To the Manor Born?

We had the whole field to ourselves last night so it was very peaceful - apart from incessant snoring from you-know-who.

We walked along to the festival, where our first talk was by Steve Richards, promoting his book on “Prime Ministers we never had”. It was easy listening and interesting.

Second up was Journeys towards COP26, which started with an excellent short film by local youth activists before a discussion with Lord Bilimoria, Prof Ali Watson and Stephen Dunbar-Johnson.

The third event was Magnus Linklater chairing former MET chief Bernard Hogan-Howe and John Taylor, who worked in intelligence and security for 50 years. They discussed the state of play concerning domestic and international security.

Alan, who we met in Kyrgyzstan, came down from Glasgow for the day and we had our picnic together in the walled garden before we had a quick look at the Scottish women painters exhibition there hadn’t been time for yesterday.

We then braced ourselves for the emotionally charged session “Dispatches from Kabul”. One of the participants was a young woman journalist who had spent 5 days at the airport waiting to be evacuated to Ireland via the Middle East from where she spoke via video link. Also speaking was Eldridge Adolfo, the Swedish EU envoy to Afghanistan, Afghan rights campaigner Samina Ansari, Beyond Borders fellow Mariam Safi and William Dalrymple. They are all furious about how US decided an arbitrary leaving date without giving time for everyone else to plan an orderly evacuation of those to whom they had obligations.

After that we only had enthusiasm for the penultimate event about whether there was such a thing as American Exceptionalism. It was chaired by Jim Naughtie with Tim Phillips, Aminatta Forna and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera. Razia Iqbal summed up from Cape Cod. Yesterday Elif Shafak described countries such as USA and UK being rather more in a liquid than solid state now, and today the panel felt that with Trump, populism and what happened on 6th January, this was true. It was in a dangerous position now and needed to look at how it was seen by the rest of the world.

After that we couldn’t face “Where next for Global Britain” and now are en route home.

Here is Mr C outside Traquair House, the owners of which host the festival in their grounds.