02/04/2008

The Scotsman columnist, Robert McNeil, found himself in the headlines yesterday after one of Scotland’s leading philanthropists claimed he was one of the reasons she was leaving the country.

In a colourful broadside, Carol Colburn Hogel, from Chicago, who has donated £20 million to the arts over the  past two decades, said she is returning to the US - furious at the UK government’s tax on non-domiciles.

But the heiress, who lives in Edinburgh, said the final straw was a column by the ‘philistine’ McNeil in The Scotsman.

In one of his twice-weeky columns, McNeil tackled the issue of the SNP’s proposed local income tax plans - not the  non-domicile proposals, and stated: “The rich are leaving and good ruddy riddance to them."

In its own reporting of Hogel's decision, The Scotsman said McNeil was "baffled", quoting McNeil: "I have also called for bald and fat people to be imprisoned. Let’s hope they don’t leave the  country. Recently, I wrote it was wrong to accuse Amercans of not understanding irony. I take that back."

Said The Scotsman’s editor, Mike Gilson: “I am sorry that Carol Colburn Hogel ...is considering  leaving Edinburgh. I am also sorry she has taken offence to our columnist, Robert McNeil’s words on the subject of the rich. Like all really great columnists, Rab wraps kernels of truth with layers of humorous exaggeration. He is full of spiky  irony and surreal observations, with his opinion changing sometimes in mid-sentence. No-one should be upset by Rab’s irreverence”.

The story also received extensive coverage in yesterday’s Times.

Hogel first performed as a pianist in Edinburgh more than 30 years ago, and made the city her home several years later. Her children were all raised in the city, and she was give an honorary degree from the local, Napier University and made a CBE.

She runs the Dunard Fund, a charitable trust funded by her family’s electrical business.

She explained: “It has been a difficult and painful decision for me, and neither the sincere gratitude and on-going needs of such organisations as the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Library, the RSNO, all the UK’s major opera companies, the Edinburgh International Festival, SCO, RSPB, etc - nor my emotional and intellectual attachment to them, can outweigh the destructively spiteful, philistine attitude of the government or of journalists like [McNeil].”

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