Plenty of words – but nothing like an answer
WiTh her pastel suits and conservative hair-do, Tess White is the sensibly stylish face of no-nonsense Toryism. The politics of Ruth Davidson meets the gutsiness of Teresa Gorman with the flair of Edwina Currie. A formidable troika, you’ll agree.
Like the SNP’s Christine Grahame, White brings a pop of colour to a holyrood chamber dulled by all those inseparably grey men who seem to wear the same Slater’s two-piece on rotation.
But White is more than sharp suits and sharp words. She is shaping up to be a formidable interrogator of ministers, skilled at locating a weak-spot and prodding it from every angle. Yesterday afternoon, she put Transport Minister Jenny Gilruth through her paces.
The subject was the SNP’s feat of taking over ScotRail and somehow making it worse. Two months into nationalisation, there’s a pay dispute and drivers are refusing to work on Sundays, compounding a longstanding driver shortage.
ScotRail announced the axing of one-third of its services in response, with key routes finishing early or being cut back altogether. The Midnight Train to Georgia now stops at 8.15pm and the Chattanooga choo-choo only choo-choos every other day.
Train timetables being hardly the most thrilling topic, White honed in on what will be at the forefront of many a football fan’s thoughts.
‘The World Cup qualifier on June 1 is one of the biggest games in 20 years, with more than 50,000 people flocking to hampden,’ she told Gilruth. ‘Can the minister give fans the assurances they need that extra capacity will be provided to get them home from hampden and that that capacity will not fall foul of more unplanned cancellations?’
her question was met with some refreshing candour. The minister admitted that ‘over the past few weeks, the network has… not been functioning’ and pointed to ‘mass cancellations’, including 300 in one day. This was all wrong.
if Gilruth had paid attention in ministerial training school, she’d have spun the cancellations as a major reduction in late-running trains. Services can’t be tardy if they’ve been ditched altogether.
Gilruth said the Government wanted fans to attend the match ‘on public transport, including by using, where possible, our bus services across Scotland’. Quite what bus companies would make of a sudden influx of thousands of footie fans was never addressed.
Gilruth also protested that ‘before the reduced timetable was introduced, the last train from Glasgow to Aberdeen would have been at 21:40, so it still would not have returned people home to Aberdeen after the match’.
This was the best the SNP’s spin doctors could come up with? They have an army of comms specialists and the winning line in the morning meeting was: ‘Things are only slightly worse than before?’
ThE minister informed the chamber: ‘Specifically on the Scotland-Ukraine match, i asked ScotRail for an update on this last Friday. They have assured me that plans are in place and they will publicise details of this in due course.’ Take your time. Given kick-off is in seven days, the phrase ‘in due course’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
White pivoted to the night-time economy and cultural sector, which were ‘already on their knees as a result of the pandemic’ and whose representatives had called the rail cuts ‘devastating’.
What compensation would they be eligible for? There burbled up from Gilruth a lot of words but nothing resembling an answer.
Gilruth is still young. She has plenty of time to find her own ministerial voice. But if she’s going to mimic anyone, she should pick someone more plausible than the First Minister.