Holyrood coffee row leaves a bitter taste

IEXPECT you’re probably sipping a hot drink as you read this. Perhaps it’s one you made at home, or maybe you’ve treated yourself to something in a coffee shop. Either way, I imagine you paid for it yourself.

It may, then, interest you to know that in a delusional place called Holyrood, such things are regarded as somewhat beyond the pale.

Let us transplant ourselves to a plenary session that took place in the main chamber of the Scottish parliament on Thursday afternoon, where the Scottish Conservatives’ Mary Scanlon, her f ace as solemn as the grave, demanded that ‘ new and existing MSPs get a decent cup of coffee in committee’.

Heavens to Betsy. We know not how they suffer.

Honestly, this really happened. If you don’t believe me you can scoot on over to Scottish Parliament TV (every bit as seat-gripping as it sounds) and watch the whole sorry exchange for yourself.

Scanlon even attempted a little joke, saying that if they were talking about food disposal (they weren’t) then perhaps they ought to dispose of the coffee, as it wasn’t very good. Tee hee.

Just to clarify, this is free coffee. Or rather, it’s free to the MSPs. You and I are paying for it. Happily, it would seem this is a cross-party issue that everyone can get on board with.

Scanlon may have raised the problem, but she was swiftly backed by Nationalist MSP Mike MacKenzie, who said he ‘shared her concerns’. The Tories and the SNP: working together to ban watery coffee for good!

To give her her due, Linda Fabiani MSP, who was chairing the whole sorry situation, seemed somewhat flummoxed.

‘I quite like the coffee that we get in committee,’ she said meekly, before going on to acknowledge that she had indeed heard dark rumours over the years about the quality of committee room coffee. Mr MacKenzie then – hold on to your seats, folks – observed that the quality of the coffee diminished the longer it sat in their flasks.

Seriously. This went on for about five minutes. In the main chamber of the Scottish parliament. In the middle of a working day. I’d recommend you hop on over to watching-paint- dry.com afterwards for a little light relief.

What’s next, one wonders? Tighter regulation on parliamentary baked goods? A watchdog named OffScone? A quality control i nspectorate on teaspoons?

Look, this not about a cup of coffee, awful or otherwise. Not really. It’s about a parliament that wants to be taken seriously debating pointless trivia.

It’s about a parliament that recently received its biggest pay rise in years using our time – and our money – to witter about peripheral nonsense.

It’s about navel-gazing of the worst, most excruciating, kind – the type that gets the backs of the electorate up and sounds awful when played out on front pages across the land.

And frankly, while we grapple with a creaking NHS, an arthritic school system and crippling council tax rises, it feels like fiddling while Scotland burns.

So MSPs, a word of advice: Stop moaning about nothing. Start working for your constituents.

And buy your own coffee, just like the rest of us.