After attending Blackrock College in County Dublin, White joined the Royal Navy as a boy recruit at the former HMS Ganges in Suffolk.

During the 1990s White became active in the Scottish National Party, standing as its candidate for the Westminster parliamentary seat of Edinburgh East and Musselburgh in 1997, where he took a 19% share of the vote.

White wrote a series of books on training, sales, personality profiling, and psychometric testing, and numerous articles on politics for the Scottish Left Review.

His last published book, Scotland, Frequently Asked Questions: What Every Visitor Needs to Know (2004), is a humorous exploration of the sore points of Scottish history and psychology.

Prior to his death he had completed a further book, giving a tongue-in-cheek view of what's wrong with Britain and justifying his move to Spain.