10月9日口譯文章：與FT共進午飯 梅麗布萊克Lunch with the FT: Mhairi Black
這是一年中最熱的一天。我的顧客梅麗布萊克(Mhairi Black)是由一名滿頭大汗的中年男士送到餐廳的。這位中年人我認得，他是蘇格蘭民族黨(Scottish National Party)英國議會下院(House of Commons)議員團隊的引導人。而布萊克的年事還不到他的一半，身體更矮小一些，神誌更沉著一些，身上的穿戴則有點像禮服：深藍色的褲子和外衣、和一件淺藍色的襯衫，一頭淡色的頭發緊貼著頭部。這身著裝，和我在媒體上見到的她的每張照片都差未幾。
很快，布萊克就要揭櫫她的初次演說了————在那以前，她已在網上被點擊過逾一萬萬次。不外，她早已經是政治上的驚動話題。在本年5月的大選中，這位新被選的佩斯利與倫弗魯郡南選區(Paisley and Ranfrewshire South)議員擊敗了道格拉斯騠虎煓大(Douglas Alexander)。這是蘇格蘭民族黨浩瀚成功中最具戲劇性的一幕。此前，亞歷山大始終坐擁1.6萬多半票，正等著鄙人屆工黨當局中擔負交際大臣，忽然之間卻發明本身被趕下了寶座。
大選以前，很多人都曾擔憂年青人與政治擺脫。布萊克的存在證實這類意見是句假話。年僅20歲的她，連忙成為下議院最年青的議員，並是以博得了“議院寶寶”的外號。
咱們交往了多封電郵，才肯定就餐的所在，緣故原由正如她在一封電郵中所說，她在倫敦見過的獨一餐廳便是麥當勞(McDonald's)。曾有小報的報導將布萊克描寫成一名靠快餐、薯片和油炸瑪氏(Mars)巧克力棒生存的卡通式的蘇格蘭人。究竟證實，如許的報導其實不極度————就像那種說或人不信基督教的說話同樣：她愛好各式各樣的食品，還愛好下廚。“我曾請求把一台意大利面制造機作為我15歲誕辰宴會的禮品。我還用了這台機械。”
在我發起的餐廳名單中，她選取了肉桂俱樂部(Cinnamon Club)，這是處於威斯敏斯特舊大眾藏書樓的一家高級印度餐廳。對付布萊克來講，這裏的地位充足便利，一旦她須要投票，就能夠返回下議院。巧的是，這家餐館加入了英國《金融時報》周末版夏日菜單(FT Weekend Summer Menus)的傾銷運動，以45英鎊供給由三道菜構成的一餐，這也省了咱們點菜的工夫。她說：“假如沒題目的話，三道菜我都要了。”我也和她同樣要了全體三道菜，接著又從我的口袋裏抽出了當天早上在Argos買的灌音機。不幸的是，我把灌音機的應用解釋和其外包裝一道拋棄了。
但是榮幸的是，布萊克不但是1832年英國《改造法案》(Great Reform Act)出生以來最年青的議員，照樣位時新技巧的妙手。我不會用我的灌音機，她門生時期卻用過一樣的灌音機。這下，我感到本身像上了年事的叔叔，正帶著侄女就餐。就如許，整理午飯湧現了降級為荒謬場景的緊張傷害。修睦灌音機的她，下一步大概要開端本身問本身題目了。
我試圖掌控住宴會的自動權，問她究竟是怎樣被選的。她說：“我到如今另有點沒回過神來。”她的故鄉佩斯利鎮，一向座落在算不上俏麗的蘇格蘭低地地帶。在那邊，諸多紡織廠早已封閉，一個又一個帶有雄偉名稱的中興許諾已然幻滅。佩斯利曾一度具有如許的名聲，這裏的工黨可以在一條牛頭梗鑲著飾品的項圈上掛上一個赤色玫瑰形標記，然後坐看它當選為議員。在這裏，一群老拙不勝的工會官員和曾的議會引導，會被按期派往英國議會(這些人在議會被稱為“低調人物”)。在那邊，他們仿佛會鄙人議院的酒吧喝著帶有補助的酒，過著無害的無為生存——除非是接到了指導，須要他們顫巍巍地在議會裏，依照黨鞭的指令投下本身的一票。
但是，這位新的佩斯利鎮議員不但是一名年青的女性，代表的照樣蘇格蘭民族黨。在現代政治圈，統統都難以預感，而布萊克便是一個活生生的證實。在本年的大選中，工黨在蘇格蘭的59個議席中只拿到一個席位，而蘇格蘭民族黨則拿到別的席位中的56個。
就在不久前，工黨這台機械大概還期望著來自布萊克家這種家庭的選票————這些家庭裏都是信仰上帝教、踴躍介入政治的大眾部分員工。布萊克的怙恃都是西席。她說：“咱們估計會旁觀消息報導，而且會批評它。”這位新被選議員的哥哥是一位火車乘務員。她另有部門同夥在領取救援金。在她家裏，蘇格蘭民族黨被稱為“蘇格蘭挖鼻孔者(Scottish nose-pickers，其英文首字母也是SNP——譯者註)”。
不外，在梅麗女時期產生的布萊克家庭的態度改變，大概在全部英都城非常典範。她說：“曩昔，我爸爸和我常常在飯桌上爭辯幾個小時。我便是無法懂得，為什麽在工作沒有任何轉變的情形下，另有人會持續信任英聯邦。”
【參考譯文】
When the waiter arrives with the first course — she’s having spice-encrusted Kentish lamb, I’m having Bombay-style vegetables — Black looks at the food, says, “Smashing,” and makes a point of thanking him generously.
She began to go “door-chapping” (canvassing) for the nationalists long before last September’s referendum on independence, and found that vast numbers of voters had come to the same conclusion as she had. There were some holdouts, of course. “It took a long time to persuade my Auntie Jane, until I took her to a Labour for Independence meeting, and next morning she posted on Facebook that she was voting yes! I read her post in the library at university and I had to run outside because I was so excited, and you can’t make a noise in the library.”
