Nothing’s private if the public paid for it
THE Scottish Daily Mail’s revelation this week that two senior Nationalist MPs embarked on torrid affairs with the same woman shook to the core the SNP’s sanctimonious claim to be the vanguard of ‘a new kind of politics’.
The simple truth remains that politicians of every stripe have – like the rest of us – feet of clay. As John MacLeod details elsewhere on this page, the Commons has a long and ignoble history of such tawdry goings-on.
The senior MPs at the centre of the latest furore – Angus MacNeil and Stewart Hosie – now face serious questions over their flings with journalist Serena Cowdy.
This is not about censorious ‘Victorian values’. Mr MacNeil may have used public cash in his wooing of the blonde.
That demolishes the key Nationalist complaint about the story – that politicians’ private lives are somehow off-limits. Not if public money is involved, they aren’t.
Nicola Sturgeon, confronted by the sternest test of her leadership of the party, tried to ride two horses on Wednesday when she was reappointed as First Minister. On one hand she made a public, and welcome, show of support for friend and Cabinet colleague Shona Robison, nowestranged wife of Mr Hosie. Simultaneously she eschewed three chances to back the errant Mr Hosie, deputy party leader.
But faced with the reality that she must address the louche behaviour of her two MPs, she declared the matter private.
Her position is unsustainable. The public have every right to know that MPs were fornicating behind their respective wives’ backs when they were supposedly engaged in Parliamentary business and, crucially, whether taxpayers’ cash was frittered in the pursuit of Miss Cowdy.
Equally, the SNP is the party of government in Scotland and a significant bloc – no less than the Parliament’s conscience, if you believe its own claims – at Westminster.
So the public are also entitled to evaluate the dynamics at the top of the party.
Mr MacNeil is a veteran MP and head of the prestigious Energy and Climate Change Committee. Does he still enjoy Miss Sturgeon’s confidence? In a back-slapping meeting on Wednesday, Mr Hosie was confirmed as deputy leader of the SNP Westminster cohort. Miss Sturgeon’s silence is tacit approval.
And Mr Hosie is also in charge of the SNP’s desperate new campaign to resurrect its independence push.
The public will have Mr Hosie touting for their support this summer and must be in a position to gauge his trustworthiness.
Today, Press freedom is under siege. Politicians want to legislate so they have control of what the public know. Celebrities are using injunctions to keep sordid and deceitful assignations hidden.
Should the powerful forces arrayed against the Press triumph, it will be the venal and the duplicitous who gain at the public’s expense.