Wings Over Scotland

First Minister's Questions is rarely a hugely edifying spectacle, but this blog could barely watch to the end of yesterday's proceedings. Labour's leader exhibited a heady mix of ignorance and xenophobia, while the FM's Conservative counterpart opted for a barely-believable combination of direct personal abuse (which could truthfully be paraphrased as "You're fat, ha ha!") and petty timewasting. If we tell you, dear readers, that Willie Rennie took on the role of the calm, intelligent voice of reason (with a dull but substantive question about freedom-of-information laws), you'll perhaps grasp the full degree to which the other two opposition leaders lost the plot.

It was one of the rowdiest FMQs in recent memory, with the Presiding Officer forced to repeatedly call for order, specifically warn Labour's Jackie Baillie to behave herself, and on one occasion even resort to a sharp bang of her gavel in order to silence the cacophanous hooting and jeering coming from – mostly – the opposition benches. The First Minister himself looked dismayed, surprised and somewhat ashamed at the picture of Scotland's political elite being portrayed to the world, and it would be hard for any impartial observer to disagree with his judgement.

Johann Lamont had chosen the new Forth Bridge as her line of attack, and angrily demanded to know why filthy foreigners (in this case, the Chinese) had been awarded what she called an "£800m steel contract" to produce the materials for the crossing. Salmond explained that no such thing had happened, noting that the steel accounted for only 5-10% of the sum quoted and that there were no Scottish companies industrially capable producing the type of steel that would be provided by the Chinese. The actual value of that element of the contract, he pointed out, was somewhere between £20m and £60m, rather than the £800m Lamont had claimed.

Lamont wasn't to be deflected by anything so basic and trivial as being utterly wrong. She reasserted that the Scottish Government was "spending £800m on steel" and that "not a single job has been created in Scotland" as a result. Salmond got back to his feet, admonished Lamont for not listening to the previous answer, and added that procurement rules cited by the previous Labour FM Jack McConnell meant that contracts couldn't simply be given to Scottish companies regardless of other tenders.

But it was to no avail, as she ignored the points and rambled on at enervating length about how dastardly foreign workers were profiting from Scotland's bridge before Salmond comprehensively reiterated the hard facts – Lamont's numbers were wildly wrong to the point of comedy (perhaps Andy Kerr had done her research), not a single Scottish steel fabrication company had tendered to supply the core steel for the bridge because there WERE no Scottish steel fabrication companies, and that all contracts had by law to be awarded competitively.

But the worst was still to come. Ruth Davidson for the Tories stood up and decided to show the world that she thought the most important issue requiring to be urgently addressed by the Scottish Parliament was whether the First Minister should be allowed to discuss rugby on the telly or not. She used the first of her allotted questions for a personal assault that was both mind-numbingly vacuous and disgracefully dishonest, accusing Salmond of "likening a BBC employee to a Nazi" and demanding an apology.

We've discussed "GauleiterGate" in some detail on this blog before, and despite his calm tone Salmond could barely conceal his contempt at the cheap, mendacious smear. He pointed out that he'd done no such thing, quoting the Chambers Dictionary definition of the term meaning a petty bureaucrat and noting that its use in such a context is commonplace (of which more very shortly). He then went on to refute Davidson's line – repeated in many newspapers earlier in the week – that he'd proactively "demanded" to appear on the Six Nations coverage, by reading out an email from the BBC Head Of Sport, Carl Hicks, which ran "I'd like to ask if the First Minister will take part…" in the show from which he was later de-invited.

Anyone thinking that the mere establishment of the facts would settle the matter, however, clearly can't have been paying attention during Johann Lamont's questions, and sure enough Davidson wasn't letting it lie. Showing the command of detail for which her FMQ performances have become known, she started off by reassigning Mr Hicks' gender – describing him as "she", having presumably misheard "Carl" as "Carol" and not having bothered to know who she was talking about beforehand (even though Salmond had explicitly referred to "Mr Hicks" and called him "he" no fewer than three times in his previous answer).

But Davidson had further depths to plumb. She announced that she'd been researching the First Minister's qualifications as a rugby expert, sneering that "he has the build for it" and bizarrely going on to list Salmond's educational and employment background, trumpeting as if it was a royal decree the revelation that he'd never played for any of his school, university or work's rugby teams.

So pleased was Davidson with this spectacularly irrelevant information (as far as we're aware most professional rugby journalists have somehow managed to offer their opinions without the benefit of a playing career, and nobody had at any point attempted to ascribe any expertise on the subject to Salmond beyond that of a fan) that she almost forgot to make any sort of point at all, but quickly tacked on some sort of vague accusation about wasting the BBC's time – somewhat ironically, as she'd just devoted her entire allotted amount of dialogue with the First Minister and weekly national broadcast coverage to pursuing this ludicrously insubstantial name-calling rather than anything of more pressing concern to the Scottish people.

None of the opposition's new leaders have covered themselves in glory at FMQs thus far, but Thursday's episode was a new low. We can only assume that the SNP's continued rise in the opinion polls is in some part due to the grotesque, childish and embarrassing ineptitude so often seen in Lamont, Davidson and Rennie's most high-profile weekly display to the voters. The partisan side of us hopes they continue. But the side which doesn't want to cringe every time the rest of the world sees how Scotland conducts its political business can scarcely bear any more of such humilation.