Anyone who has spent any time with London parliamentarians becomes wearily familiar with their noisy omniscience. In that sense, Black is not a parliamentarian, for the most striking thing about her is not confidence but enthusiasm. She’s young and committed, and it takes no effort at all to imagine her running out of the university library and punching the air.
Yet the nationalists lost the referendum on Scottish independence after almost all the London party leaders scurried north in the last days of the campaign to spread the heebie-jeebies among voters. It worked. “It was horrible and soul-destroying, so it was. I don’t think I slept at all that night [of the referendum result]. It was horrible the next day, too. Then a couple of days later I thought, ‘I’ve not worked for two years just to see it all come to nothing’.” She went back to door-chapping.
So what explains the SNP’s triumph, only a few months later, in the general election? It wasn’t an upsurge of nationalist feeling. “The SNP destroyed Labour because we were anti-austerity, whereas their message was almost the same as in the Better Together campaign.” (“Better for whom?” I have always wondered.)
With the arrival of the main course — we are both having chicken with mace and cardamom, with a mint chilli korma sauce — she again thanks the waiter politely and I wonder whether this sort of comfortable, expensive food is something she feels Labour MPs from lowland Scotland just got too used to. “They just seemed to be blagging it for years,” she says. For the voters, rejection of self-determination was not the same as embracing the way the Union worked in Scotland. “Supporting Labour might have made sense at the start of the welfare state but it didn’t do so any longer. By the 21st century, Labour had become intellectually bankrupt,” she says.
I suspect she intends “intellectual bankruptcy” to include moral and spiritual impoverishment, too. New Labour was always an English project, designed to make the party safe for the middle class. If anyone killed the Labour party in Scotland, I suggest, it was Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. “New Labour meant so little,” she says.
