Wings Over Scotland

As far as we know, this is the final major set-piece interview that Jim Murphy will have to give before the general election.

As Sally Magnusson of Reporting Scotland makes an admirably dogged but ultimately unsuccessful effort to get a straight answer on just about anything out of Labour’s regional branch manager, we’d swear it was possible to actually measure the delirium of relief on his face as the end draws near and the desperate evasion is over forever.

We gather that for the next week Scottish Labour are just bringing in boardgames.

Positive to the last, Scottish Labour go down punching.

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On the left, Jim Murphy campaigning for the Scottish Labour leadership a few months ago (the backdrop is distinctive, placing the pic sometime last November).

On the right, Jim Murphy on STV tonight.

Don’t tell lies, readers. It drains your soul.

It’s come awfully late, but we’ve finally got an answer to a question people have been asking Jim Murphy since last December.

In an interview with the BBC’s Gary Robertson this morning, the Scottish Labour regional manager told listeners that should he win the East Renfrewshire seat in next month’s election, he’d stay in the job for the full five-year term, but would also stand for election as a Holyrood MSP in 2016.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 29 April 2015)
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And that raises more questions than it answers.

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Greg Moodie’s Election Dissection, a compilation of splendid cartoon strips from The National, Bella Caledonia and elsewhere, is available to order now.

Scottish Labour branch office manager Jim Murphy will be appearing on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Call Kaye” programme from 9am today, taking questions from voters as well as presenter Kaye Adams. The phone number to ring in is 0500 92 95 00.

Below are a few posers readers might like to put to Mr Murphy, because he seems to have been adept at avoiding them throughout the campaign. Feel free to reword them.

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There’s a tactical voting tool on the Telegraph website, which despite a somewhat loaded headline purports to even-handedly advise confused voters on the best course of action to take in their own constituency depending on whether they want to keep Ed Miliband or David Cameron OUT of 10 Downing Street.

We were a bit suspicious when we typed our Bath postcode in and asked to keep Cameron out, because it advised us to vote Labour even though it’s one of the safest Lib Dem seats in the country (with the Tories in 2nd) and Labour got just 3,251 votes in 2010, which is to say they’ve got absolutely no hope here.

And then we tried some Scottish seats, and things got a bit creepy.

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Firstly, we’re not sure this qualifies as “BREAKING” news:

But it’s not the Daily Record’s cub reporter that we’re talking about.

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Waking up bleary-eyed this morning at 6.45am, we reached over to switch on Good Morning Scotland, just in time for the news headlines round-up. This is what we heard:

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 28 April 2015)
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We honestly thought in our semi-awake state we might have dreamed it.

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The Daily Mail evidently decided the first headline wasn’t mad enough.

First and second versions here.

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Right. We’ve got some slightly bad news, readers, and we might as well bite the bullet and tell you now. It’s touch and go whether Project Red is going to arrive before the election. (The good news is that going by the polls it isn’t going to matter.) Our vast team of coders is still working on it around the clock, but it’s looking like a tall order.

So we better tell you why.

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If you’re trying to give someone an example of a terrible group of people from history, I think the Nazis are pretty good for that purpose. They fulfil the criterion excellently, what with all the invading and occupying and repression and genocidal murder and everything, and there’s very little ambiguity or any shades of grey about their evil.

Now, alert readers may have spotted that while the headline of this article is a genuine quote from the paragraph above, and could be technically correctly described as my words by someone with malicious and dishonest intent (something which does in fact happen regularly), it gives a highly misleading impression of what was really said.

And with that, welcome to the Scottish media.

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