We just noticed a finding from the most recent opinion poll that surprisingly seems to have escaped the attention of every Scottish newspaper except the Press & Journal.
As far as we can ascertain, the P&J was alone in reporting the obviously newsworthy fact that just a quarter of Scots believe the First Minister’s ridiculous cock-and-bull story about “forgetting” the occasion when she first heard that her friend, colleague and mentor of 30 years was facing charges of trying to rape some of her other friends.
But the figures are part of a wider and depressing trend.
We’ve just received the most extraordinary Freedom Of Information response from the Scottish Government, readers. Trust us, you want to go and make yourselves a strong cup of tea before you read it. Or get this guy to bring you one.
It doesn’t take a master analyst to see that the Salmond inquiry committee is running out of patience with the Scottish Government’s endless attempts to obstruct its work.
This afternoon it issued a statement, with obvious irritation, making clear that it did not wish to see documents the Scottish Government was trying to submit to it, which the committee had not asked for, and which had previously been struck down as unlawful by Lord Pentland in the initial judicial inquiry.
The Scottish Government’s only purpose in doing so was to try to put the details of the discredited and disproven-in-court allegations into the public domain with the intention of smearing Mr Salmond yet again, and the committee has made its displeasure with the plan clear, telling the Scottish Government to abandon its intended legal action to release the documents and get on with producing the ones the inquiry HAS asked for.
But there’s a little bit more to the story than that.
We’re grumpy this morning, readers, because it’s Sunday and we were planning a long lie and then someone told us about this. It’s the First Minister appearing on the Sophy Ridge show on Sky News at around 8.45am and you need to see it.
In the light of yesterday’s revelations, we’ve sent the following Freedom Of Information request to the Central Enquiry Unit (CEU) of the Scottish Government.
Back in the 1980s there was a hit game for the ZX Spectrum home computer called Worse Things Happen At Sea. In it you play a robot whose job is to get a heavily-laden cargo ship safely to port, except that more and more disasters keep befalling it.
It springs leaks, it veers off course, the engine overheats and the robot’s power runs down, until eventually the catalogue of catastrophes overwhelms the harassed metallic custodian and the boat slides down into the murky depths.
We wonder if that feels familiar to anyone at the moment.
There’s an especially interesting post on the blog of Scottish solicitor-advocate Gordon Dangerfield at the moment, pointing out that there are no legal reasons whatever for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) to be withholding documents relating to the allegations against Alex Salmond, and indeed issuing dire threats of prosecution against him or anyone who might put them into the public domain.
(All of the blog’s coverage of the inquiry in general has been expert and revealing, and should be the first stop for readers seeking to understand proceedings.)
The items in question include the infamous WhatsApp messages exchanged by the group of people attempting to have Salmond imprisoned for crimes he didn’t commit, among them SNP chief executive Peter Murrell.
When two of Murrell’s messages were leaked recently it was front-page news in the Scottish press, and generated a huge amount of subsequent coverage. Commentators as diverse as Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood magazine and Alex Massie of the Times and Spectator have noted that while they’d initially disbelieved talk of a conspiracy, the Scottish Government’s actions have given them the opposite impression.
The message log is absolutely central to Salmond’s claim of a conspiracy against him, so the last thing that either COPFS or the leadership of the SNP wants is for it to become public knowledge. Indeed, COPFS has denied that the messages exist at all, which makes it a bit weird that the police are currently conducting a serious criminal investigation into who leaked some apparently entirely imaginary documents.
So it would be quite astonishing if they suddenly disappeared, wouldn’t it?
Readers, we can’t tell you how much we want to get back to just dissecting Scotland’s hopeless Unionist media for a living. It’s a lot more fun than what the current political circumstances are obliging us to do, so you can hardly imagine our excitement when we spotted what looked like an open goal in yesterday’s Mail On Sunday.
Our ears pricked up immediately at the sight of the words “up to”, which is invariably a sign of dodgy doings on the way, and so it proved. The article contained no solid data at all about the size of Scottish Government special advisers’ pay rises, only how many SpAds there were and which general pay bands they were in, each of which spans a wide range of between £14,000 and £23,000.
But while the Mail had spooned the sitter six feet over the crossbar – because the crude spin they’d put on it was total rubbish – there was still a loose ball just waiting to be knocked into the back of the net.
The SNP’s earth-shattering 2011 majority election victory, which paved the way for the 2014 independence referendum, dropped a bomb on Scottish politics.
What few people realised at the time was that it was also going to set up a series of massive paydays for one of Scotland’s wealthiest demographics: lawyers.
We’re very busy today writing more FOI requests and the like, so we’ll just take a brief moment here to note that hiring super-expensive lawyers to object to the questions you’re being asked DEFINITELY sounds like the behaviour of people who are keen to co-operate fully and in the most transparent way possible with an inquiry:
A column on a Sturgeon-loyalist indy website that we read yesterday has been mildly annoying us ever since, and in the interests of open debate (but mainly because it’s cold and grey and rainy outside and we can’t go out and feed the swans) we thought it was worth taking half an hour to walk through it a little and explain just why it’s such a dangerous piece of fantasy nonsense.
