There’s a Calvin And Hobbes cartoon we like to post on social media when someone’s got themselves in such a pickle that they’re just flailing around desperately firing off every slogan, argument or insult they can think of to get themselves out of it.
The Scottish Government have just launched yet another nanny-state “healthy eating” intervention, and to be honest, readers, the cheap-shot open goals just queued up.
Our first instinct was to do a simple picture gallery of some of the insatiable pie-hounds squeezing their expenses-fed backsides onto the groaning, creaking benches and chairs of the Holyrood and Westminster parliaments, such as Kirsten “Elbows” Oswald (pictured above, slumped back under the sheer weight of her neck) – so known to other MPs because you get between her and a buffet at grave peril to your ribcage.
(And no, we’re not telling you which ones told us that.)
We’re reluctant to even mention the farcical, embarrassing goings-on in the House Of Commons last night, but the very short version is that the SNP somehow contrived to save Keir Starmer from an embarrassing mass rebellion of Labour MPs.
And in so far as anyone cared about them at all, the people of Gaza were the losers.
If there’s ever been a (branch office of a) political party that could somehow manage to blow it in Scotland against the burning trainwreck in a ditch full of sewage that is the SNP right now, it’s definitely Anas Sarwar’s hapless Scottish Labour.
Honestly, this stuff is comedy gold. But in a winner-takes-all dumb-off with Humza Yousaf’s SNP, it’s way too close to call.
As Twitter followers will have noticed, we’ve been busy this week with an extensive remodelling of Wings HQ, which involved the main computer being out of commission for several days while the office was basically torn down and rebuilt from scratch. (It seemed a good time to do it, given that there’s nothing remotely of interest happening in Scottish politics.)
Unfortunately the lack of activity on the site caused the comments on the last post to degenerate into the most wretched playground shrieking match, so let’s see if we can’t distract the children and talk about something else for a bit.
Particularly alert observers will have noted that Kezia Dugdale, the most spectacularly inept and unsuccessful Scottish political leader in history, this week demitted her role as Director of the John Smith Centre, which she was handed as an incentive to quit Scottish Labour after dragging it to 14% in the opinion polls.
We make no apology for returning once more to the subject of the Scottish Government’s proposed new law to ban “conversion practices”, because it provides such an illuminating microcosm of how far a once competent and widely-respected administration has fallen since 2015.
Emma Roddick, who is piloting the bill towards the statute books in much the same way that Mohamed Atta piloted American Airlines Flight 11 towards the World Trade Centre, is a 26-year-old who by her own admission suffers from a serious and debilitating mental illness that any sane country would regard as an insurmountable bar to political office.