Buckhaven Bruiser was back in the blue corner
RUTH Davidson got Nicola Sturgeon to admit ‘we are not infallible’, so we can count her return to First Minister’s Questions as a win. The Buckhaven Bruiser was back in the blue corner in her new role as leader of the Scottish Conservatives at Holyrood. It’s a big step up for this rising star who was on the backbenches only a week ago.
Davidson got stuck in from the off by taking a swing at John Swinney. ‘The last week has been a terrible time for Scotland’s school pupils and a new low for this Government’s handling of our education system,’ she declared.
The opposition are fit to be tied that Sturgeon’s second-in-command killed off the exam results row by restoring pupils’ Higher grades. Had he done anything less, they’d be closing in on the knockout blow right now. He beat them by conceding their point, which is dastardly clever.
Still, needs must, so Davidson pressed on. She was rather clever herself, having dug up what Sturgeon said about the last exams fiasco, back when the SNP was in opposition and questioning the government was talking UP Scotland.
The future First Minister had demanded Labour’s education minister, Sam Galbraith. release all relevant papers about the bungle. Would she now hold herself to that?
‘We will make available to parliament whatever parliament wants,’ she undertook, before taking issue with the terms of the question: ‘One thing that is different now is that we are living through a global pandemic.’
She seems to think fouling up exam results in a year with no exams was to be expected, rather
than something of an achievement. Davidson essayed that, while Sturgeon’s loyalty to her minister was commendable, her primary loyalty was to pupils and parents. ‘I’m not sure loyalty to colleagues is a strong suit for Ruth Davidson,’ Sturgeon shot back. Jackson Carlaw was noticeably absent from the chamber.
ISTRUGGLED to contain, or even socially distance, my glee. This is what FMQs is meant to be about: verbal sparring without regard to facts or logic, and they weren’t done yet.
Sturgeon taunted that Davidson would soon be ‘pulling on her ermine and going to the unelected House of Lords’ and implied she was ‘running away from democratic accountability’.
Davidson was up like a shot: ‘For four months, we’ve had this First Minister stand up and tell the people of Scotland she doesn’t do party politics.
Nine minutes it took her to get there.’ For good measure, she chucked in a dig about Alex Salmond ‘shilling for Putin’s Pravda’.
Sturgeon suspected she had hit a ‘raw nerve’, adding: ‘I don’t criticise anybody for wanting to serve in any parliament. I just have an oldfashioned preference that they get elected before they do so.’ Holyrood is such a den of dullards, it was a treat to watch two of its biggest beasts lock horns once more.
Sturgeon asserted: ‘We are not infallible; we make mistakes and when we make them, we put them right.’
The punters, she said, weren’t keen on ‘the ding-dong exchanges that I in opposition have been as guilty of as anybody else’. But now was different. ‘We are not living in normal times.’
The Chinese Communist Party’s hapless handling of an epidemic meant she wasn’t a hypocrite. As if that giant binder wasn’t enough, now she has a Little Red Book of excuses.