Two bird watchers edge towards the shore at Boddam, a beach at the craggy, northernmost reaches of Scotland: the Shetland Islands. The sunlight catches a camera in one of their hands; a murmur of wading birds scatters.
Unless the twitchers are regulars to Boddam, they will not know that at this moment, from either side of a fluorescent, softly bubbling fish tank in a house hundreds of metres away, both a long-lens camera and spotting scope are trained on them; that as they watch birds, Sandra Irvine is watching them – and her blood pressure is rising.
‘I just see red when they’re down there,’ she says, wearing a purple cardigan. Irvine runs a taxi company with her husband when she’s not scanning from her living room window for naturalists. ‘They think they’ve got the Right to Roam, because they think this is Scotland. But it’s not.’
For most people, Shetland’s sovereignty was settled five and a half centuries ago: in 1472, the Scottish government came to collect the islands as collateral for an unpaid dowry between the Norwegian crown and James III of Scotland. For Irvine and Shetland First – Britain’s most northerly separatists – that deal was bunkum, the Shetland Islands are as Scottish as Tromsø and neither the police, the council nor the courts have any legitimate authority.
Irvine has gone to jail for her beliefs. And, as we stand observing the bird watchers return to their van, she is prepared to go back. Like Capone went down for tax evasion, Shetland’s separatists rarely take the rap for full-blown treason. Irvine first went to prison in 2023 for refusing to pay a £500 fine for ‘shouting and swearing’ at birders. Now she stands accused of filming while driving (at birdwatchers, fleeing).
For Shetland First, getting caught is half the point. Over the past half-decade, the group has traversed the isles in unregistered vehicles, stormed the local tourist centre and breached the council’s list of tax defaulters to individually reassure them: the council isn’t real, and probably owes you a refund.
In all of this, Shetland First has been led by one man – advising Irvine through her current court case while also running a shadow campaign of ballot-spoiling in Scotland’s May elections. Shetland’s chief of police calls him ‘an absolute pain in the arse’. The local Green councillor calls him ‘a danger to democracy’. His partner, Margaret, calls him ‘obsessed’.
Stuart Hill, 83, says he can control the weather, the colour of his urine and put on weight during a hunger strike. He has been to prison four times and will die on 28 May 2069, unless he changes his mind. He claims the number of Shetland First supporters is growing, though after an early interview, he also mentions plans to learn how to windfoil (windsurfing, but floating above the water on a thin mast). For the recent Scottish elections, however, Hill changed his pitch.
Previously, Hill has focused on relatively esoteric points of history and legalese. Now, on the advice of his chief campaign advisor, ChatGPT, he is meeting people where they are: should council tax go up while official salaries get bumped? Is it fair to live in fuel poverty at the footsteps of Britain’s largest onshore wind farm?
‘There are all these injustices, and once you read the history, you can see a basic injustice,’ Hill says. ‘Everybody seems to be kind of comfortable with it, but at the same time there’s a basic undercurrent of dissatisfaction.’
Hill is also English; he wears the knitted ganzies of a Shetlander, but still speaks with a soft Essex accent. Like any populist, the fact that he does not belong to the group he claims to represent is hardly delegitimising. For some, it adds to the mystique. ‘I think it’s a godsend that he came to this island,’ says Irvine, herself from Orkney. ‘I believe in fate, and he was meant to be here to fight for the folk of Shetland. It was like Shetland was the magnet that drew him in.’
Retracing the path of that ‘magnet’, past the North Sea emergency that introduced most Shetlanders to Hill, took me to a bombproof vault beneath the V&A in London.
Between an empty picture frame and the stand for an anonymous, long-lost piece of metalwork rests a steel table the size of a chessboard with inch-wide frogs perched on each corner. Metamorphosis was the pinnacle of Stuart Hill’s career as an arthouse blacksmith.
Hill was born a dozen miles away in Bromley in 1943. Aged 26, he set up a double-glazing firm, which folded seven years later when a contractor employing him to work on Ramsgate swimming pool went bust. Facing a significant debt, he and his then-wife, Vi, sold their house and moved to Suffolk. The new digs had an old forge, so in 1977, Hill went on a week-long blacksmithing course.