It is the hottest day of the year and my guest has been delivered to the restaurant by a perspiring middle-aged man whom I recognise as the leader of the Scottish National party’s band of MPs in the House of Commons. Less than half his age, shorter and cooler, she is dressed in something of a uniform: dark blue trousers and jacket and a light blue shirt, her fair hair pulled tight to her head. She’s worn much the same thing in every photo of her I’ve seen in the press.
She will shortly be making her maiden speech — since viewed online more than 10m times — but Mhairi Black is already a political sensation. The newly elected MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South pulled off the most dramatic of the SNP’s many victories in the May general election when she defenestrated Douglas Alexander. Ed Miliband’s chief election strategist, Alexander had been sitting on a majority of 16,000, looking forward to being foreign secretary in the next Labour government. Suddenly he found himself dethroned.
Before the election many had worried about the disengagement of young people from politics. Black gave the lie to that belief. She is only 20, and immediately became the youngest MP in the House of Commons, earning the nickname “the baby of the House”.
There had been a bit of toing and froing about where we might eat since — as she put it in an email — the only restaurant she had seen in London was McDonald’s. But it turns out that the tabloid coverage depicting her as a cartoon Scot existing on fast food, chips and deep-fried Mars bars is as benign as you’d expect a portrayal of the Antichrist to be: she enjoys a wide variety of food, and likes cooking. “I asked for a pasta-maker for my 15th birthday. And I used it.”
She picked the Cinnamon Club from my list of suggestions, an upmarket Indian place in the old Westminster public library, close enough for her to be able to scurry back to the House of Commons if she needed to vote. As chance would have it, the restaurant is part of the FT Weekend Summer Menus promotion, which simplified our choice of food, offering a three-course meal for 45. “I’ll have the whole shebang, if that’s all right,” she says. I join her, and fish my recording machine out of my pocket, bought that morning from Argos. It turns out that I have, unfortunately, chucked the instructions in the bin, along with the packaging.
Fortunately, as well as being the youngest MP since the Great Reform Act of 1832, Black is also a dab hand with irritating technology. I can’t make my recording machine work but she has used an identical device as a student. I am already feeling a little like an elderly uncle taking his niece out for a square meal. Now there is a serious danger of the whole lunch degenerating into absurdity. Having fixed the recording device, maybe she’ll start asking herself questions next.
I try to get on to the front foot by asking her how on earth it had all happened. “I’m still a bit stunned,” she says. Her home town of Paisley sits solidly in that less than beautiful strip of lowland Scotland where the textile mills closed long ago and one grandly titled promise of regeneration after another has fallen flat. It’s the sort of town that once had the reputation for being a place where the Labour party could stick a red rosette on the studded collar of a child-eating bull terrier and see it elected to parliament. A procession of clapped-out trade union officials and former council leaders — “low-flying jimmies”, as they were known in parliament — were regularly dispatched to Westminster, where they seemed to spend lives of harmless inactivity drinking subsidised alcohol in House of Commons bars until instructed to wobble out to vote in parliament as the party whips instructed.
Yet the new MP for Paisley is not only young and female. She also represents the SNP. Black is walking proof that in contemporary politics all bets are off. In this year’s general election Labour was reduced to one seat out of the 59 in Scotland. The SNP took 56 of the others.
Not so long ago, the Labour machine might have counted on the votes of families like the Blacks — Catholic, politically engaged public-sector employees. Her parents were teachers. “We were expected to watch the news — and to comment on it,” she says. The new MP’s elder brother is a railway conductor. Some of her friends are on the dole. The SNP were known in the family as “the Scottish nose-pickers”.
But the conversion of the Black family, which took place when Mhairi was a teenager, was perhaps typical of what happened across the country. “My dad and I used to argue for hours at the dinner table,” she says. “I just couldn’t understand how anyone could continue to believe in the Union when things weren’t really changing at all.”
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