Aberdeen

Monday

1 June 2026

Will the Tories win the Aberdeen South by-election?

For all of the squabbling between Reform and Restore, the Right’s best chance at a by-election win on 18 June may not be in Makerfield, but 300-odd miles further north – in Aberdeen. The beneficiary wouldn’t be Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe, but Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives. The Tory candidate is now ‘quietly confident’ It’s unsurprising that this contest has been largely overlooked. My Westminster colleagues treat the suburbs of Manchester as being almost unfathomably distant, so the North Sea coast seems like an alien planet. But Aberdeen is also a city used to being ignored. According to the Centre for Cities, between 2010 and 2020, household incomes in the city fell by almost 7 per cent; between 2010 and 2023, it was one of only two cities in the UK to lose jobs.

Thursday

28 January 2021

Maggie Fergusson

One of the last men-only jobs left — offshore in the North Sea

As a child, I loved the Ladybird ‘People at Work’ series. I had the ones on the fireman, the policeman, the fisherman and the postman; and just one on a woman, The Nurse. Now, of course, they seem absurd. Women are doing all those ‘man’s’ jobs, and many more. So where do you go to find a men-only workplace? A monastery, maybe. Or an oil rig. It’s not clear how Tabitha Lasley first fell in with riggers, but she was quickly enthralled. They are among the best paid blue-collar workers in the country — at the height of the North Sea oil boom even rig cleaners earned £300 a day — and they splash their money about like professional footballers on flashy clothes, state-of-the-art TVs, cocaine. ‘They were interesting.