... as her old lecturer takes a swipe

NICOLA Sturgeon’s former law professor has launched a withering attack on her Government’s legislation and accused the SNP of blocking ‘dissent’ in the party.

Alistair Bonnington, the former Honorary Professor of Law at Glasgow University, said Nationalist MSPs ‘slavishly follow what they are instructed to do’, leading to the ‘lowest quality legislation in Europe’.

Legislation that has come under fire includes the Named Person scheme to appoint a state guardian for every child, and a crackdown on anti-sectarian chanting.

Victims have recently urged Deputy First Minister John Swinney to quit over an ongoing child abuse inquiry. They are furious that the probe has been left leaderless in the wake of the resignation of its chairman, Susan O’Brien.

In a newspaper opinion piece, Professor Bonnington wrote: ‘I fear I must accept responsibility here. I taught Nicola Sturgeon when she was in law classes at Glasgow University. I seem to have failed to instill in her the most basic rules of how the institutions of government work in the free world.’

However, an SNP spokesman hit back last night saying Mr Bonnington was ‘well known for his vitriolic and over-the-top articles’, adding: ‘The SNP has an incredibly strong track record in government.’

REMIND him of anybody?’ The highlight of Theresa May’s barnstorming first Prime Minister’s Questions was her booming, deadpan reanimation of the blessed Margaret, as she delivered a final, killing blow to the hapless Jeremy.

The Tory side of the Commons exploded in delight at TM doing MT, whooping in recognition, its collective heart pounding at the brief and unexpected return of its late heroine’s husky, head-mistressy tones to the chamber she once dominated.

The already bedraggled and miserable Labour MPs sitting opposite responded with a muscle-memory shudder of fear – a fight or flight instinct sparked by the sudden appearance of an ancient and deadly enemy, a frog suddenly eyeballing a cobra.

It was an arch and knowing move by a Prime Minister who seems to have discovered a welcome and previously well-hidden capacity for mischief. It took guts. It made you wonder about the pre-PMQs conversation with her advisers. ‘Shall I?’ ‘Go on. We dare you.’ ‘But can I carry it off?’ ‘It’ll send Liam Fox into a six-month erotic reverie if you do. It might even stop him droning on about Article 50 for a bit…’ ‘Sold.’

If Mrs May’s intentional tribute to an illustrious predecessor went down well, Melania Trump’s ‘tribute’ was unintentional and considerably less successful.

While the British PM knew exactly what she was doing and why, the wannabe American First Lady wandered wide-eyed into a humiliating plagiarism row at the Republican National Convention, where her unlovely huckster hubbie and his acolytes have spent the past week finding ever new ways to horrify the world’s reality-based community.

The third and current Mrs Trump gave the traditional candidate’s wife speech at the convention in Cleveland on Monday – traditional in the sense that it was practically a word-for-word repetition of the one delivered by Michelle Obama at the same stage of the political cycle eight years ago.

Melania/Michelle had been raised to feel that ‘you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise’.

Michelle/Melania wanted ‘our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them’. And so on.

Republicans were horrified; Democrats were scornful; the New York Times was unimpressed; the eminent New Yorker magazine commissioned a caustic essay. Mrs Trump was quickly disappeared by the campaign goons.

Here’s where I do something I never thought I would, and confess some actual sympathy for an actual human with the actual surname Trump. The levels of snobbery and disdain directed at Melania over the past few days have been ludicrous.

The speech may have raised questions about her judgment but remember, this is a woman who willingly married Donald Trump: who doubted her judgment was a tad shaky? It may have cast doubt on her integrity – but it’s clear from what has emerged since that this was a failure caused by inexperience and cock-up rather than arrogance and conspiracy. It may be the latest infuriatingly amateurish piece of political bungling from Camp Trump, but remember that Melania isn’t standing for election to anything, has no real experience of writing for or speaking to crowds of 50,000 people and would anyway probably rather have been getting her nails done.

This Mrs T ain’t our Mrs T. And while she may well be a perfectly ghastly individual, I can’t find it in myself to judge her a devil for saying some words that someone else said almost a decade ago.

For me, the vitriol heaped on Mrs Trump’s expensively coiffured head hasn’t damaged her husband’s claim to the presidency (there’s plenty else doing that) so much as it has exposed yet again the gulf between the obsessions of the professional political and media class and those who sit outside it and do unspeakable things such as, say, vote for Donald Trump, or for Brexit, or mistake guacamole for mushy peas rather than the other way round.

The week-long, over-hyped furore around what is basically an unimportant speech by an inexperienced woman is just another sign that the centre is not listening to what the periphery is telling it, and may yet result in a clownish former reality TV star moving into the White House.

And here’s another thing: I don’t actually have much of a problem with plagiarism. In fact, at times I’ve positively encouraged it. And I’ve certainly been guilty of it – of which, more in a bit.

Now, look. If you’re doing something important such as writing a PhD thesis or a novel or a history book, you should try to avoid nicking someone else’s clever ideas and presenting them as the fruit of your own genius. That’s just naughty. And you probably didn’t deserve that Nobel Prize if you copied your equations from a book you’re now late in returning to the library.

But equally, let’s not get carried away. If plagiarism is a sin, then we are all of us sinners. If you’ve passed off someone else’s funny joke as your own, beaming smugly at the guffaws of your audience, you’re a dirty plagiarist. If you’ve absorbed the opinions and predictions of some pompous newspaper columnist, and then repeated them to your poor, bored wife or husband as if you’re Abraham Lincoln: plagiarist.

If you’ve ever found a certain tweet particularly witty or smart and deployed cut-and-paste to reissue it as an original thought, you’re a plagiarist. But really, who cares? Who but the prissiest egoon-legs could mind? It just doesn’t matter. Corrie’s on in a minute.

WHEN, as a young thing full of bad ideas, I was given my first newspaper column, I was hugely intimidated by the prospect. I approached a talented and successful older friend whose own writing I admired, and asked for advice.

He told me this, roughly: ‘You’re too young and inexperienced to have a voice of your own that could be anything other than squeaky, pre-pubescent and interesting only to your mother. So decide which successful writers you enjoy most and spend the next few years ripping them off. Seriously, just rip them off. Steal their best lines and their sharpest gags and their cleverest insights and, in time, you’ll absorb the lessons and grow into yourself.’ Reader, I did just that.

I felt a particular affinity with the political views of the novelist Robert Harris, who at that time wrote a weekly column for a newspaper in Fleet Street. I liked his books and his urbane style.

In an early column I ‘borrowed’ one of his lines about Gordon Brown standing ‘like a great bullfrog’ in the way of Tony Blair’s efforts to reform the public services, then spent all weekend panicking I’d be found out.

I half-inched the odd Martin Amis witticism (all young male writers try to write like Martin Amis for a bit – all young male writers fail). I regularly helped myself to the distinctive formulations favoured by the late, great Herald columnist Ian Bell. There are others to whom I owe a significant number of pints.

In truth, I was learning my craft – studying at the feet of the masters, even if I was so insignificant they had no idea I was there. I certainly felt the benefit and, having passed on my friend’s advice to up-andcoming talents over the years, I know others have too.

So I suppose what I’m saying is that, in my view, not all plagiarism is bad plagiarism – in fact, some of it can be quite good. And even some of the bad stuff doesn’t matter very much.

If Melania doesn’t make it to the White House, it won’t be because she copied a Michelle Obama speech, but because she has terrible taste in men. And if she does make it to the White House, we’ll have bigger things to worry about.