A snuffle here, a lunge there, he spun the First Minister dizzy...
Sees Sturgeon squirm over state snooper fiasco
YOU could tell that Ken Macintosh was furious because his tone was mild disapproval. The Presiding Officer is the perennial pushover teacher but yesterday he waved his ruler menacingly towards ministerial knuckles.
Later on, Education Secretary John Swinney would be announcing the ditching of the Named Person scheme. Or r ather, announcing it to anyone who hadn’t read about it already.
Somehow, this humiliating U-turn had been leaked in such a way that it l essened the SNP’s embarrassment in parliament. However could that have happened?
‘I understand that the Government is i nvestigating t he matter,’ said Macintosh. I doubt if Columbo would need a whole episode to figure this one out. Macintosh, who was jolly well minded to keep everyone in after lessons, reminded MSPs that ‘announcements on major policies should not enter the public domain before they are communicated to parliament’.
Interim Tory leader Jackson Carlaw got to his feet with trepidation: ‘I will try to artfully dance around the comment you have just made, Presiding Officer.’
And what a waltz it was. A shuffle here, a lunge there. He spun the First Minister dizzy with questions about her state snoopers plan, now the longestrunning and least successful spying operation since the Pierce Brosnan Bond years.
Sturgeon took the Frank Drebin approach of claiming everything was fine, like the hapless Naked Gun detective who causes an explosion in a fireworks factory then stands out front repeating ‘Nothing to see here’ as rockets combust around him.
She told MSPs: ‘Young people across Scotland already benefit from a named point of contact... and we want that to continue.’
Why, then, Carlaw needled, had she gone to all the trouble of defending the policy in court, to the tune of £800,000 in legal fees? With Herculean humbug, Sturgeon told him his ‘tone’ was ‘regrettable’.
There is a whiff of don’t-you-knowwho-I-am to the First Minister and even the mildest criticism can fill the air with entitled indignation.
Throughout, Swinney sat stonyfaced. His tenure at education has been so dismal you wonder if he’s been hired by Angela Constance to rehabilitate her reputation.
Carlaw reminded ministers that they ignored every warning about state snoopers from teachers and parents and, now, ‘teachers and parents have been left, as usual, in the dark’. With that, the Chief Mammy was dispatched to the naughty step. Patrick Harvie, the Robespierre of recycling, was ready to man – sorry, person – the barricades over the revelation that David Cameron asked Her Majesty for a sceptical ‘raising of the eyebrow’ during the 2014 independence referendum.
‘Another referendum is coming,’ he declared, prompting a jeremiad from Sturgeon accusing the UK Government of ‘trying to block or rig Scotland’s democratic right to choose’. That’s what I always think when I consider Scots politics over the past five years: not enough elections.
TORY Donald Cameron pounced with an enigmatic query: had Sturgeon ever used personal or party email addresses to conduct government business? The Hillary question. Hmmm. Sturgeon began hesitantly. There was an almost audible whoosh of eyebrows shooting up foreheads. She side-stepped, then resumed her seat.
‘Expect to hear more about this’ I jotted down, only for Neil Findlay to promptly oblige. When tackled by Tory justice spokesman Liam Kerr about police training, she asked him to forward details of the freedom of information response he quoted from. Political bruiser Findlay piped up: ‘Which email should he use?’
Stephen Daisley