Over the following decade and a half, Hill produced enough public artwork to populate a niche pub crawl of London, designing gates, fences and bollards for several Art Deco estates, Croydon Mosque, Liverpool Street Station taxi rank, Kensington Gardens, more than one ASDA and the failed Tobacco Dock shopping centre. Further afield, he sent works to Armagh Astropark, Utrecht’s military hospital, the Metal Museum in Memphis and had multiple pieces commissioned by Lord and Lady Walston.
The German art professor Klaus Pracht called Metamorphosis ‘remarkable, down to the smallest detail’ and Amina Chatwin’s review of modern British blacksmiths, Into the New Iron Age, calls it ‘a work of art’. In 1982, Hill toured his frogs stateside: ‘He was using them like currency bars; after the demonstration people were wild for them,’ as well as for, ‘the fertility of his mind,’ according to Chatwin.
Eventually he made the leap into the American market (sales in Dallas, manufacturing in Arkansas), but was ‘shafted’ by a misunderstanding of US design rights, he says. ‘The very first job we lost the whole lot. I’d spent all my money, cashed in all my pensions.’ For the second time in his life, Hill was defeated by the rules of a game set beyond his control. ‘So here I am at age 55 looking around, thinking: this is interesting.’
After a brief interlude selling bathrooms, he set up a yellow book for internet pages. When that was swept away by the dot-com bubble, Hill decided to sail a lap around the UK, advertising for whoever would chip in for a slot on the hull of his 15-foot yacht called ‘Maximum Exposure’. Much of this journey is documented in news clips and a Wikipedia page, and its fortunes are hinted at by the epithet it earned him: ‘Captain Calamity’. But for Shetland’s purposes, it is summary enough to say that by August 2001, Hill had successfully sailed north far enough to capsize just west of the isles.
A week before, his wife had rung: she’d sold the house, moved to France and didn’t expect him to visit. As he lay in a hammock mulling his options, the last 30p to his name dropped out of an upside-down cupboard and into the waves. It had happened again: ‘Here I am halfway through my life with no ties or responsibilities. I thought I was heading home, but suddenly there’s no home to go to.’
To cope with these upsets, Hill developed a handful of axioms. ‘Whatever’s happening right now is just perfect,’ he likes to tell Irvine when she gets flustered. ‘Stick with me and you’ll never get wet,’ he says of his ability to control Shetland’s temperamental weather. At times this outlook makes him a difficult interviewee. (‘I don’t really have emotions,’ he tells me when I ask if being imprisoned in his ninth decade was frightening. ‘It’s all a game.’) But it is also undoubtedly part of his appeal to people whose lives have been touched by misfortune.
So when he was helicoptered into Shetland’s hospital, with no one to call and nothing but a boatful of expensively loaned equipment drifting away in the North Sea, he thought: ‘How many people ever have the opportunity to look at a blank sheet and say – that was the first half, what am I going to do with the second?’
It is not always as easy being a Hill supporter. Irvine sacked her own lawyer on Hill’s promise that he could act as her attorney after her last case. In March, I watched from the benches of Lerwick Court as sheriff Ian Mann shouted Hill down and threw his application to represent Irvine into a theatrically distant bin. Without particularly trying I spotted two Swastikas etched like desk graffiti into the gallery as we filed out.
‘That was just brutal,’ Irvine says afterwards, recovering with a coffee at a community centre nearby.
‘You realise,’ says Hill, ‘they are the ones that are shit scared of us.’
‘But then they’re always winning, though, Stuart.’ Irvine’s head is in her hands. ‘That’s the thing.’
‘So far,’ he replies.
‘There has to be a way around this. They can’t just bulldoze us into submission. It’s bullying.’
Irvine was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper and remembers being picked on because they had to keep moving her from school to school. Later her son took his own life, after being chronically bullied at school. ‘The family didn’t exactly fall apart but it kind of grew apart,’ she says. ‘That’s when I kind of turned: it gave me the strength to realise that something’s not right here. You can’t treat somebody like that and expect to get away with it.’ To her, Hill is first and foremost someone who stands up to bullies.
