Stateside Nic doesn’t deserve pelters
WHILE away, I saw Nicola Sturgeon getting pelters for daring to go abroad. Forgive me for not joining in the collective stoning but we all need a break sometimes, and Scotland needs to be represented overseas.
Sturgeon took her work on holiday with her, lecturing America about Scottish independence while domestic opponents would rather she got on with the day job.
That seems to be the mood of Scotland’s strangulated politics just now, with no break in the constitutional logjam until the polls jolt things along or until events, dear boy, events, change the tune.
Sturgeon’s forays into international affairs are as nothing to the misadventures of Boris Johnson in the last week.
Unless you are Boris Johnson then I suppose there is no good week to be Boris Johnson, but poor Foreign Secretary came back from the G7 with his tail between his legs. Mocked for cancelling a trip to Moscow, where he could have confronted the Kremlin directly on Assad’s chemical attack on civilians, Johnson was dismissed by his G7 colleagues over a call for Russian sanctions.
His team now admit that there may have been a misunderstanding of what the blubbering Foreign Secretary meant by sanctions.
He wants targeted action against high-profile military individuals involved in the Syrian campaign, not the kind of measures that would lead Moscow to switch off the gas pipe to western European economies.
Written down as a serial blunderer, Johnson was actually right to pursue this line against Russia but was spat out in the whirlwind of events.
Like Sturgeon, he won’t be dented by a few bad headlines and events may prove him, and her, right in the end.
As the bard said, the loser now will be later to win.