When I said to my friends that I was going to start writing a new regular column that would fuse spirituality with politics, most of them laughed. Surely, they said, that's a contradiction in terms! And you can sort of see what they are saying.

The image of politicians is off pigs around the trough; birds feathering their own nests or perhaps (even more unkindly) of ostriches sticking their head in the sand. Putting aside the misuse of animals in these less than flattering occasions, politics is about a lot more than just MP's or MSP's making money for themselves. In Scotland there has been a long tradition of the spiritual and the temporal mixing. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is perhaps the best example of that today. But historically it is also true. St. Columba, perhaps the best known of the Celtic Saints, was born into the ruling family of Northern Ireland and Western Scotland in the sixth century. Indeed most of the monastic traditions in Celtic Christianity were headed by monks or nuns who could talk to kings and princes as equals.  Even before that it is reasonable to assume that the same tradition applied to the all-powerful druids.