Holyrood Sketch No more Mr nice guy... the return of Angry John
THERE was a distinct lack of a First Minister. In her place sat John Swinney. Z i mbabweans have ousted Robert Mugabe after a long, colourful tyranny. Could a military coup have claimed our own snazzily-dressed megalomaniac?
Nicola Sturgeon would be blissfully unaware if there were tanks in the streets of Edinburgh. She’s been off on a German jaunt to the UN climate conference in Bonn, where she announced more than £300,000 for a ‘ Gender Action Plan’ to increase representation of women in the fight against greenhouse gases.
To think we’ve been wasting money tackling global warming with windmills and low-energy light bulbs when the real culprit was too many men in lab coats.
Given Mr Swinney’s performance yesterday, Miss Sturgeon might be onto something preferring women in the workplace. The Deputy First Minister is usually reliable as a wall of bluster.
Since the SNP came to power, he has reinvented himself as ‘Honest John’, the boring bank manager you can trust. Those with long memories will recall his ill-starred time at the helm of the party when he was Angry John, the bespectacled Braveheart who rallied the SNP faithful with cries of ‘tell the Brits to get off ’.
It was Angry John who turned up for FMQs. Ruth Davidson reminded him that he guaranteed basic-rate payers before the Holyrood elections that their taxes wouldn’t go up. Would he keep that promise? Mr Swinney chose his words carefully: ‘The Scottish Government i s engaged in dialogue and discussion with the public... to consider the steps that we should take on taxation.’
‘Aw,’ snorted the Tory leader. ‘That was a bit lacklustre.’ God, she’s evil. ‘ The truth is that the SNP wheeled out Mr Swinney – Honest John – before the election to tell people that their taxes would not go up, but as soon as the party got back in, those promises turned to dust.’
The confidence drained from Mr Swinney. The bank manager had invested everyone’s savings in an exciting opportunity run by a Nigerian prince and the customers were about to find out.
Miss Davidson went on: ‘ There was once a time when he and Alex Salmond used to preach the merits of competitive taxation. Now, Mr Swinney takes his directions from Derek Mackay and Mr Salmond takes his from Mr Putin. How the mighty have fallen.’
AND that did it. Angry John roared to life: ‘The only sad thing is Ruth Davidson’s miserable contribution to FMQs. That is what is sad. Week in, week out, we have that miserable contribution to the debate. The Government takes the serious decisions about our country’s future and will leave Ruth Davidson weeping in the opposition benches.’ Down sat Miss Davidson with a smile of satisfaction, an assassin who had got her mark.
Willie Rennie picked up the Putin thread. Was Alex Salmond a fit and proper person to buy the Scotsman? Tovarisch Swinney leapt to Kremlin Eck’s defence. The sin, apparently, wasn’t Scotland’s reputation being bought and sold for Moscow gold but ‘the stinking reek of hypocrisy’ from those complaining about it.
Yesterday was the debut of the Alex Salmond Show. It played like a vaguely sinister episode of Newsround, complete with a Jerry Springer- style ‘final thoughts’ monologue. Whatever the Kremlin is paying for this, it’s far too much.