Yesterday’s evidence session at the Fabiani inquiry had several standout moments, but by a narrow margin this was our favourite.
And just in case you were wondering, yes, that IS Scotland’s top prosecutor, the Lord Advocate, chief of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, James Wolffe QC, repeatedly refusing to tell an MSP whether or not it’s a criminal offence in Scotland to refuse to comply with a court-ordered search warrant.
So next time you’ve ramraided a load of iPads and the polis come knocking on your door asking if they can have a nosy around your attic for them, just tell them they can’t come in because it’s a matter of your motivations.
For the record, we thought you should see what the Scottish Parliament considers to be the appropriate treatment of an “Urgent Question”.
For a little over eight minutes, the Lord Advocate was allowed to ignore and avoid a series of questions put to him regarding the abjectly corrupt Crown Office’s recent interference with the work of the Fabiani inquiry by redacting evidence which in no way identified anyone as a complainer in the trial of Alex Salmond.
Because while pretty much every journalist, pundit and legal expert reporting the case agrees that the amendment made to the Section 11 order protecting the anonymity of the complainers in the Alex Salmond case is an important and significant one, it hasn’t impressed the only person whose opinion actually matters: Andy Wightwash.
First Minister’s Questions was very interesting today. Ruth Davidson had some tricky ones which Nicola Sturgeon simply didn’t even attempt to look like she was answering, and we might come back to one of them in particular a little later on.
But Jackie Baillie’s were even more pointed, especially this one:
With our trademark scrupulous fairness we’ve included the full question and answer, and they raise a whole series of issues, but if you’re in a hurry the key part we want to talk about right now is between 0.18 and 0.26.
Sky News had a breaking report tonight about a person they couldn’t name.
Was it The Woman Whose Name You Can’t Say? We couldn’t tell you even if we knew, readers. And we can’t tell you whether we do or not. Sky carefully avoided even saying what sex the person was, and you’d have to be quite an alert viewer to notice any of the hints they dropped in the piece. We’ve said enough. You’re on your own now.
As ever, please do not commit contempt of court in the comments.
Ridiculously, more than eight hours after voting closed in an all-electronic election in which “counting” should have taken a maximum of one second, and at 11.30pm, the SNP have released the results of this year’s NEC elections.
There are some big stories.
Alyn Smith is OUT as Policy Development Convener, replaced by Chris Hanlon.
In a post last month we referenced a ZX Spectrum computer game from 1984 called “Worse Things Happen At Sea”. Today as we watched the First Minister on the Andrew Marr Show, we were put in mind of another nautical-disaster-themed one from a great deal nearer to the end of the Speccy’s life.
We were going to write a post about today’s Sunday National front page lead story, but it would just have been an angry rant, so instead we’ll let our readers make their own judgements on how convinced they are by this bloviating guff:
