by Robbie Dinwoodie

Keith Brown

YOU MAY think that, as the SNP grapples over a route map to independence should Westminster keep refusing to sanction a second referendum, the role of deputy party leader and chief flak-catcher for Nicola Sturgeon would be stressful.

There again, Keith Brown lost his father while still at primary school, fought one of the fiercest battles of the Falklands War when barely out of his teens, took over the notoriously tough transport brief as a Holyrood Minister, and has salsa danced with his partner and fellow MSP Christina McKelvie. All of that suggests he’s made of the right stuff.

One of the defining things about Brown is what he did between his late teens and early twenties. He went to war. Not Nintendo pilots half a world from the action but boots on the ground and fellow marines dying. I can barely imagine his experience yomping 50 miles across the boggy mainland of the Falklands. I covered that war as a defence correspondent based in Whitehall. Brown did it as a commando fighting his way ashore at San Carlos and yomping with a heavy radio on his back to the big battle to capture Two Sisters mountain, the commanding heights above Port Stanley.

I first interviewed Brown about his war experiences a decade ago and recall being in awe of his sanguine responses. He’d been there, done that, neither feeling the need to dwell on it nor be in denial about it.

His childhood saw him move around west Edinburgh as his family’s fortunes waxed and waned. His Broraborn father was in his words “an unusual dad”, a serial entrepreneur who could “sell anything to anyone” and earned enough to have a house built on the River Almond in leafy Cramond and buy a yacht there.

The three brothers and three sisters had a happy childhood with summers driving off in a battered old car to camping holidays in Europe, but their father died young, while Brown was still at primary school, forcing his mother to sell up and move to the Saughton area of the city. At Tynecastle High School he was not motivated, leaving to work in bars and clubs, even selling carpets for a while before making the decision to join the armed forces.

There was no family tradition of military service but the recession of the eighties was kicking in, and he just wanted to get fit, so he toured the recruitment offices and at the Royal Navy centre in Lothian Road made the decision to join the Marines at the age of 18. The biggest concern was being posted to the mean streets of West Belfast. Little did he realise he’d end up with a posting in a brutal conflict half a world away.