Wings Over Scotland

We’re sure you all read this story last night.

Via another source we’d known it was coming for a few hours and were all set to follow it up, but in fact Daniel Sanderson of the Telegraph did a pretty thorough job on it in a comprehensive piece, even listing all the times the “prepared” civil servants had had to go back and “clarify” “errors” in their evidence even after dozens of hours of practice and £55,000 worth of “training” in how to not quite tell the truth under pressure.

It was hard not to wonder how abysmal their performances would have been if they’d only had – say – £30,000 worth of coaching at your expense.

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On pain of a grisly death, we’re not allowed to tell our splendid cartoonist Chris Cairns what to draw cartoons about. Artists are funny that way. And it’s a shame, because if we were we’d have a great idea for this weekend’s toon.

Because what’s being demanded of Alex Salmond right now is extraordinary.

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So we have our answer. According to press reports today (although we haven’t seen an actual official reply), John Swinney has refused to formally tell James Hamilton that his inquiry into possible breaches of the Ministerial Code by the First Minister over the Alex Salmond investigation ought to include the matter of whether she repeatedly lied to Parliament about what she knew and when.

Wave goodbye to justice, readers.

Because the First Minister and her deputy are now proven liars and cowards.

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We know we’ve given you quite a lot to digest already this year, readers. But spare a thought for us – trying to keep on top of all the fast-moving developments in Scottish politics in the first 11 days of 2021 has been rather like trying to tunnel our way out of an avalanche while it was still happening.

We’ve had a bit of job even finding a spare moment to squeeze the cartoons in. But today’s task looked like one of the most challenging of all.

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There are two articles on the Spectator website today relating to last night’s breaking story about Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. One of them readers of this site have seen already, because the Spectator has literally just cut and pasted it in its entirety from Wings (without any attribution or acknowledgement).

It’s the text of Salmond’s submission to the Hamilton inquiry, and we know they copied it from us (rather than having been leaked it independently) because of this paragraph:

As we told readers last night, that redaction was made by us – not by Salmond – as an extra precaution to prevent the possibility of one of the complainers in the criminal trial from being identified. It didn’t appear in Salmond’s actual submission, and so Wings is the only possible source for it being in the Spectator.

Stealing our story lock, stock and barrel without a credit is rather poor form from the magazine, but it’s the other piece we’re more concerned about.

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You know everything’s definitely going swimmingly for Nicola Sturgeon when the white knight riding heroically to her defence is… [checks notes twice] Duncan Hothersall.

We’re very excited to find out what our secret plan is.

(We must apologise to readers at this point for the late arrival of this week’s typically splendid Chris Cairns cartoon, which in fact arrived entirely on time from our hard-working crayonist but which we’ve put on hold for a bit while we cover last night’s major breaking story and its immediate aftermath. Now on with the show.)

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Agreeing with Tom Gordon from the Herald is a position that we really don’t like to find ourselves in, readers. But we can’t find fault with a single word of this column.

We could quote almost any of it, and we recommend digesting the whole thing, but this is as good a passage to pick out as any:

For most of this site’s existence it was the Unionists who were denying the obvious realities staring them in the face. It’s a source of great discomfort to us that many on the Yes side are now picking up the habit too. But we are where we are.

The utterly ridiculous, vindictive, trumped-up charges against Mark Hirst have failed.

We understand that in a very short trial the sheriff said, quite rightly, that his comments were political speech exercising his Article 10 rights to express his opinions. We hope to be bringing you the whole story of this farcical prosecution very soon.

Just for old times’ sake, during last night’s attempted coup in America we took a little dip back into the Yoonstream, the very special place on social media where the most deranged of Scotland’s Unionists hang out.

It didn’t disappoint.

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Over a year has passed since the December 2019 election. The SNP triumphed in Scotland and the Tories were comprehensively defeated. Nevertheless, a huge English majority allowed Boris Johnson to sweep back into Downing Street and “Stop Brexit” became as redundant a slogan as the one on another campaign bus that had falsely promised £350m a week for the NHS.

But “Scotland has spoken” was the chant, “Scotland won’t accept it” the shout. There was much anger and outrage from elected representatives.

But the huffing and puffing came to naught. Johnson wasn’t listening and he certainly wasn’t for turning. Brexit was driven through, Scotland was taken out of the EU and its Parliament and democracy now stand threatened.

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Poor old Blair McDougall. He doesn’t think Scotland can do anything.

What a dismally rotten, hopeless wee province he thinks Scotland is. It must be such a miserable experience to be him, constantly ashamed of your own nationality. (Except, of course, Blair’s nationality is British, not Scottish.)

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