Fair play to The National, the use of the word “HIS” in this banner on their front page today might be the single funniest thing ever printed by a Scottish newspaper.
Because everyone and his dug in Scotland knows whose strategy it actually is, and how many years Pete Wishart spent traducing it as nonsense and furiously venting his overworked spleen at anyone who advocated it – right up to the point where Nicola Sturgeon adopted it in a desperate last attempt to keep the indy faithful pushing the SNP gravy bus, at which point it became the greatest masterplan of all time.
But today’s piece in the indy equivalent of the Daily Express (albeit with only a tenth of the sales) is so jawdropping that we doubt even Robert Oppenheimer would be up to the job of putting a scorchmark on Wishart’s brass neck, so let’s spend five minutes having a look at it before we go out for a bit of sunshine.
Humza Yousaf is played here by Morgan Freeman, the big plane carrying the bomb is the independence movement and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are in the chopper.
Tuesday’s front page headline in The National was roughly the political equivalent of introducing yourself to your new next-door neighbour by saying “Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Jimmy from No.22 and it definitely wasn’t me who killed your cat last night”.
Humza Yousaf’s great masterplan of an independence strategy is imploding faster than the OceanGate Titan, and scarcely any less disastrously. And unless you’re one of the colleagues, family or friends of the tragic victims on board the doomed vessel, it’s even more painful to watch.
24 hours on, pretty much everyone seems to have come to the same conclusion (with the assistance of briefings from the FM himself) about Humza Yousaf’s “independence strategy” as the one Wings saw immediately yesterday, namely that he’s taken Nicola Sturgeon’s flawed version of a de-facto referendum and made it even less credible.
In as far as they’re talking about it at all, anyway.
Still wondering what Humza Yousaf’s going to say to the SNP’s pretend “conference” on independence strategy this coming Saturday? Well, wonder no longer, because this morning he told Sky News.
In other words, he’s waving the white flag and praying for a miracle.