It brings us genuinely no pleasure at all to report that events in Scottish politics are panning out exactly the way we’ve been telling you they would for nearly two years.
Because this is the worst of all possible worlds.
Finally, after an astonishing four and a half days of “counting”, the SNP have released their candidate rankings for the regional list in this year’s Holyrood election. We’ll give you the results first, and then something much more interesting.
NO SKIPPING STRAIGHT TO THE END, THOUGH.
Like an old man getting up for the fourth time in the middle of the night, the Scottish Government has squeezed out another little dribble of its legal advice in respect of the conduct of its shambolic investigation into false allegations against Alex Salmond.
And to push that gross analogy to its outermost limit, it must have found releasing one of the documents in particular as painful as passing a rather large kidney stone.
We’ll say one thing for Police Scotland – when it comes to Freedom Of Information requests, dealing with them compared to the Scottish Government or Crown Office is a breath of fresh air. Responses tend to be reasonably swift and you actually get some straight answers, like these.
And in this case they’re pretty remarkable answers.
In the end the four-hour session ran for almost exactly six hours, and Alex Salmond looked like he could have done another six standing on his head. Now, it would be only fair to acknowledge that this site was on his side before the start, but by any rational objective assessment the former First Minister delivered the performance of his life.
(We use “performance” there in the Lionel Messi sense, not the Laurence Olivier one.)
The contrast with every other witness who’s appeared before the committee was night and day. With Salmond there was no evasion, no hesitation, no forgetting, no “I’ll get back to you on that in writing”. (We recommend the Twitter feed of Scotland Speaks for some choice clips.)
Every question was answered fully, directly, fluently and immediately, without recourse to notes, and the content was never less than devastating from his opening statement to the final surprise bombshell. We were exhausted just watching it.
His words, tone and body language all absolutely radiated candour, solemnity and honesty. When the SNP members tried to trip him up on some arcane point or other, he was on them like an extremely calm hawk, methodically tearing their assertions to ribbons with the correct fact or quote at his fingertips, and ice in his veins.
Salmond came across like a man who’d been planning this day for almost a year and wasn’t going to mess it up. And he didn’t. Heavens, how he didn’t.
For the record, we thought you should see what the Scottish Parliament considers to be the appropriate treatment of an “Urgent Question”.
For a little over eight minutes, the Lord Advocate was allowed to ignore and avoid a series of questions put to him regarding the abjectly corrupt Crown Office’s recent interference with the work of the Fabiani inquiry by redacting evidence which in no way identified anyone as a complainer in the trial of Alex Salmond.
By the end, he’d left nobody any the wiser.
FOREWORD: SNP MPs writing for this website about anything, especially a Plan B for independence, shouldn’t be controversial. We as a party should welcome diversity and inclusion – as indeed we do by giving quotes to every daily UK newspaper and broadcaster, as well as occasionally providing articles and financial help for them.
I for one would prefer it if people would get over posturing about the messenger and deal with the more important message. So let’s get to it.
It really can’t be overstated what extraordinary tweets these are.
That’s the editor of the conservative, ultra-establishment Spectator openly linking to a document that the Crown Office – the agent of the Queen herself – has threatened to prosecute the Scottish Parliament for publishing, and which has officially been deleted but is for some reason actually still available on the Parliament’s website.
The Spectator is giving the Queen the finger. And that’s not even the mad bit.
It’s difficult to know where to even start on the absolutely extraordinary reaction to our post about yesterday’s meeting of the SNP National Executive Committee. Our traffic exploded to levels not seen since 2014, racking up tens of thousands of pageviews an hour, and social media was aflame with argument into the small hours of the morning.
A whole raft of issues arose from our exclusive revelations, but the one we want to talk about now is the one that was buried at the bottom of what a panicked SNP hastily and laughably produced as the “minutes” of the meeting, and we didn’t even notice it until a couple of hours after the original post.
If there’s one subject this site can speak about with authority, readers, it’s defamation. We’re now into the FIFTH YEAR of a court action we brought against former Scottish Labour branch office manager Kezia Dugdale after she’d smeared us in a newspaper and in the Scottish Parliament with a vile personal slur which a sheriff and three senior appeal court judges all found to be unequivocally false and defamatory.
But they also ruled that because Dugdale is a drooling halfwitted imbecile who doesn’t know what simple words mean she was entitled to use her stupidity and ignorance as a defence, so we lost the case and to this day (the original smear having happened way back in 2017) our lawyers are still negotiating with her lawyers over the final costs.
So trust us when we tell you this: today’s front-page lead in the Herald On Sunday is a great big pile of stinky unmitigated horse-bollocks.
Because we know whereof we speak.
Ulster-bred (specifically the ultra-Loyalist stronghold of Antrim) columnist Neil Mackay, a man who’s been systematically undermining and dividing the Yes movement since at least 2015 while claiming to be part of it, has an opinion piece in the Herald today.
In its own way it’s an exemplar of the infiltrator’s craft. Let’s take a look.
Okay, we’re trolling a bit with the title there. But fair’s fair.
Because some REALLY shonky, and very obviously co-ordinated, shenanigans went on this past weekend, but at least the above is the truth.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
