A glimpse of contempt behind the tartan titans’ poker faces

For all the turmoil of recent years, the sight of two brawling politicians is – thankfully – a rarity in British politics. We are not Uganda or Ukraine (not yet, anyway).

However, at First Minister’s questions yesterday, Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson came as close to fisticuffs as you are likely to see on these isles. Contempt seethed off each syllable. Every glance betrayed a fizzing, thinly-veiled loathing.

The first minister, fresh from an eight-hour grilling at the hands of the Holyrood harassment inquiry, should have been exhausted. After all, there is nothing more tiring than continually remembering details from meetings you claim to have forgotten. But Ms Sturgeon seemed indefatigable.

Resplendent in businesslike navy rather than her familiar scarlet suit, she – as ever – brazened it out, refusing to engage with the details of Ms Davidson’s pointed questioning.

Ms Davidson had come prepared for this clash of the tartan titans. No sooner had the First Minister finished updating the chamber on the latest Covid statistics than the Tory parliament leader began quizzing Ms Sturgeon on the ministerial code. “To quote the words of her own legal counsel, why did the government try to defend the indefensible for so long?”

For a split second, Ms Sturgeon looked as if she had swallowed a hornet; but she quickly issued a lengthy rebuttal at breakneck speed. Glibly parroting her two-pronged stock defence, she fell back again and again on references to her gruelling eight-hour inquisition. “As anybody who paid any attention to lengthy proceedings yesterday will have seen – which clearly doesn’t include Ruth

Davidson,” she added, with an airy wave across the chamber, “that’s just simply not true”. “In the meantime, I’m going to get on with the job I suspect most people want me to get on with – leading this country through and out of a pandemic.” At this, the assembled SNP colleagues quacked ecstatically, like a flock of mating mallards.

Ms Davidson, concealing her contempt more successfully, continued rattling off discrepancies in prosecutorial tones: “There is no argument about if [she] broke the ministerial code. The argument is only about how badly she broke it.”

Ms Sturgeon is, as we are often told, a skilled parliamentarian. But even the finest poker players have telltale tics. For the first minister, these are a slight wobble of the head; an occasional scowl that even this most selfcontrolled of politicians cannot disguise as a grimace; and when properly rattled, ad hominem deflection. Perhaps this explains why Ms Davidson grinned broadly as Ms Sturgeon, eyes bulging, mocked her for “slinking off to the House of Lords”, spitting bile in scenes worthy of The Exorcist. She never got round to answering “the soon-to-be Baroness Davidson’s” questions, but perhaps the real answer was revealed in the SNP MSPS’ baying cheers, for one, and the snarling fury on Ms Sturgeon’s face.