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A Puritan collar for our pain in the neck

If you are under the age of 369 you will have missed the bracing Scottish experience that was the Solemn League and Covenant, or its even more robust predecessor the National Covenant, when everything that was most drab, philistine and narrow-minded in Scotland mustered in Greyfriars Kirkyard to inaugurate the Rule of the Saints, writes Gerald Warner. The most fanatical signed in their blood and, having consequently contracted septicaemia, played no further part in the diminishment of Scotland.

It was a scene for every sanctimonious Scottish radical to envy. The malice, the hatred of art, music, laughter and, above all, Popery and its baroque splendour – here was the pure leaven of that 'progressive' Scottish philosophy that revels in the "dingin' doon" of all things gracious and elegant. It was, in many respects, a rehearsal for the Wee Scotch Senate that ornaments Holyrood today. If Covenanting was about anything, it was about banning everything that moves: ditto the WSS.

Today, on the threshold of the 370th anniversary of the Covenant, there is good news for all whey-faced Whigs, in their modern incarnation as socialists, leftists and politically correct witchfinders: the Rule of the Saints is back. Nor is its jurisdiction confined to north of the border. Gordon Brown, the Johnston of Warriston de nos jours, rules from Downing Street. Pity untutored English commentators, struggling to analyse the Brown phenomenon. They do not share our Scottish insight. We have been here before.

Crown that scowling countenance with a funereal black hat, garland the squat neck with a puritan collar and substitute a bible for the even thicker tome of tax regulations in his hand and Gordon assumes his innate identity: this is one of nature's Covenanters.

Full story at Scotland on Sunday.