SNP shoot themselves in the foot over data cowboys
NEVER ask a question you don’t know the answer to is quite a good rule for politicians.
It’s something Brendan O’Hara MP discovered when he quizzed a whistleblower over Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in UK politics.
I think they call it a boomerang shot, judging by the stunned look on O’Hara’s face when the answer came back that the controversial data company met with the SNP to pitch for business.
This is not embarrassing because the SNP met with the firm that allegedly harvested Facebook data to distort the democratic process.
It is very embarrassing because the party’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford has been flinging metaphorical rocks across the Commons aimed at hitting on Tory party links with Cambridge Analytica.
Now, via the whistle-blower, Westminster find out what SNP central HQ must have known all along. The SNP rushed out a press release stating one meeting had taken place with an arm’s-length consultant, not a party office bearer, who concluded the company were “a bunch of cowboys”.
The self-satisfied quip is the giveaway.
The SNP wouldn’t recognise a posse of digital cowboys if the cast of Rawhide saddled up on Calton Hill.
If the party are so adept at spotting dodgy data sifters, how did they end up in the independence referendum with Canadian pollsters who had them winning the vote 54 per cent to 46 per cent right up until the polls closed on September 18, 2014?
First Contact were so confident in their tracking of social media Scotland, rather than real Caledonia, that they boasted of winning in a Canadian newspaper before Clackmannanshire had declared.
The only pity is the headline wasn’t along the “Dewey defeats Truman” lines, which could be deployed now by opponents whenever Indyref2 is mentioned.
We don’t know who in the SNP carried the can for hiring the Canadian cowboys any more than we know who met with Cambridge cowboys.
So much for transparency, so much incompetence and so much for leaving Westminster colleagues so exposed to charges of hypocrisy.