Sir Alec’s spinal tap

A BOOK on Prime Ministers by Andrew Gimson tells how Sir Alec Douglas-Home was rejected by the Army in 1940 because of a spinal condition that required grafting bone from his shin on to his vertebrae. The languid, aristocratic Tory MP for Kinross and Western Perthshire later joked that surgeons had ‘achieved the impossible – and put backbone into a politician’.

SCOTTISH Labour switches leaders with such rapidity that no fewer than four of them stood up to grill Nicola Sturgeon at First Minister’s Questions – Iain Gray, Johann Lamont, Kezia Dugdale and present incumbent Richard Leonard. It left Holyrood wags wondering if they could form a ‘leaders club’, but given this is Scottish Labour, and the top job has a short shelf life, would they find a clubhouse big enough?