Wings Over Scotland

According to the Telegraph.

We’re not sure which one’s Michelle Mone.

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Here’s Michelle Mone on last night’s Channel 4 News:

When presenter Matt Frei sympathetically puts to her that she left Scotland because she was being “given a very very hard time” by Yes/SNP supporters, Mone denies it, saying “I didn’t actually leave, that wasn’t the main reason to have left Scotland”.

So where could Frei have come by such a misapprehension?

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You can’t move for Michelle Mone in the media today, which is just the way she likes it. Almost every newspaper and broadcaster has been running lengthy stories and interviews about the publicity-craving ex-Labour supporter being commissioned by Iain Duncan Smith to produce a report on starting up businesses in disadvantaged areas.

(So excited was Mone – who now backs the Conservatives and is widely expected to be given a peerage in the next honours list by David Cameron for campaigning against Scottish independence – to be working for IDS that she just couldn’t keep the news in until the midnight embargo on the press release, tweeting it at 11pm last night.)

Nationalists have in the main reacted to Mone’s apparent imminent ennoblement as an unelected lawmaker in the manner you’d expect, but they’re not the only people to question her credentials as an expert business adviser and employment guru. So we thought we’d do a little digging and compiling.

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Michelle Mone, the fake-tan-and-diet-pills tycoon who threatened to leave Scotland if the SNP won the 2007 Holyrood election (but didn’t when they did), then threatened to leave if Yes won the referendum (but did when it didn’t), now lives in a very expensive flat by the Thames in London with a lovely view of Tower Bridge.

And boy, does she ever want you to know about it.

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As part of their tireless campaign against abuse and threats on the internet, the Mail’s ever-alert reporters will doubtless be wanting to run a major piece on the deputy leader of UKIP calling today on a widely-read website for Nicola Sturgeon to be killed.

No need to thank us for the tip-off, guys. All part of the service.

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Because the media in Britain is now basically just a giant gossip circle repeating each other’s stories, pretty much every newspaper today repeats Michelle Mone’s tiresome publicity-seeking whinge about “cybernats” from the Mail On Sunday.

One of them is the Herald, whose piece contains a quote suggesting that Mone – who appeared to think that flitting from Scotland to England somehow got you away from the internet – does have at least some basic understanding of how Twitter works:

“I blocked all the ones who used the C word. All from the same party, surprise, surprise.”

Now, we’re going to assume that by “the C word” she meant the four-letter insult, and by “the same party” we can deduce from context that she must mean the SNP.

So let’s just see if that claim stands up to scrutiny.

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Michelle Mone, the titular head of a loss-making underwear company mostly owned by a shady Sri Lankan business group, who’s spent much of the last eight years trying to blackmail Scots by threatening to punish them with hundreds of job losses if they don’t vote the way she tells them to, has a 1400-word whine/house advert in the MoS today about how beastly cybernats have forced her to finally move to England.

Who wants to be the one to break it to her that they have Twitter in England too?

We’ve been documenting lately the number of “Better Together” scare stories that have been horribly sagging under the weight of scrutiny since the turn of the year. But yesterday saw perhaps the No camp’s most significant boob yet.

Ladies’ foundation-garment manufacturer Michelle Mone has for some years insisted that she would pack up and leave Scotland – taking her factory and its attendant jobs with her – should Scotland have the temerity to vote for independence, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the populace.

Yesterday, we’re delighted to report, she changed her mind.

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These are the leaders of the nation’s business community, as they present themselves to us when explaining that they’re the mighty “masters of the universe” and require to be paid ever-soaring salaries in order to generate wealth and jobs and growth, because without them society itself will crumble to dust and we’ll all be reduced to foraging for berries in the shattered ruins of our once-proud civilisation.

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It’s a bit disappointing to see an Italian-born man play into Mafia stereotypes.

“Nice indy movement you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything… happened to it.”

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When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.

Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.

Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.

But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.

And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.

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I went for a very long walk before writing this post, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing it in the heat of anger. But 8.5 miles and 18,753 steps later it still needs to be said and there’s no getting out of it, so batten down the hatches, folks.

Last night SNP MP Mhairi Black tweeted what may be the most ill-advised, destructive, offensive, repellent and just downright idiotic thing that I’ve ever seen an elected SNP member do. (Maybe not just the SNP.)

The video, bizarrely made for the amusement of readers of comedy lad-mag website Joe.co.uk, sees Black reading out a series of supposedly “transphobic” and “mean” tweets – almost all from women and only two of which were in any way rude – and reacting to them with a toxic mixture of arrogant condescension, mockery and insults, alongside a tirade of flatly wrong and endlessly-debunked myths.

It concludes with the smirking, sniggering suggestion that women, including survivors of male violence, who’ve expressed their serious concerns over reforms to the Gender Recognition Act – concerns shared by the overwhelming majority of women, and of the population as a whole – are “Jeremy Hunts”, a piece of rhyming slang that doesn’t need any translation.

The video pretty much speaks for itself, unfortunately, but let’s look at some highlights.

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