It’s not often we have to correct the figures of an esteemed KC like Joanna Cherry, but she’s made a straight-up mistake in her column for The National today.
Because of course Ash Regan and Kate Forbes did rather better than that.
To be honest, Humza Yousaf’s new Cabinet satirises itself – everyone’s picking on the absurdity of noted idiot Shona Robison becoming Finance Secretary but the funniest is surely omnifailure Shirley-Anne Somerville as Trans Rights – sorry, “Social Justice” Secretary – so rather than waste our breath on it today we’re going to catch up on some results from our latest Panelbase poll that we haven’t managed to squeeze in amid the mayhem of the last couple of weeks.
They tell us some interesting things about the Scotland the new FM now leads.
Well, we’re off to a flying start.
This is certainly what the public want. So let’s see his plans.
The beam on Kate Forbes’ face was quite something.
She’d clearly been exhausted by the contest some time ago, and must have been dreading winning and having to continue fighting the assault from within her own party. Her evident delight and relief at her own failure was a revealing moment.
The great unknown in this election was just who the SNP membership was. No poll could tell us, and with over 50,000 people having quit the party in the last three years, nobody knew who was left. But we know now: idiots.
Wait what now?
And how would he know that, exactly?
We’ve been thinking about it since last night, and we’re not sure if Humza Yousaf now still has ANY of the policies he started the leadership election with.
But this one‘s got us extra-specially perplexed, since at the start it was pretty much the main unique selling point he was hanging his whole campaign on.
Maybe you can help us out, readers.
According to SNP President and acting CEO Mike Russell, SNP members are too thick to understand the concept of changing their vote, and integrity is “disruptive”.
We’re not very clear on why a revote would be susceptible to “hacking” in any way that the original vote isn’t, but we’re sure there’s a great explanation.
There can surely be no credible disputing that the SNP leadership election – and therefore that of Scotland’s next First Minister – is, to put it very mildly, under a cloud.
The list of let’s call them “irregularities” is almost endless. The artificial truncation of the contest, against the SNP constitution; the packing of the hustings with Humza Yousaf supporters; candidates being denied any knowledge about the size of the membership until voting was under way, and then the party’s press chief and CEO both resigning over lying about it; the apparent existence of 6000 more ballot papers than the party has members; one of the Scottish Government’s most senior officers being improperly seconded to the Yousaf campaign (and then also resigning as a result); numerous documented examples of non-members being given votes while fully-paid-up members weren’t; we could, frankly, go on and on.
As things stand, whoever wins will be forever tainted by the process – easy meat for the Unionist opposition in the Holyrood chamber and the media and a potential legal challenge could cause untold further damage to the party.
With six days still left for voting, the case for a reballot – an administratively fairly trivial task in an election being conducted almost entirely online – is now unanswerable, and needn’t even involve a delay.
Only one person stands in the way.
So we were a couple of days early on this one.
In fairness to the Scottish press, it’s had a lot of stuff to fit in recently.
You might think that Scottish political journalists would all be in a shark-like frenzy of excitement at the events of the last few days. But not over on The Guardian.
Apparently it’s all a bit too much for the delicate wee flowers.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
