La verité 179
We’re going to let this speak for itself.
We’re going to let this speak for itself.
…we shall say zees only wance.
That clip (from just past midnight on the BBC News channel) isn’t a bad starting-point summary of last night’s extraordinary story, except by our count the Telegraph’s piece was fourth-hand rather than third-hand.
(First-hand would have been Nicola Sturgeon. Second-hand would have been the ambassador. Third-hand would have been the consul-general. The civil servant – who doubted the story him/herself – is fourth-hand.)
This is also a pretty good primer. Now let’s get to the fun stuff.
Sheesh. We pop out for a couple of hours to feed the Wings Emergency Kitten and we get back to find that it’s the UK press that’s barfed up hairballs all over its front pages.
And the contradictory cross-vortex coverlines aren’t even the mad bit.
Here’s Ed Miliband, giving a speech this morning to literally at least 20 Labour MPs, Labour MSPs, journalists and possibly a stray member of the public who accidentally walked through the wrong door in Clydebank, a place where Labour leaders used to address gatherings of thousands.
Unusually, Miliband took a few questions from the hacks, all of whom promptly wasted the opportunity by lobbing completely pointless softballs about coalitions and deals, all of which (a) have been asked a hundred times already, (b) were rendered moot by Alex Salmond on the Marr show yesterday, and (c) were only ever going to be batted away non-committally.
So here’s an actually worthwhile one they can ask instead next time.
The Daily Record, still smarting from the humiliation of being forced to very quietly admit it told its readers a £20 billion lie about the Smith Commission late last year, has been in a demented overdrive trying to provoke Yes/SNP supporters this week.
It started on Tuesday with an echo of the paper’s infamous “Vow” cover, clearly aimed at winding up its detractors but which passed without much comment as social media users merely raised a brief weary eyebrow and got on with their day. But then the Record started turning up the volume.
Sometimes the UK media is so soul-crushingly moronic, readers, that it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning. Nevertheless, we’re pretty sure we haven’t nodded off and woken up in 2017, so today’s papers must be even more idiotic than usual.
For those of you who missed it, me ringing in to the Kaye Adams show this morning.
Editorial in today’s Scottish Sun:
The Scottish Sun is around 80% the same newspaper as the English edition (with the bulk of the difference being accounted for by football coverage) so presumably the south-of-the-border version has a broadly similar view, right?
If we’re honest, readers, we almost never bother with BBC Scotland’s televised political coverage any more. We suspect the viewing figures for Scotland 2015 are down to fingers-and-toes territory now, and if last night’s edition – which we gritted our teeth and watched after noting the incredulous response on social media – is anything to go by, the state broadcaster is now using it to try out work-experience kids.
But we can cut fresh-faced new boy David Henderson (who suffered the indignity of being billed as Sarah Smith) a bit of slack for being outmanoeuvred by an experienced operator like Jim Murphy, who at one point in the show was actually interrogating the presenter rather than the other way round.
Kirsty Wark, regular anchor on the Corporation’s current-affairs flagship Newsnight, on the other hand, has no such excuses whatsoever.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.