

While Mr Cumming was feathering his nest in the US, I lived with the consequences of every Scottish election vote too.

Everyone who made their home in Scotland did.

In 2007, 2011, 2016, and 2021 the SNP emerged as the largest party and almost ­certainly will do so again in 2026. That is a lot of consequences.

Our economy is tanked. Our taxes are the most punitive in the UK which means high achievers don’t want to stay. Worse, monies raised are squandered or mismanaged by incompetents.

A ferry called the MV Glen Rosa, due for delivery in 2018, sits rusting in a government-owned shipyard in 2026, nowhere near ready for service, her massively blown budget – everything about her, in fact – a national embarrassment.

How readily she symbolises the Holyrood shower who conceived her.

While Mr Cumming and his husband Grant Shaffer have been dividing their time between Manhattan and a home in the Catskills in upstate New York, our health service has lurched from crisis to calamity, waiting lists off the chart.

Education standards have plummeted, and classrooms have become war zones because disciplining thugs is frowned upon if they happen to be school pupils.

We’re not much better at disciplining adult ones.

The SNP’s solution to prison overcrowding is to urge judges not to send criminals there and to let the ones who are locked up out before their minimum sentence is served.

The wee bit hill and glen Mr Cumming dreams of spending more time in is now largely one big wind farm.

Do we need any more of them to reach our net zero targets? Absolutely not. We’ve way overshot. Are we getting more? Yes. Loads.

Consequences, Alan, love.

Dear me, all those consequences you get to live with when the vote doesn’t go your way. Unless you’re Alan Cumming.

Things did not work out as the actor would have preferred at the US Presidential elections in November 2024 and, less than a year after Trump entered the White House for his non-consecutive second term the poor lamb doesn’t think he can take the consequences any more.

Nineteen years and counting under the SNP on this side of the pond, mate. Can we take any more? Nope. Are we going to have to take it anyway? Yep.

How sweet life must be as the fair-weather citizen of the world, the butterfly with the wherewithal to flutter from shore to shore in search of the prevailing climes which best suit our politics.

How very few of us enjoy that luxury.

Mr Cumming thumbed his nose at Scots by wading into an independence campaign with no consequences for the life he had chosen for himself in America.

Now he thumbs his nose at millions of Americans by refusing to face the consequences – as they must – of the Presidential vote.

I am not much impressed, therefore, with the version of fear bleated about theatrically by a multi-millionaire ham with homes on two continents. Sorry, old bean, but it sounds more like faint-heartedness to me.

Back in the old country, the values he alludes to may be those of the SNP government but the natives he speaks of are as divided over values as ever.

If you ask me, it was that referendum campaign he stuck his oar into that was the catalyst.

Indeed, over here, people appear much as they do in the US: frazzled; fractious; entrenched; bent out of shape by the fault line which splits our nation in two.

But come on in, Mr Cumming, if you’re coming. Regale us with your adventures in the land of the free. Patronise us with the geopolitical ‘insights’ your travels have brought.

Then pipe down a while, why don’t you? We’re busy here living with consequences.