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.

这是一年中最热的一天。我的客人梅丽布莱克(Mhairi Black)是由一位满头大汗的中年男士送到餐馆的。这位中年人我认得，他是苏格兰民族党(Scottish National Party)英国议会下院(House of Commons)议员团队的领导人。而布莱克的年纪还不到他的一半，身材更矮小一些，神态更冷静一些，身上的穿着则有点像制服：深蓝色的裤子和外套、以及一件浅蓝色的衬衫，一头浅色的头发紧贴着头部。这身着装，和我在媒体上见到的她的每张照片都差不多。

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.

很快，布莱克就要发表她的首次演说了————在那之前，她已在网上被点击过逾一千万次。不过，她早已是政治上的轰动话题。在今年5月的大选中，这位新当选的佩斯利与伦弗鲁郡南选区(Paisley and Ranfrewshire South)议员击败了道格拉斯騠虎煓大(Douglas Alexander)。这是苏格兰民族党众多胜利中最具戏剧性的一幕。此前，亚历山大始终坐拥1.6万多数票，正等着在下届工党政府中担任外交大臣，突然之间却发现自己被赶下了宝座。

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”.

大选之前，许多人都曾担心年轻人与政治脱节。布莱克的存在证明这种看法是句谎言。年仅20岁的她，立刻成为下议院最年轻的议员，并因此赢得了“议院宝宝”的绰号。

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.”

我们来往了多封电邮，才确定就餐的地点，原因正如她在一封电邮中所说，她在伦敦见过的唯一餐馆就是麦当劳(McDonald's)。曾有小报的报道将布莱克描绘成一位靠快餐、薯片和油炸玛氏(Mars)巧克力棒生活的卡通式的苏格兰人。事实证明，这样的报道并不极端————就像那种说某人不信基督教的措辞一样：她喜欢各种各样的食物，还喜欢下厨。“我曾要求把一台意大利面制作机作为我15岁生日宴会的礼物。我还用了这台机器。”

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.

在我提议的餐馆名单中，她选择了肉桂俱乐部(Cinnamon Club)，这是位于威斯敏斯特旧公共图书馆的一家高档印度餐馆。对于布莱克来说，这里的位置足够方便，一旦她需要投票，就可以返回下议院。巧的是，这家餐厅参加了英国《金融时报》周末版夏季菜单(FT Weekend Summer Menus)的推销活动，以45英镑提供由三道菜组成的一餐，这也省了我们点菜的功夫。她说：“如果没问题的话，三道菜我都要了。”我也和她一样要了全部三道菜，接着又从我的口袋里抽出了当天早上在Argos买的录音机。不幸的是，我把录音机的使用说明和其外包装一道扔掉了。

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.

然而幸运的是，布莱克不仅是1832年英国《改革法案》(Great Reform Act)诞生以来最年轻的议员，还是位时新技术的高手。我不会用我的录音机，她学生时代却用过同样的录音机。这下，我感觉自己像上了年纪的叔叔，正带着侄女就餐。就这样，整顿午餐出现了降级为荒诞场景的严重危险。修好录音机的她，下一步也许要开始自己问自己问题了。

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.

我试图把握住宴会的主动权，问她到底是怎么当选的。她说：“我到现在还有点没回过神来。”她的家乡佩斯利镇，一直坐落在算不上美丽的苏格兰低地地带。在那里，诸多纺织厂早已关闭，一个又一个带有宏伟名称的复兴承诺已然破灭。佩斯利曾一度拥有这样的名声，这里的工党可以在一条牛头梗镶着饰品的项圈上挂上一个红色玫瑰形标志，然后坐看它被选为议员。在这里，一群老朽不堪的工会官员和曾经的议会领导，会被定期派往英国议会（这些人在议会被称为“低调人物”）。在那里，他们似乎会在下议院的酒吧喝着带有补贴的酒，过着无害的无为生活——除非是接到了指示，需要他们颤巍巍地在议会里，按照党鞭的指令投下自己的一票。

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.