The next hearing goes better. Irvine goes up after a drunken sailor pleading his case (‘I wasn’t working at the time’) and a 24-year-old in a grey hoodie who was found with a knife in someone’s porch who describes living on benefits while struggling with substance abuse. Irvine’s trial is postponed, then collapses. It turns out the birders bringing charges against her are also English, and have said they won’t get back to the isles to give evidence until September at the earliest.
We file out for coffee and I ask Hill what makes a good Shetland First follower. ‘The people who are most affected by this system have the least to lose,’ he says. ‘All those people in court today are potential candidates for joining up.’ Irvine agrees: ‘It’s a vicious cycle. That second guy that was up – he didn’t ask to be where he’s at today. It’s the system that’s put him there like the rest of them.’
The group go on to discuss legalising drugs, and their visions for a sovereign Shetland. Hill outlines a kind of techno-futurist luxury communism; Irvine imagines returning to an agrarian system of bartering. While they chat, Hill leans over. He has bought the hydrofoil.
I find Hill down on the beach on a Saturday in late April that begins rainily but clears up by the time we meet. He is sat in full neoprene, fastening a sail to his new Thunderbolt85 high-performance windfoil board. This is a practice; if successful, Hill plans to sail into harbour next week, carving donuts through the waves with a massive flag, encouraging islanders to spoil their ballots. He’s forgotten his lifejacket though, and sends me back to the house to get it. Headlines flash through my mind: Promising Young Journalist’s Career Ended by Manslaughter, Elder Abuse Charges. I scour my texts with Hill for anything that could be considered to have encouraged this experiment.
Hill has set out an anchor, tied a safety rope back to shore and lumbers into the water. ‘He shouldn’t be doing things like this at his age,’ his partner, Margaret, heckles just loud enough for him to hear. ‘I want him to just stay at home, but no.’ Hill tells me to call the coastguard if he drifts onto the rocks. A seal watches.
I would not be the first to compare Hill to other populists. Shetland’s homegrown meme page, Reestit Neeps, is full of AI renderings of him and Donald Trump breaking bread. Nor do I think I learnt much new about populism today from spending time with Hill and Irvine: that would-be populists find followers among the disaffected, that those proto-populists themselves are prone to feeling cheated. If anything, Shetland First demonstrates that the populist script is more accessible than ever, its promises compelling enough to attach to almost any philosophy, no matter how coherent.
Out on the water Hills swings his legs to straddle the board, hunches and gets back off without even trying to lift the sail. ‘Well that was a waste of time,’ he says, legs splayed over the pebbles. ‘Stuart Hill fails again.’
Shetland went to the polls in Scotland’s national elections on 7 May. On average, 32 ballots were spoiled in each of the islands’ last four Holyrood elections. With Hill’s dryland campaigning, 51 were spoiled this year. A few days afterwards, he sends me a clip of Australian newscasters mentioning a walking football team named in his honour. I ask how he thinks the election went.
‘What election?’ he says.
‘The Holyrood one. On Thursday.’
‘Oh, that one: an alleged election, organised by a Returning Officer who can’t explain how Shetland is part of Scotland, under the auspices of the Electoral Commission, who cannot show how they have the authority to operate here.’
Hill says he hasn’t yet found out how many ballots were spoiled, because earlier in the week, he suffered a heart attack. In a Sovereign Shetland, the health service would more resemble a kind of medieval barber-shop, he has explained in the past: sewing up cuts and resetting bones but otherwise leaving people to sort themselves out (or not). After his last heart attack eight years ago, Hill declined medication and a stent.
Not for the first time it occurs to me that, if nothing else, my time with Hill and the Sovereign Shetland movement has thrown into relief the ironies inherent in who populism claims to fight for. Still, I hope Hill is on the mend, and tell him so.
‘It’ll take more than that to get me down,’ he says. ‘I need to get fit for windsurfing.’