But first here’s one of said swans. She’s about five months old and her adult feathers are just starting to come through. Isn’t she lovely?
In case things get a bit rough later we’ve got some squirrels and a really fat dachshund as emergency backup, so buckle in.
Stephen Welsh on Vibecoding A Better World: “Fantastic!, you need to give Grok Bot a play too, not as smart as Claude (at the moment) but really…” Oct 28, 15:24
Chas on Faces In Sand: “Baird-Do you trawl through the comments section on Wings solely to say the same crap time after time AND ESPECIALLY…” Oct 28, 15:21
Lorncal on Faces In Sand: “Alf: even where they have signed a treaty and where they have acquiesced in their own subsumption for over 300…” Oct 28, 15:04
sam on Faces In Sand: “Northcode, Just in case you missed it ( I have been elsewhere) I asked today upthread what you think would…” Oct 28, 15:01
sam on Faces In Sand: “Northcode, What constitutes a mandate?” Oct 28, 14:56
Alf Baird on Faces In Sand: ““I consider it rather self evident that if a regional hub was needed anywhere near here, then Oslo and/or Dublin…” Oct 28, 14:54
Captain Caveman on Faces In Sand: “@Spartan CEng? Respect and kudos 🙂” Oct 28, 14:37
Hatey McHateface on Faces In Sand: “Put even more simply, Alf, you become a regional hub by being in a suitable location for lots of places…” Oct 28, 14:29
Spartan 117 on Faces In Sand: “@Aidan – sadly its the response I’ve come to expect from political types on comment sections on various websites in…” Oct 28, 14:23
Alf Baird on Faces In Sand: “International law relating to territorial alienation informs us that annexation is unlawful; hence an annexed people/nation retain the right to…” Oct 28, 14:19
Hatey McHateface on Faces In Sand: “All very well for you, eh Dan? You’ll be confident that post-Indy, there will be no impact on home soup…” Oct 28, 14:16
Alf Baird on Faces In Sand: ““Overall I would say a net negative for aviation in Scotland” That is not the experience of numerous former colonial…” Oct 28, 13:58
Aidan on Faces In Sand: “What a stupid thing to say Dan, an aviation professional likely means a highly specialised, industry-specific set of skills. It’s…” Oct 28, 13:20
Hamish M on Faces In Sand: “Sadly, a lot of Scotch whisky has greatly declined in quality. Casks are being reused too often to save money…” Oct 28, 13:18
Lorncal on Faces In Sand: “Alf: there are hundreds of thousands of Unionists in Scotland who believe explicitly and implicitly in the Union. Telling them…” Oct 28, 12:43
Spartan 117 on Faces In Sand: “Thank you, I’ll keep an eye out for that and will watch with interest.” Oct 28, 12:41
Alf Baird on Faces In Sand: ““One thing I’m interested in with all this talk about International Law is the aviation policy of an independent Scotland.”…” Oct 28, 12:11
Spartan 117 on Faces In Sand: “Oh sorry, I forgot, in today’s tribal times people aren’t allowed to think critically and change their mind with changing…” Oct 28, 11:55
Dan on Faces In Sand: “spartan says: “As an Aviation professional and independence supporter I’ve been seeking clarification on this since before the last referendum…” Oct 28, 11:17
Spartan 117 on Faces In Sand: “As usual, confusing “opinion” and “fact”, Prof. P.S. Watched your SSRG speech, interesting points to note – some of which…” Oct 28, 10:46
Captain Caveman on Faces In Sand: “To be fair, I was obviously talking about you, Alf, not some other guy. Since you brought him up, though,…” Oct 28, 10:23
Colin Alexander on Faces In Sand: “Just checking: Are you “£1,400 better off” per year as colonial subjects of the English Crown?” Oct 28, 10:13
Alf Baird on Faces In Sand: “On the increasingly obvious reality of the longstanding annexation of Scotland by England, only an eegit would describe Prof Robert…” Oct 28, 10:06
Captain Caveman on Faces In Sand: ““Correction: Annexed Scotland has been subject to the Union hoax since 1707.” Correction: Just because some deranged, delusional, narcissistic old…” Oct 28, 09:46
Alf Baird on Faces In Sand: ““We have been part of a Union since 1707” Correction: Annexed Scotland has been subject to the Union hoax since…” Oct 28, 09:28
Hatey McHateface on Faces In Sand: “I tried that working at night idea but security would never let me in. Jobsworth, fascist cants. A wee word…” Oct 28, 08:55
Minceheid on Faces In Sand: “Hatey McHateface says: 28 October, 2026 at 7:40 am Compared with a 6-pack, a single bottle is easier to shoplift.…” Oct 28, 08:12
Hatey McHateface on Faces In Sand: “It’s not Moon cheese. That’s the kind I’ve been conditioned to believe in. I’m sure you’re right, SBS. You do…” Oct 28, 07:47
Hatey McHateface on Faces In Sand: “Compared with a 6-pack, a single bottle is easier to shoplift. Not me, I hasten to add. Not now the…” Oct 28, 07:40
Bilbo on Faces In Sand: “@ Aidan If the production method to make English whisky is cheaper where savings are passed on and is just…” Oct 27, 21:19