然而，这位新的佩斯利镇议员不仅是一位年轻的女性，代表的还是苏格兰民族党。在当代政治圈，一切都难以预料，而布莱克就是一个活生生的证明。在今年的大选中，工党在苏格兰的59个议席中只拿到一个席位，而苏格兰民族党则拿到其余席位中的56个。

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”.

就在不久前，工党这台机器也许还指望着来自布莱克家这类家庭的选票————这些家庭里都是信奉天主教、积极参与政治的公共部门员工。布莱克的父母都是教师。她说：“我们预计会观看新闻报道，并且会评论它。”这位新当选议员的哥哥是一名火车乘务员。她还有部分朋友在领取救济金。在她家里，苏格兰民族党被称为“苏格兰挖鼻孔者（Scottish nose-pickers，其英文首字母也是SNP——译者注）”。

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.”

不过，在梅丽少女时代发生的布莱克家庭的立场转变，也许在整个英国都十分典型。她说：“过去，我爸爸和我经常在饭桌上争论几个小时。我就是没法理解，为何在事情没有任何改变的情况下，还有人会继续相信英联邦。”

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.

当侍者送上第一道菜时（她点的是洒了香料的肯特郡羊腿，我点的是孟买风味的蔬菜），布莱克看着这道菜说了句：“棒极了！”并坚持要慷慨地向侍者表示谢意。

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.”

早在去年9月的独立公投很久以前，她就已开始为这个民族主义政党拉票了。在拉票的过程中，她发现大量选民已得出了和她同样的结论。当然，也有部分人坚持不投票给他们。“我用了很长时间说服我的简阿姨(Auntie Jane)，——直到我带她去参加了一次支持苏格兰独立的工党人士聚会。第二天早上，她在Facebook上发了一个帖子，表示她对苏格兰独立投下了支持票。我是在大学图书馆看到她的帖子的，当时我由于激动而不得不跑出图书馆————因为图书馆里是不许喧哗的。”

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.

任何与伦敦议员们打过不论多久交道的人，都已对他们嚣张的全知全能见怪不怪了。从这个意义上说，布莱克并不是位议员，因为她最吸引人的地方不是自信，而是热情。她年轻而又专注，人们可以毫不费力地想象到她跑出图书馆并向空中挥手的样子。

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.

不过，在公投宣传战的最后几天里，几乎所有伦敦政党领袖都急急忙忙赶到了北部的苏格兰，在选民中散播恐慌情绪。这种策略确实奏效了，它导致苏格兰民族党在之后的苏格兰独立公投中并未取胜。“那段经历很可怕，很伤神，事情就是这样。我想我在（公投结果出来）那天晚上根本就没睡着。第二天感觉也很糟糕。几天后我想：‘我干这两年，不是为了眼瞅着它毫无成果’。”于是，她又再次开始拉票。

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.)

那么，在仅仅几个月后的大选中，苏格兰民族党就取得了压倒性胜利，个中原因是什么呢？答案并不是民族主义情感的暴涨。“苏格兰民族党会击败工党，是因为我们都反对紧缩，而工党传递出的信息，则和当初发动‘在一起更好’(Better Together)宣传攻势的时候没什么不同。”（对于这个口号，我总是在考虑一个问题：“对谁更好？”）

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.

我俩点的主菜都是洒有肉豆蔻壳和豆蔻籽的鸡肉，还浇上了薄荷味的咖喱辣椒酱。上主菜的时候，她再次礼貌地向侍者表示了感谢。当时我在想，她会不会觉得，这种口感怡人而又昂贵的食物，是那些来自苏格兰低地的工党议员已司空见惯的东西。她说：“他们似乎多年来就在骗取这些。”对于选民来说，否决自决权和支持英联邦在苏格兰的运作方式并不是一回事。她说：“在福利国家建立之初，支持工党或许是有意义的，而如今却已不再是这样。到了21世纪，工党在智力上已经破产。”

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.

我怀疑她那句“智力破产”的本意也包括了道德和精神上的贫穷。打造新工党永远是英格兰人的任务，目的是令该党使中产阶级更有安全感。我暗示说，如果说有谁毁灭了苏格兰的工党，那就是托尼布莱尔(Tony Blair)和彼得曼德尔森(Peter Mandelson)。她说：“新工党没什么意义。”