Wings Over Scotland

This is quite something. It took 15 hours into “MemoGate” before anyone got a Scottish Government representative on air – even though they’d found time to get quotes from Willie Rennie, who isn’t the leader of a Westminster party and whose party isn’t even involved in the story. When they did, here’s what happened.

Readers can form their own opinions about the interview. But at the very end of the piece the BBC’s James Cook says “this memo does exist”. It may do, but we’re not sure what his current grounds for that statement are.

To the best of our knowledge nobody is claiming to have seen it personally except the Telegraph. The Foreign Office have denied all knowledge of any memo, the Scotland Office apparently refuses to comment, and we have no idea who allegedly wrote it.

Cook has already made, then rowed back on, some rather questionable statements in the last 24 hours. Viewers may feel it might be better if he just stuck to the facts.

We’re going to let this speak for itself.

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…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.

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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.

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In over 20 years of living in Bath, spanning five general elections, we’ve never seen a political billboard in town before. There’s been no point. In vote-share terms the city is the 4th-safest Lib Dem seat in the UK (and the 2nd-safest in England), and it has been since the party won it from the Conservatives in 1992.

But we’ve got a billboard now, featuring two men whose parties haven’t got an earthly hope of winning here (one of them because it’s not standing). What’s that all about?

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Nicola Sturgeon is brilliant. Can we just outsource all our politics to Scotland and make Parliament into a Weatherspoon’s? #leadersdebate

— Brian Millar (@arthurascii) April 2, 2015

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From today’s Daily Politics (42m 25s in):

We’ll add this one to the list.

Ladies and gentlemen, golf and lynching enthusiast Mr Fraser Paterson:

When oh when will the First Minister condemn these vile cybernat oh wait.

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This is an extract from this morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 (starts about 2h 5m in), in which James Naughtie expresses an unusually frank and forthright opinion on Jim Murphy’s claim about the biggest party forming the government.

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We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

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Because we’ve been thinking about it carefully, and as the biggest party always forms the government of the UK – like it or not, that’s a simple fact – there’s only one way to protect Scotland’s interests for the next five years. Independence can wait.

Today of all days, you know it makes sense.

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Like some sort of out-of-control, unstoppable lying machine, Scottish Labour keep telling the electorate that the party with the most seats in a hung parliament is the one that forms the government, and that the only way to prevent the Conservatives from returning to power is for Labour to be the biggest party.

They’ve been saying it for weeks. They say it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, almost as if it’s all they’ve got.

The trouble is that an awful lot of people seem to disagree with them.

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Credit is due to those of the Scottish media who have taken up this site’s challenge to ask Labour the key question of the 2015 election debate in Scotland – “Are Labour prepared to form a government if they’re not the largest party in a hung parliament?”

(Because if the answer is yes then Labour’s entire Scottish election strategy – “Vote SNP get Tories!” – crumbles to dust, and if it’s no then Labour is saying that it’d be prepared to abandon not just Scotland but the whole UK to another five years of Conservative government purely out of spite against the SNP.)

Three of the party’s elected representatives have now been asked the question on air – James Kelly MSP by John Mackay of Scotland Tonight a week ago, branch office leader Jim Murphy by BBC Scotland’s Gary Robertson yesterday, and the shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran last night (below), again by STV’s John Mackay.

As you can see, Scotland’s voters still await an answer. But on this page we’ll keep track of all the swerves, evasions and dodges until we get one, if we ever do.

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