There’s not much to be cheerful about in Scottish politics at the moment, so let’s take a moment to be uncharacteristically positive about the future.
Because you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at this.
Hannah Graf MBE (below, right, receiving the decoration from Prince William in 2019 for his “work updating LGBTQ policy in the British Army”) is a very strange fella.
And not just for the obvious reason.
As a corollary to this piece from earlier today, here’s a nice simple picture.
Alert readers will already have spotted the problem with it.
This is, strictly speaking, semantically, true:
It is, however, as the famous phrase goes, not the whole truth.
Tuesday’s front page headline in The National was roughly the political equivalent of introducing yourself to your new next-door neighbour by saying “Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Jimmy from No.22 and it definitely wasn’t me who killed your cat last night”.
Humza Yousaf’s great masterplan of an independence strategy is imploding faster than the OceanGate Titan, and scarcely any less disastrously. And unless you’re one of the colleagues, family or friends of the tragic victims on board the doomed vessel, it’s even more painful to watch.
This one goes out to all the “rebel” MSPs at the SNP desks in Holyrood.
Because it’s nearly time for you to choose whether you want to fight, or die meekly.
24 hours on, pretty much everyone seems to have come to the same conclusion (with the assistance of briefings from the FM himself) about Humza Yousaf’s “independence strategy” as the one Wings saw immediately yesterday, namely that he’s taken Nicola Sturgeon’s flawed version of a de-facto referendum and made it even less credible.
In as far as they’re talking about it at all, anyway.
The word “packed” is working very hard here.
Because the video Riddoch tweeted tells a rather different story.
Still wondering what Humza Yousaf’s going to say to the SNP’s pretend “conference” on independence strategy this coming Saturday? Well, wonder no longer, because this morning he told Sky News.
In other words, he’s waving the white flag and praying for a miracle.
Well, no wonder they’re having trouble shifting tickets.
Because that’s all you’re getting for your tenner, SNP members.
This quote:
Does not say this:
No matter how much we’re all desperate for a story.
So this is pretty embarrassing.
The Scottish National Party’s primary and defining purpose is Scottish independence. Next weekend’s “special conference” will at least notionally determine its policy on that subject for years to come. On the face of it it’s the most important congregation of party members in the SNP’s history.
The Caird Hall can accommodate just 3% of the claimed membership. (And you’d expect at least half the seats to have been reserved in advance for the faithful payroll.) Members ought to be fighting like dogs for a ticket. And yet a week before the event the leader is having to send out pleading letters to try to scare up enough attendees that it won’t be a half-empty humiliation.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
