Her face remained frozen in unblinking and livid angriness
MARGARET Mitchell was not, it’s fair to say, terribly happy. Having sat through a chummy exchange between First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, during which both agreed that EU membership was very much in the UK’s interest, the Tory backbencher rose to her feet, fixed Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh with a ferocious glare, and barked: ‘Point of order!’
The point of order is a much-abused part of parliamentary procedure which allows members to question whether rules and regulations are being followed.
In reality, it’s a favourite method among the tiresome to try to derail debate when their side’s losing. Your standard point of order can, as a rule, be reduced to ‘Presiding Officer, I don’t like that other guy.’
Mr Macintosh invited Mrs Mitchell to wait until the end of yesterday’s First Minister’s Question Time to raise whatever concern was on her mind.
She agreed to do so and, for the next half hour, she sat there, stewing.
If Mrs Mitchell blinked while she counted down to her chance to speak, I didn’t see it happen: her face remained a picture of stony fury; flies bounced off her eyeballs and she didn’t flinch; opposition politicians gathered around her, hurling abuse and clapping, and not a muscle moved.
When I abseiled into the chamber and told her that I was going to lie about flies, clapping opponents and abseiling, she remained determinedly impassive. Livid barely does her reaction justice.
As proceedings drew to a close, Mr Macintosh thanked Mrs Mitchell for her patience and invited her to make her point of order.
The Tory MSP let out the breath she’d been holding for the previous 30 minutes and rose to her feet to ask the Presiding Officer whether the chummy to-and-fro between Miss Sturgeon and Miss Dugdale had broken the rule of purdah, which prevents parliamentary resources being used at this point in the EU referendum campaign lest one side benefit unduly.
If this rule had not been broken, when, wondered Mrs Mitchell, might the argument that the UK would be better off out of Europe be allowed an airing in the Holyrood chamber.
BECAUSE Mrs Mitchell holds the unfashionable-among-MSPs view that the UK should vote to leave the EU next Thursday, her point of order was drowned out. Labour’s Anas Sarwar leapt on to his lectern and began conducting the chamber in a rousing rendition of the Marseillaise, Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie lobbed a bratwurst in her direction, which would have struck her had it not got stuck on the corner of a novelty hat, in the shape of the Parthenon, selected by Tory MSP Murdo Fraser to complement his M&S suit.
Remarkably, Mr Macintosh was able to make out what Mrs Mitchell was saying and, as the singing died down and the SNP’s James Dornan scampered off to the back of the chamber to gnaw on that hurled sausage and growl at officials who risked approaching, he explained it was his view that neither the First Minister nor the Scottish Labour leader had taken a side in the EU debate.
This was, by any standard, codswallop. Miss Sturgeon and Miss Dugdale had been united in their pro-Remain rhetoric. Perhaps realising that people could actually hear the nonsense he was spouting, Mr Macintosh clarified his ruling: nobody had used ‘parliamentary resources’ to express support for a particular side, he said.
Labour’s Neil Findlay, whose third attempt to become Scottish Labour leader is expected any day now, had his own point of order: wasn’t it the case that the power used to light the chamber and the official report carrying details of
the debate were parliamentary resources. But as far as Mr Macintosh was concerned, these parliamentary resources (for that is, quite clearly, what they are) were not parliamentary resources
And so Margaret Mitchell retired, defeated. Ken Macintosh – in a past life, a pro-European Labour MSP – called proceedings to a close, leaving nobody in any doubt that he can be relied upon to interpret the rules impartially.
Just as long as they fit his own particular point of view.