POLITICAL DIARY

Pitlochry’s part

IT was certainly better than a bar of Toblerone purchased at Brussels Airport.

When Brexit Secretary David Davis met his EU counterpart, Michel Barnier, for their first formal talks last week they exchanged hiking-related gifts.

A keen climber, Mr Davis handed over a rare book on mountaineering in French, while Mr Barnier gifted a walking stick from his home region of France. But where did Davis buy the book? From Glacier Books, a specialist mountaineering bookshop in Pitlochry.

Good to see Scotland playing a part in the historic day.

Not a gravy train?

IT’S fair to say MPs don’t have the best of reputations when it comes to expenses but here’s a nice tale from when Lib Dem Jo Swinson was first elected in 2005.

Then the “Baby of the House” at just 25 years old, her travel costs shot up part of the way through her first term.

Given she was making the same journeys every week this left everyone baffled until the East Dunbartonshire MP explained it was because her Young Persons Railcard had expired.

Magnificent MPs

MUCH has been made of the “Magnificent Seven” – the Scottish Labour MPs elected at the General Election – but has anyone in Labour bandying this around seen the film?

The seven gunfighters, hired to protect a village in Mexico from bandits, finish the 1960 Western as four of them are shot dead.

Walls have space

NEW SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford said last week “everyone was on an election footing” given politics seems to have instability stamped through it like a stick of rock.

Does this explain the sea of empty picture hooks in his Commons office?

Or does he simply not have as many photos of himself as his predecessor, Angus Robertson?

Show time

SNP MP Angus MacNeil, never the shy, retiring type, took to Twitter last week to moan about how parking barriers at Edinburgh Airport were creating huge congestion for drivers trying to leave the facility.

But, not for the first time in his life, Mr MacNeil was then politely asked to get his facts straight when a member of the airport staff replied to point out the source of the congestion was in fact the neighbouring Royal Highland Show.

All a bit embarrassing, as Mr MacNeil who is the SNP’s rural affairs spokesman!